Page 44 of Grace

As long as we live, they live in our hearts.

We bid farewell with aching hearts.

Your children, Nicole and Jamie McCarty

Burning acid filled my throat. I read the lines carved into the tombstone again and again. A wave of anger overwhelmed me, sending me into a fit—in a way, it was similar to my anxiety attacks, but this was fueled by rage, not pain.

I was angry with everything and everyone—especially my siblings. Didn’t they think I loved our parents? Didn’t they think I also wanted to say goodbye to them?

That night, not only my parents died—I did, too.

I started scratching the stone, my nails scraping against the shiny granite slab. I wanted to scratch my name into the stone, but my pitiful, laughable effort proved ineffective.

“Grace! Stop it, Grace!” Cyrus knelt beside me and caught my hands, then drew me into an embrace. My muscles were tense, my bones were cracking, and I was flailing around with my bloody nails. My head swam and my blood was boiling. I pinched Cyrus’s thigh and slammed my head backward, trying to hit his nose—maybe he’d let me go then.

“Calm down, Grace! Calm down,” he whispered in my ear.

For hours, he rocked me.

The graveyard was already empty, and the sun had reached the horizon. The air was colder, and the world was quiet. I watched the orange silhouette in the sky, shivering with cold. I got lost in its picturesque beauty and thought about how I hadn’t seen a sunset in five years.

Was it life’s bizarre irony that that’s where I saw my first sunset? In a cold graveyard, next to my parents’ grave? I don’t know. There was only one thought circling in my head while I crouched on the ground, freezing.

Chase knew.

He knew my parents were dead and never told me.

January 2006

Cyrus delivered the letter summoning me to court personally. He hadn’t visited me too often after the incident in the graveyard. This didn’t surprise me, though.

He promised to pick me up on the day of the hearing and gave me a card. A doctor’s. He said he was the best, and that I should visit him to help process the trauma that made me behave erratically.

Often, I could not control my emotions. This was one of those times. I crushed the paper in my palm and threw it at Cyrus’s head, then ran into the house. I sobbed loudly and kept hitting the mattress. Because I had turned down the help I really needed.

March 2006

In the court, I was sweating, and my heart went berserk.

It was weird to see him after all this time.

Chase had been looking for me with his gaze—and found me right away. My throat and stomach clenched.

When I looked at him, strange feelings whirled inside me. He was wearing a bright orange jumpsuit instead of the usual jeans-and-T-shirt combo. His wrists and ankles were in cuffs linked by a thin, bright chain. It had been months since he’d been locked up in prison—still, his face and gaze didn’t seem broken. His face looked more angular, his eyes harder, and his posture more commanding than before—and I shrank inside the suffocating whirlpool I felt around him.

During the hearing, he didn’t rage or try to contradict me. He admitted everything, even the cruel murder of Mr. Miller. But what shocked me was not this, but the fact that he was not afraid. He was smiling when they were leading him away. He smiled at me, because he knew too well that I… that there had been times when I had given myself to him freely. The worst thing was that this had happened on more than one occasion. His last message to me—the one he shouted across the courtroom—was not a threat or a promise… It was a simple fact.

“You are mine, Grace!”

His deep brown eyes flashed sharply, and his deep, dark, resonant voice floated around me for a long time. All eyes in the courtroom were on me, while all I was capable of was staring at the door where they had led him out of the room. I was deep in thought, because I had heard him say this so many times that I had ended up believing it.

I am his.

A memory from 2002

Two years after kidnapping—I was 17

Chase must have stepped out of the shower when I started banging on the door of my prison. I kept hitting and kicking it hard—I didn’t care about the pain or the wounds on my skin.