Page 109 of Stone Vows

Ethan puts a hand on my shoulder. “Don’t worry about him.”

I sigh. “I really think he just wants me to contact Grant and let the chips fall where they may. I can’t do that, Ethan. I wish he could understand.”

“He’s torn up inside, Lexi. Confused. You’re married to another man. You could never legally be with him. But on the flip side, I think he understands that you have no choice. That you’re doing it to protect not only yourself, but Ellie. But it’s a big pill to swallow, knowing that the one you love can never truly be yours.”

“Love?” I ask, looking up at him with trepidation. With hope.

“I see the way he looks at you, Lexi. He’s not fooling anyone—except maybe himself.” He puts an arm around me, escorting me back out into the main room. “Just give him time. He’ll come around.”

I stare at Kyle as he talks to Chad, and it dawns on me how ironic it is that I’m living with a man who I love, who refuses to love me—refuses to touch me; when just over a year ago, I was living with a man I hated, who had his way with me whenever it suited him.

The irony is—I still go to bed every night living a lie.

Chapter Fifty-one

I fall to my knees in the dirt, heartbroken to see the remnants of my flower garden scattered all over the backyard. Roots have been pulled out of the ground. Stems bent or snapped in two. Buds and bulbs plucked from their stems and scattered about. It’s been completely destroyed.

Who would do such a thing?

My first instinct is to call the police. But then I remember my husbandisthe police, so I guess I’ll just tell him when he gets home. Maybe he can file a vandalism report. I’m not supposed to bother him at work. Not unless it’s an emergency. And he wouldn’t consider this one of those. My flower garden meant nothing to him. In fact, I think he hated it. In some way, I think he was even jealous of it.

Oh, God.

I quickly make my way to the gate in our privacy fence. The one that is always locked. Padlocked. I find it secure. Either someone scaled the six-foot fence, or . . .

I look around the yard for clues. There are none. I go back into the house and make my way to the garage. What could he have used? I look at my gardening tools. The hedge clippers. The trowels. None of them would have produced the destructive results that litter what was once my pride and joy of a backyard. It’s one of the only things that was truly mine and not his. It’s how I found peace. Solace. And now it’s gone. Beaten down and ripped to shreds—just like I am.

Defeated, I turn to head back into the house, but then I catch a glimpse of something and stop in my tracks. It’s his golf bag. The very thing that allowshimpeace and solace every Saturday morning while I sit at home by myself. I pick up the largest club and pull it out of the bag, examining the clumps of dirt on the club face. Then I look on the ground next to the golf bag and see a mangled petal of my favorite flower.

He didn’t even have the decency to cover up his crime.

I race inside the house, wanting nothing more than retaliation. I go into his study—the room I’m not allowed in. I eye his boxing trophies on the shelf above his desk. The ones that are his pride and joy. I pull the biggest one down and throw it on the floor, gaining instant satisfaction from hearing it crack and shatter.

My satisfaction doesn’t last long, however, when I realize what I’ve done.

For the second time today, I fall to my knees. This time to pick up the pieces of his prized trophy. One he likes to show off almost as much as he likes to show offme. That’s what I feel like when he parades me around in front of everyone—his trophy.

I sit on the floor with my back to the wall, holding his broken relic in my hands. What have I done?

I look at the clock. He’ll be home in an hour. I don’t have time to try and replace it. I don’t even have time to go to the store to get anything to fix it.

I rifle through his desk drawers, hoping to find superglue. The drawers I’m forbidden to go through, in the desk I’m not supposed to sit at, in the office I’m never allowed to enter. I’m violating so many rules today that my face starts to ache just thinking about what he might do to it.

I do find some superglue. But not before I find a bunch of other things I wasn’t supposed to see. Small baggies of what I can only assume are drugs. Rolled-up bills secured by a rubber band. There must be hundreds of dollars here—maybe thousands.

I contemplate taking one or two bills to add to my collection in the lining of my purse. But then I think better of it. He could have it here to test me. To see if I’m snooping. To see if I’d steal from him. To give himself more reason to ‘remind me of the rules.’ I put the money back exactly the way I found it.

Then I find something you’d think would be the most disturbing of it all, but, oddly, it’s not. I find letters written to him from a woman. Love letters. With pictures inside. Naked pictures. Of her. Of them.

My heart races. Not in fear or worry, but in pure unadulterated relief. He’s with another woman. He’ll want to leave me for her. I close my eyes and say a prayer of thanks. But then I notice the date on one of the letters. It was written over a year ago. I page through all of them, looking at more dates. They range from a few years back to as recently as two weeks ago. I drop the letters onto the desk as if they have burned me.

He’s not going to leave me.

I put the letters back, careful to arrange them as they were. Then I take the superglue and the trophy into the kitchen and get to work.

Thirty minutes later, having done a meticulous job to get it back to original condition, there are still some tiny cracks that one could see if they closely examined it. But it’s up on a shelf. How often does he really sit and stare at the thing?

I just get it back on the shelf when I hear the door to the garage open. My heart beating wildly, I quickly put the superglue back in the drawer where I found it and take one last look around the office to make sure I didn’t miss anything.

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