Chapter 35
S he was just curious, Harper told herself. That’s why she was detouring to the cemetery instead of going straight home. Her talk with Sophie still hung heavy in her heart.
She glanced down at the tiny bouquet of wildflowers she had picked up at the farmer’s market. They were a summery impulse buy while she waited in line to pay for her strawberries. After all, you couldn’t go empty-handed to meet the woman who still had Luke’s heart.
The cemetery was a grassy stretch of park a few blocks back from the center of town. She thought back to all the times she and Luke must have driven past and wondered if she had missed him gazing out the window for his wife.
His wife. The mother of his child.
To be starting a new life, a family, only to have it all taken from you. Harper’s heart ached.
She put the car in park and climbed out. She knew the general direction of the grave thanks to a morbid but helpful website dedicated to mapping cemeteries. While summer had blanketed Benevolence in a dry heat, the grass here stayed vibrantly green.
Harper wandered down the skinny asphalt path that wound its way through the park. She hung a left at the winged angel statue and found a pocket of graves on a gentle slope.
The headstone caught her eye immediately. She recognized the carving before she saw the name. It was Luke’s tattoo. The phoenix he had over his heart.
She heard the far off sounds of a lawn mower and an airplane in flight, but all she saw was the phoenix.
Holding her breath, she approached the glossy black stone .
Karen Garrison
Loving wife and daughter.
There was no mention of the loving mother she would have been. In a tragic way, she had taken their secret to the grave.
Harper let her breath out and knelt down gingerly on the grass. She sat back on her heels. It was a beautiful spot. The tree line at her back cast its shade over the dozen graves decorating the copse.
There was already a pretty arrangement of colorful blooms that was starting to dry out tucked in the metal urn behind the stone.
It didn’t feel sad. It felt… peaceful.
Harper toyed with the twine around the wildflowers and cleared her throat.
“I’m not really sure how to introduce myself or if I even should,” she started. “I’m in love with your husband, so I’m pretty sure that wouldn’t make us friends if you were still here. But maybe, given the circumstances, you’d be okay with it?
“I think you must have been a pretty amazing person. I think Luke is, too. You must have been so happy together.
“I don’t really know why I’m here. He shouldn’t be trying to keep you locked away. I can’t tell if he’s trying to protect everyone else or himself.
“I fell in love with a man who can’t be honest with me, and I don’t know what this is going to mean for us when he comes home.”
Harper sat in silence for a few moments. She leaned forward and ran a finger across the phoenix. She missed him. Missed him with a hard edge that rubbed everything raw. She didn’t know what the future would hold, but right now she knew that she wanted him home.
The work week was passing in a blur. Harper found if she kept herself busy, she didn’t have as much time to focus on the keen edge of need just below the surface.
It was only at night that she couldn’t block out the ache.
She found herself getting up earlier and earlier in the mornings to head out for a quiet run.
Like today.
It was still hours away from the full heat of a summer day when she laced up her shoes. Hours away from work, from words, from people. Now there was only time for thoughts and dreams.
She chose a different route today, one that wound through the still silent streets of town. Harper had finally found that space between the beats of her foot strike where peace reigned.
Aldo was impressed with her progress and she with his. The last round of modifications made to his prosthesis really seemed to help. His gait was smooth, and he was steadily increasing the intensity of his physical therapy. She was surprised she hadn’t seen similar progress between him and Gloria.
“Not everyone is a love story waiting to happen,” Luke had teased her last night from seven thousand miles away.
He was smiling on the screen, and Harper knew it was a good sign.
After Aldo, she had seen the gray, the shadows, and she knew that he was fighting battles not just on the ground.
As strong as he was, he took sustenance from the good news at home.
They discussed work in brief broad strokes, but Harper saw his expression come to life most when she talked about home.
Aldo’s latest stunt at physical therapy or Josh’s new saying or what new tofu recipe Claire had tried on Charlie.
She didn’t mention Karen or her trip to the cemetery. They would talk eventually. Face to face .
It was Karen on her mind that had Harper choosing this route. She stopped to catch her breath in front of a tidy two-story duplex. 417 Meadow View. Their home together. Luke and Karen. Behind those walls, they had cooked breakfast together, made love, argued, and planned a family.
She didn’t know what she expected to feel being here. What was someone supposed to feel when they stalked ghosts?
Hands on her hips, she paced the sidewalk, glancing every now and then at the house. Did Luke ever do this? Did he come back to the place where there was life? Did he visit the cemetery where there was only death?
Harper felt something. A presence. A ghost?
But it was a woman. Flesh and blood. Haunting the sidewalk. They studied each other from several paces away. The trim figure was dressed casually in shorts and a t-shirt. She had her brown hair with its silver strands pulled back in a short curly stub.
Harper felt like she had been caught in the act. She gave an awkward wave. “Morning,” she called.
The woman simply stared. There was something familiar about her face. It reminded her of Karen. Harper felt her heart skip a beat. “Joni?”
The woman’s face transformed into an impassive mask.
“So you’re her,” she said, her tone soft, but laced with pain.
“I’m who?”
“Luke’s replacement for my daughter.”
Harper froze where she was.
“Joni, I can guarantee there’s no replacement for Karen.”
“That’s not how it looks to me. What it looks like to me is he tried to pretend she never existed until he found someone new to help him forget.”
Harper started toward her. “Now hang on a minute?— ”
“I’ve been hanging on for five years.” Her voice broke. “I lost my family because of him. He never loved her enough. His country came first, and my daughter came a distant second. He’ll do it to you, too.”
Harper could see the tears now. She shook her head. “I think we need to talk.”
It took some coaxing and some strong-arming, but Harper got Joni to come home with her. They walked back, the summer humidity teasing a line of sweat down Harper’s back.
“What was Karen like?”
Joni sighed. “She was everything to me. Her father left us when she was very young. He just up and walked out one day. Said he didn’t want to be a husband and a father anymore. So it was just the two of us from then on.”
The abandonment had stung and still did. Harper could hear it in her tone.
“Karen was this driven, ambitious girl. Even when she was eight, she had her entire life mapped out. She was going to go to college to be a scientist and marry a man who would ‘be a good daddy.’ It was amazing to watch her set her sights on a goal and then march toward it until she captured it.” Joni took a breath.
“And now she’s gone. And he pretends she never existed. Did he ever love her? If he did, how could he have walked away from her, from us, so easily?”
Another abandonment.
They arrived home, and Joni stopped to take it in. “Karen would have loved this house. That townhouse was just a waypoint. They were going to have a home, a family. They were going to have it all.”
Harper led her up onto the porch. “Are you okay with dogs?”
Joni sighed. “Of course you have a dog. ”
Harper pushed the front door open, and Lola and Max rushed to greet them.
“Oh my, hello there,” Joni said, crouching to greet the mass of tongues and paws and wiggling rear ends.
“Let me give them some t-r-e-a-t-s, and we can head down to the basement.”
Harper hurried down the hallway to the kitchen and grabbed a bag of bacon treats. She shook the bag and the dogs hurtled down the hall toward her.
“Good puppies. Okay, sit. Good job. Here’s one for you and one for you.”
She found Joni peering into the dining room. “This is all new. Luke was in such a hurry to get out of that townhouse. He sold it for less than they paid and sold or gave away every stick of furniture. He got rid of everything they owned, everything that was hers.”
“And you think he did that because he wanted to move on?”
“There’s no other explanation.”
“I think there might be. I think you’re wrong about Luke. Let me show you something.” Harper opened the basement door.
“You’re not taking me down there to chop me into pieces to feed to the dogs are you? I’m not ready to be one of those ‘missing and never heard from again’ people,” Joni said.
“Very funny. Now let me just go get my rusty axe.”
“Ha ha.” But she followed Harper down the stairs.
Harper paused outside the door. “Luke is still in love with your daughter. He never stopped.”
“What did he tell you?”
“It’s not what he told me. It’s what I found.” She twisted the knob and pushed the door open. “Go ahead. You can look through it all. I’m going to go make us some coffee.”
Joni nodded, but her attention was on the contents of the room .
Harper gave Joni her privacy and went back upstairs. She took the dogs out in the back yard while coffee brewed.
She didn’t know if she was doing the right thing. But spending years believing your daughter’s husband had cast aside her memory and moved on without a second thought? A mother deserved to know the truth.
She gave it another half an hour before venturing back into the basement with a tray of coffee, sugar, creamer, and tissues.
“Joni?”
She found her sitting cross-legged on the floor holding a photo album. “He kept everything,” she whispered tearfully.
Harper saw the box with the onesies was open. She set the tray down on the floor and sat next to Joni.
“Everything. Every article of clothing, every picture, every newspaper clipping.”
“They were going to have a baby.” Joni ran a finger over one of the onesies. Her eyes welled up again. “I was going to be a grandma.”
Harper handed her a tissue.
“It wasn’t his fault,” Joni said, tears falling freely now.
“I always knew it wasn’t, but when I thought he had just moved on…
I blamed him for that. It was easy to point the finger.
” She took a moment to dab at her eyes with the tissue.
“At the funeral—Oh, God. The things I said to him. And he kept my secret. He knew and never told a soul.”
“Your secret?”
“It was my fault,” Joni said, crumpling the tissue in her hand. “Karen died because of me.”