Page 111 of Stone Vows

I stop fighting back and he relaxes his hold on me. But he doesn’t entirely let me go. He’s behind me in my bed, kind of spooning me, but without any of his lower body touching any of mine. His reassuring hand rests on my upper arm.

I crane my head back to see him in the dim light coming from the hallway. “Sorry,” I say with a big sigh.

“Bad dream, huh?”

I nod and put my head back down on the pillow. “You could say that. More like a nightmare,” I tell him. “One I actually lived through.”

“Do you want to talk about it?” he asks.

I shrug noncommittally.

“I did a rotation in Psych, you know,” he says, squeezing my arm. “And if I learned anything, I learned it’s always best to talk about things that bother you. If you don’t, they will grow like cancer, slowly eating away at you.”

I turn away, so he can’t see the shame on my face. “Grant destroyed my flower garden.”

“Why would he want to do that?” he asks.

“Because I loved it.”

Those four words tell Kyle more about my relationship with Grant than I could ever tell him in an entire conversation. I can feel him shaking his head behind me. He doesn’t know what to say.

“When I took the pregnancy test and found out I was going to have a baby, my first thought was of my flower garden. I planted it right after we moved into the house. It was shortly after we married. He told me it was a great idea. That he would love to have fresh flowers around the house. He even helped me till the earth and haul in fresh planting dirt. He was always nice and helpful back then—early on.

“Then about a month into our marriage, when things had begun to change, he started complaining that I spent more time with my flower garden than with him. And he was right, I did spend a lot of time there. But only because he wouldn’t let me get a job. It was the only thing I had that was truly mine.

“Months later, I’d find freshly cut flowers, that I had put in vases around the house, thrown into the trash. He told me they were a reminder of howhewasn’t enough for me. He actually thought my entire world should be centered around him. So when the pregnancy test turned positive, I knew without a shadow of a doubt that I needed to leave.

“If he destroyed a flower garden because he thought I loved it more than him, I wasn’t about to stick around to see what he would do to a child. Because I knew, despite who its father was, that I would love it more than anything in the entire world. And he wouldn’t be able to handle that.”

“Jesus, Lex.” His hand comes around my body to pull me against him, but he quickly realizes what he’s done and he removes it, sitting up on the bed to look down at me. “It makes me sick to think there are men like that walking around.”

“Do you remember when I showed you my scars that one time we played ‘Never have I ever’?” I roll onto my back and look up at him.

“Yeah.”

“The night he destroyed my flower garden. That’s the night I got this.” I run my finger across the scar on my collarbone.

He stares down at the scar. His hand twitches as if he wants to touch it, but he doesn’t. He just stares at it, his jaw hardening, his eyes burning with hatred.

“I broke one of his boxing trophies,” I tell him. “I did it out of anger when I saw what he’d done to my garden. I tried to glue it back together before he saw it, but I didn’t fool him. He stabbed me with a broken metal shard from one of the pieces.”

He scrubs his hands across his face. “If I ever see that bastard,” he says, shaking his head.

“The plan is to never see him again, Kyle. Now you know why I can’t ever contact him. He would destroy everything that I love just to hurt me. I love Ellie. I can’t risk it.”

He nods his head, looking from Ellie’s crib back to me. He nods it as if he finally understands what I’ve been telling him for weeks. “I know,” he says. “I know.”

“He was having an affair,” I admit. “As far as I could tell, for the whole time we were married he was also with someone else.”

“I’m so sorry,” he says. “You deserve so much more.”

I think I can see regret in his eyes. Regret over what? Grant hurting me? Or him not wanting to be with me?

“She deserves more,” I say, glancing over at Ellie.

“You both do,” he says. “Are you okay now?”

I nod. “Yeah, thanks.”

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