Uncovering Stone

by T. Saint John

  “Brayden has her. I wanted to talk to both of you first,” he responds in that annoyingly professional tone.

  “Is she alright?” Alani asks worriedly.

  “She’ll be fine. She’s underweight, weighing only four pounds, four ounces. She’ll need extra feedings, but make sure they’re small. I don’t want her getting too much, too fast. I don’t know why you aren’t producing enough breast milk, but there are things you can do to aid in milk production. And of course, you could always do formula.”

  Now that I know Harper is fine, I stop listening to Noah and head in to finally hold my daughter again. Shit. We have nothing at my place for a baby. No clothes, no diapers, and no formula. Neither Alani nor I are able to get those things right now, so I approach Brayden to talk to him.

  “Hey. When we head out, can you stop at the store and pick up some formula and diapers?” I ask him.

  “We brought that stuff from the hospital,” Brayden informs me as he hands Harper to me. Once she’s in my arms, I look her over. She’s sleeping peacefully—she’s so beautiful. I make a silent promise to her that no one will ever harm her.

  “Go home to your wife and son. Enjoy this night,” I tell Brayden.

  “Alright,” he responds. “We need to get together and get our story straight. The cops are going to want to know where they were.”

  “Tomorrow morning. Bring everyone over.”

  “Will do,” replies Brayden. Looking over my shoulder, he sees Alani and walks over to her. Giving her a hug, he says, “Lani, I can’t thank you enough for keeping Cade safe. I’m glad to have you both back. Welcome home.”

  “We kept each other safe, and he kept me sane. He’s a really good kid—the best. You should be very proud of him,” she says tearing up.

  It’s time for me to get my girls home where they belong. “You ready, Alani?” I ask.

  “Yes,” she replies, walking towards me to look at Harper. Alani looks so lost, and I know immediately that the Alani that left me that night isn’t the same one who came back. Regardless, I still love her and will do anything to get her back to feeling like herself again.

  Chapter 15

  Lani

  We just arrived at Evan’s penthouse and I’m overcome with emotion as I walk inside. I burst into fresh tears, unable to believe that I’m finally back. Evan has the doorman bringing up a playpen that Molly and Noah lent us. I’m so relieved to hear Harper is going to be ok, but I still have so much to worry about. I don’t want to leave my daughter, but I may need to in order to keep her safe. Thoughts like this keep replaying in my mind, and it leaves me wondering how everything will play out.

  Before I can do anything else, I first have to bathe. I need to wash the past eight months off of me and not let it touch this part of my life. I don’t want that experience to contaminate the normal life I want to return to. I turn to Evan and say, “Can you watch Harper? I’m going to shower.”

  “Sure,” he replies awkwardly, glancing up from staring at Harper. Looking at him, I know he’s feeling the same thing I am. So much to talk about, but unsure where to start. I head to my old bedroom, and I’m shocked as I open the door. Everything is exactly the way I’d left it. The gum on my nightstand hasn’t been moved, the dresser drawer I’d left slightly open is still in the same position, and a pair of shoes I’d discarded on the floor continue to haphazardly lay in the middle of the room. Knowing how anal he is about keeping the place in order, I figured he would’ve had my room cleaned or even packed up. I wonder why he didn’t touch it, or at least have the cleaning lady take care of it. It’s not like I expect anyone to clean up after me, but I assumed the mess would have bothered Evan. Dismissing my thoughts, I grab some clean clothes and head to the shower.

  When I step under the warm water, I try to relax and focus on the positive side for a while. Harper and I are safe inside Evan’s penthouse, and he seems to be handling the news that he’s now a father rather well. I’m able to take a warm shower without someone watching or taking a video, and once I finish, I’ll be able to order something to eat. Now that the adrenaline is finally wearing off, I feel like I’m starving—just like all those months Cade and I spent as prisoners in that farm house. Those two bastards who held us captive never gave Cade and me enough food. At the beginning, we asked them for more food, but the couple told us they were receiving a food allowance for us. They refused to spend a dime more than what they were being paid, but I have a feeling they spent most of that food allowance on themselves. I feel guilty that I wasn’t able to eat healthy while I was pregnant with Harper. She didn’t receive the proper nutrients she needed to grow with all that junk I was forced to eat. While most moms took prenatal vitamins to ensure they had a healthy baby, the only fruits or vegetables I ate during my pregnancy came from a can of beef stew or those canned mixed fruits that nobody likes to eat. I failed Harper as a mother even before she was born—I can just imagine all the different ways I’ll screw up the rest of her life if I stay in it.

  As I start to soap myself, the memory of the man’s voice enters my head, “Make sure you wash every little part of you and show it all off for us—every dirty detail.” I cringe as I remember some of the things he’d made me do. I suddenly feel very dirty—even dirtier than I felt before deciding I needed to bathe. I turn the water on hot and fall to my knees in the shower, scrubbing at my skin so hard that it starts to turn red. My tears begin to fall as I hear the man speaking inside my head once again, “Slowly now...show off those tiny nipples. Play with them a little...he’ll like that.” I try to stop the memory, but the image of the man’s hand going down his pants replays in my mind. GROSS! Get the fuck out of my head! The bastard never touched me, but he didn’t need to—his words were enough to make me sick.

  Evan

  I do some online shopping while Alani is in the shower. I’m having everything overnighted so that our daughter will have a proper place to sleep right away. I might have gone a little overboard with the ordering, but I don’t really have a clue about what babies need. I basically bought one of everything just in case Harper needed it. I warm up a bottle for her and she drinks about an ounce of it before passing out in my arms. Once again, it strikes me how beautiful she is. As I lay Harper down in the playpen, I realize that Alani has been gone for over an hour, so I decide to check on her.

  When I get to her room, I don’t bother to knock since she left her bedroom door open and I can hear the shower still going. I head over to the closed bathroom door and knock, calling out to her, “Alani?”

  “Go away, Evan!” she cries out. From the sound of her voice, I know she’s in the middle of a meltdown.

  “Not happening, Alani. I’m coming in,” I warn before opening the door. As I step into the bathroom, the cold air hits me. I quickly grab a towel and open the shower door to find her sitting on the floor. Shit! It’s freezing in here! I feel the ice cold water drenching me as I reach over Alani and turn off the tap. I wrap the towel around Alani and try to pick her up.

  “NO! Leave me alone! STOP, EVAN, STOP! I’m not clean! GET OUT!” she screams, shoving me away. I try to contain her by wrapping my arms around her, but she starts flailing her arms and hitting me.

  “Calm down, Alani. Stop it. You’re clean, baby. You’re clean!” I assure her, starting to panic. I back up from her slightly, hoping to calm her down. How the fuck do I help her out of her mental hell?! As she reaches to turn on the water again, I grab her wrist and yank her up against me. I stand there holding her and running my hands along her back, saying, “It’s ok, I’m right here. You’re safe with me.”

  She stops fighting me and begins to calm down, her body relaxing in my arms. Maneuvering us out of the shower, I try to grab another towel to replace the soaked one lying on the floor. As I reach for the towel, her body goes limp and drops down on the cold, hard tile. She curls herself into a fetal position and starts sobbing. I grab the towel to cover her and try to get her warmed up.

  “Talk to me, Alani.
Please.”

  “Just go, Evan,” she quietly sobs out. I lay down on the floor next to her, putting my forehead against her.

  “No. Never, Alani. I’m not leaving you. I’ve lived in hell for the past eight months, worrying about what they were doing to you, worried I’d never see you alive...hating myself for not fighting harder for you. I’m not letting you push me away,” I tell her. Stroking her hair, I continue to say, “When Cade told me the two of you were always together and that no one ever hurt either of you, I felt so relieved. I kept imagining you being tortured in a house of horrors all that time and it would drive me crazy insane thinking about it. I’m just glad it wasn’t real and they didn’t touch you.”

  “Yeah, well Cade slept. He didn’t see it all,” she remarks detachedly.

  Fuck! What does that mean?! “Talk to me,” I coax her. Even though I don’t want to hear it, I need to know what happened to her. She turns to lay on her back and stares at the ceiling for a few moments before speaking.

  “They would take turns watching and videotaping me in the shower. I think Jackson put them up to it and had them send the videos to him somehow. They made me touch and play with myself and sometimes...sometimes, the man would jack off while watching me,” she reveals, sounding ashamed and her face with her hands. It pisses me the fuck off.

  “Did he touch you?” I ask carefully, so as not to cause her any more pain than she’s already experiencing. I hate to ask, but I have to know.

  “No.” It’s a relief to hear her answer, but it doesn’t help the fury building inside me.

  “I’m so sorry, Alani,” I say, pulling her into my arms.

  “I guess, in a way, you made your presence known there,” she says after a few moments.

  “What do you mean?” I ask, confused.

  “When my pregnancy started to show, they stopped videotaping. Jackson apparently doesn’t find fat women attractive.” Hearing her words make me want to kill Jackson even more. It occurs to me that I didn’t get a chance to see Alani’s belly, round with my baby. I didn’t get to help her deal with the morning sickness, and I didn’t get to witness my daughter being born. Jackson didn’t just steal Alani from me, he stole my right as a father. I may not have wanted to deal with a woman’s pregnancy or having a child before, but I don’t like having that choice taken away from me, either. Now that I have Harper, I wish I could have been a part of Alani’s pregnancy and delivery.

  “Alani, I’m not sure what I can do to help you, but please let me try. Don’t attempt to work any of this out on your own. Let me be there for you. Please,” I plead.

  “I’m so scared, Evan,” she admits as her tears start to fall.

  “I know, baby. I know.” I pick her up and carry her over to the bed. As I lay her down on the mattress, I make a decision. I know where Dylan is and I’ll be paying him a visit real soon. That way, Alani will have one less thing to worry about. I go to her dresser and see the shirt I lent her the first night she arrive at my place. She never bothered to return it and she used to wear it whenever she wanted to be comfortable at home. I take it to her and help her put it on.

  “Evan?” she calls out as I turn to leave.

  “Yeah, baby?”

  “Stay with me tonight,” she desperately pleads. I wasn’t planning on sleeping tonight, but I will stay and lay down with her if that’s what she needs.

  “Ok, just let me go get Harper.” I walk out of Alani’s room to get our daughter, who’s still sleeping soundly in the playpen. After wheeling the playpen into Alani’s bedroom, I turn off the lights and lay down next to Alani. Since she’s still wide awake, I start a conversation with her.

  “What was your pregnancy like?” I inquire, wanting to know more about what she went through.

  “Morning sickness sucked, but the rest of it was good. I slept a lot. About a week before I had her, I was cramping a lot and had terrible backaches.”

  “I wish I could’ve been there.”

  “You were,” she whispers to me. I feel her body start to tremble, so I move closer to her and hold her tight.

  “You were here with me, as well. I came to your room every night, just to feel your presence.”

  “I was surprised you didn’t clean up,” she comments, laughing through her tears.

  “Yeah, I missed you so much that I refused to clean up your room. I left it that way so I’d get annoyed every time I walked in. It made it feel like you were still here and I liked it.” I chuckle at the thought of how ridiculous I was about her inability to properly clean things around my place.

  Lani

  Once again, I find myself in Evan’s strong arms and it still doesn’t seem possible. I want to push him away...I should push him away and keep my distance from him, but I can’t. I see the haunted look in his eyes and I know these last eight months have been as horrible for him as they were for me. He had to deal with all the unanswered questions about where I was and what was happening to me. I know Evan—if he could, he would have moved heaven and earth to find us, and it had to have been killing him that he couldn’t. Knowing him, he’d probably keep torturing himself forever over it, so I stay in the comfort of his arms. It’s like Evan is my security blanket—with him holding me like this, I’m not scared. I feel as if no one will be able to break his hold and rip me away from him. I snuggle closer to his chest and place my cheek to where his ‘Always mine’ tattoo would be behind his shirt. It makes me start to think about the rest of his markings and wonder if he’s added to them. With everything that happened earlier, I didn’t pay attention to his exposed chest after he’d been shot. I gently pull away from him, careful not to inflict additional pain to his fresh wound. I reach over and flip on the bedside lamp.

  “What’s wrong?” he asks, propping himself up on his elbow.

  “Take off your shirt,” I command. When he raises his eyebrow at me, I roll my eyes and say, “It’s not like that. You heard Noah...no sex for six weeks. And trust me, that’s the furthest thing from my mind. I just want to see your tattoos.”

  After giving a disappointed laugh, he curiously asks, “Why?”

  “I want to see if you added anything new while I was gone,” I reply softly. He closes his eyes for a few moments, dealing with the painful memory, before he starts to remove the shirt he borrowed from Noah. Once the shirt is off, I examine his chest closely, looking for any unfamiliar markings. I get emotional as I read the words ‘Gone’ and ‘Taken’. I discover another new one and run my fingers over the word ‘Lost’. He begins to turn his back towards me and I gasp. Oh...My...God.

  My parents have always been obsessed with Hawaii, which is why they named me Alani—after the Hawaiian orange tree. I always thought being named after an orange tree was stupid, but seeing it on Evan’s body made me see the beauty in it. I reach out to trace some of the flowing branches and tiny oranges covering the expanse of his back. As I softly touch the delicate fruit, I notice that instead of oranges growing upon the branches, it’s little orange numbers. There’s over two hundred of them, one for each day I was gone. Seeing it only confirms how tortured he was since I went missing. I’m unable to stop myself from pulling him against me and hugging him tightly.

  “I missed you,” he confesses, clearing his throat and hugging me back even tighter.

  “I know,” I whisper, before planting a small kiss on his neck. Even though Evan and I may never be a couple, he’s one of my best friends. I hear a small whimper from the playpen, and Evan immediately releases me.

  “I’ll get her,” he announces, jumping out of the bed to go to our daughter. It’s funny that the man, who months before was so scared to conceive a child and swore he never wanted to have kids, is now at the beck and call of our daughter. I watch as he carefully cradles Harper, looking at her with so much love in his eyes. I know that he can and always will protect her. And I also know that as much as it hurts, the only thing I can do to keep them both safe is to leave—it’s the way it has to be.

  “She
’s a good baby,” I tell him. And she is...her only real need is to be held and comforted.

  “She looks just like you, Alani.”

  “Really? I think she looks like you.”

  “Just the dark hair, but she has your nose, chin, and beautiful, dark eyes,” Evan explains as I get up to go stand beside him. I want my daughter, and I want to be a part of her life as she grows up. God, this sucks so bad! Why can’t all this shit with Jackson just end?

  “I can’t wait to show her to my mom and dad,” I remark. I wonder how they’ll react to finding out they have a granddaughter. How did they even handle my being gone? “Have you talked to my parents? Maybe I should call them.”

  “I haven’t talked to them since we found you, but I did when you went missing. I talked with Nick daily. Your family loves you very much and were worried about you. Maddox told me they called or stopped by the police station daily, asking for updates. They also offered up a large reward for your return.”