“Cut it out, Charles.” Fear grips my throat with icy fingers. Why did I do this? I didn’t need proof. I saw it already on her skin.
“Don’t think I will.” He lowers himself to the floor, looming over me. “See, someone needs to remember just who the man of the house is around here.”
“Oh, and you’re going to show me?” I bite back, jaw tight.
His expression twists into something unreadable. Menacing. A rock settles in my stomach.
“Like you showed Nancy?”
He goes eerily still, doesn’t even blink. “What did you just say to me?”
I scoot farther away until my shoulder scrapes the fireplace. The walls close in around me. With nowhere else to go, I try to stand, to run.
Charles launches forward, grabbing my neck and shoving me back to the ground. His hands go to my windpipe, and I struggle to suck in a breath. I claw at the air, desperately searching for his eyes, his face, but he manages to stay just out of my reach.
I’m not strong enough, though maybe I’ve always lied to myself and said I was. My hands fall to the floor, searching blindly for something,anything, I can use.
His grip tightens on my neck.
My vision blurs, thoughts disappearing like smoke.
My hand connects with something above my head, something metal, and I send the fireplace tools in every direction.
In a second, I have my chance. He sees it coming moments before it hits. My hand clasps the fire poker, the ornate, wrought-iron pattern of the handle fitting perfectly in my palm.
I meet his eyes, and I swing.
The shovel slips in my hands, splinters stabbing the raw skin on my palm. I bite the inside of my cheek to keep from cursing out loud, the burning impossible to ignore.
I stab the earth again, angrier this time, and the metal strikes stone hidden just below the surface. A sharp jolt shoots straight up my arms, into my bones.
I brace myself and try once more, but the ground is unrelenting and hard as brick.
Just like he was. Set in his ways from the very day I met him. Unyielding.
The quilt wrapped around his body behind me is an old one, hand-sewn by my great-grandmother and passed down through generations. The faded pattern is stained dark now—from both his blood and the creek water I dragged him through to get here.
I can’t stand to look at it. Nor at him.
“You always did weigh too much,” I say to the bundle without turning back.In words. In secrets. Apparently in fists.
My palms are raw and blistered. In my rush, I didn’t think to grab my gardening gloves. It feels as if I’ve been digging for hours, though I have no idea how long it’s actually been.
Could be minutes.
Or years.
I’m not sure my body knows the difference anymore.
Around me, the woods are too quiet. No birds, not even the wind chime singing on the breeze from the porch. Just the sound of my tired breath and the dry scrape of my shovel.
I drop it, cursing and wiping sweat from my brow with my arm.
The shovel clangs against the ground, and I press my hands to my thighs, gasping for breath. My arms are filled with sand, and my dress clings to my skin with sweat. There’s a tear in my sleeve, and I realize it must have snagged on a branch at some point while I was dragging him through the forest.
He won’t be buried like the others, between the new willow and the old oak. He doesn’t deserve it. I wouldn’t dare lay him to rest with my mother.
I want to cry, to succumb to something other than blind rage, but the tears won’t come.
