Page 102 of Our Secrets and Scars

He does own me. Every tiny piece of me belongs to him. The shattered parts and the complete ones. The ugly and the beautiful. The good and the bad. The scars on my soul and my darkest secrets.

It’s all his.

And nothing in my life has ever felt sweeter than knowing I finally, truly belong somewhere. Holden accepts me for who I am, not the person I pretend to be, and show the rest of the world. He lovesme.

Just me.

Without all the bells and whistles, the lies, the perfectly practiced performance to make me more likable, and the makeup to cover the marks on my face. I’m enough for him.

And finally, I’m enough for me too.

“Are you ever going to tell me what you called the painting we did?” I ask as we lie side by side, our hands intertwined and our heavy breaths synchronized.

“You really wanna know?”

“Obviously.”

He leans over and presses a loving kiss to my forehead.

“Our Secrets and Scars,” he says.

And I should have known.

Epilogue

Holden

Seven years later

Kinz,

I sit here at the dining table we bought for our new home, resting in a leather-backed chair that we argued over for hours in the store. I liked the metal-framed ones better, but you said they wouldn’t look right with the other pieces you’d picked out. That’s only one of the thousands of arguments you’ve won over the years. Photographs of us hang on the wall opposite me, memories frozen in black and white. Major, the old mutt you rescued from the pound last year lays curled up at my feet as I write this. This is a moment so ordinary, so normal, and yet there was a time I didn’t believe I’d ever experience something like this.

Because for sixteen years, I viewed the world through the distorted lens of a naïve, impressionable young boy. One who was lost in many ways, conflicted and confused. I didn’t know enough about life or myself to have any real understanding of my experiences and the choices I was making. I wasn’t smart enough to realize how something as simple as the company I kept could have such influence over my future. Nothing in the world made any real sense to me at all.

Until the day I received your first letter.

And just like that, my life, which had always been so uncertain, suddenly made sense. It was like you could see me clearer than anyone ever could. You understood what it was like to live life as if you were looking through a dirty window at the rest of the world. With the years that passed and the letters that kept on coming, you taught me who I was. You showed me what life could be like and made me realize that I could be more than just a product of my circumstance. You shined your light on the world until, finally, I could see it in blinding clarity.

Truth is, I don’t know who I’d be without you. You are woven through every thread of my soul, present in every corner of my being and my heart, just as it always has done, beats in time to the rhythm of your name.

Kinsley Violet Fletcher, I promise to love you in sickness and health. For richer, for poorer. In life and in death. But more so, I promise to love you through peace and pain, darkness and light, secrets and scars. I promise to treasure you, cherish you, and adore you until the day we’re forced apart, and even then, I promise to find you in the next life and love you all over again.

It's us for eternity, little one.

Forever and always.

My wedding vows are framed in embellished wood on our bedroom wall, hung beside my wife’s. Kinsley smiles at me as I read them to her, just as I have done every night since the day we married. I make her the same promises every day, whisper them to her like a lullaby before we make love and go to sleep.

It’s to remind her that those vows weren’t made only in the magic of the moment. That they were an oath I swore to her as solemnly as a witness swearing on the Bible in a court of law. Every time I say them to her, I mean them as earnestly as I did when I was slipping her wedding band onto her finger.

I turn to face her, and my heart stutters. She looks radiant in the light of the setting sun. Hues of orange and violet twist up and around her body as it seeps through the gaps in our drapes, wanting to touch her just as much as I do.

Climbing into bed beside her, I rest my hand on her stomach that’s swollen with growing life. Our baby rolls under my touch, an elbow or knee jutting outward as he moves around inside her.

“He always moves when you touch me,” Kinsley says, her eyes wide and adoring.

“Maybe he knows who I am.”

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