Chapter 41 #3
I sink my teeth into his knuckles, biting down until he jerks away with a roar. I stumble backward. In a rush to escape, my foot catches on a chair leg, and I crash to the floor.
A low chuckle builds in his throat. His lips tug into a terrible grin as he steps forward, the toe of his socked foot on the hem of my dress. “Someone’s feeling mouthy tonight.”
“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.
It’s not grief I feel in this moment.
This is something else.
It’s the sound of a door slamming shut, leaving nothing but an echo in its quiet wake.
“You would’ve known how to do this,” I whisper, staring down into the half-dug grave. I know they would have—the others. The Wilde women who came before me. Who built this house and protected us all.
I can’t even dig a grave.
I sink onto the ground, dropping my face into my hands.
That’s when the wind shifts. I feel it first on the back of my neck. There’s a sudden breath, sharp and cold. The leaves on the ground around me shudder. The air seems to thicken, and I smell a storm coming, damp and metallic.
It comes on quickly.
Rain. And not just a drizzle. There is no warning. No gentle heads-up. There is only the storm.
It pours down as if the sky has been holding its breath all spring, waiting for this moment. Like it’s a bucket filled to the brim, suddenly tipped over.
The trees groan, flowers in the meadow whip this way and that. And right before my very eyes, the soil all around me, under me, turns soft.
I sit in disbelief, soaked to the bone as I watch the earth melt.
It’s impossible, but it’s real.
I know, but I don’t.
Foxglove is helping me in that way she does, a way I’ve only heard stories of until this moment.
Our land doesn’t speak to us, not in words, but it knows.
It remembers. It remembers my mother’s warmth and my gran’s playful manner.
It remembers their fire. It remembers our stories and our scars, the blood on the floor after each baby has come into this world.
The whispered secrets floating to the rafters. The tears. The laughter. The love.
It remembers us, just like my gran told me all those years ago.
I don’t wait. I move.
I grab the shovel and begin to dig. The earth shifts easily now, yielding like warm dough. A better woman than I might say a prayer, but when the grave is deep enough, I just let him fall in.
I pour the dirt back over him in a hurry, in silence.
By the time I’m done, my hands are slick with mud. My dress is ruined by the act. One more thing he’ll take from me.
It doesn’t stop raining, even when I’m finished. Doesn’t stop taking him deeper into the earth, and for that, I am grateful.
Within minutes, the spot where his body rests has vanished, the ground unmarked. It doesn’t look like a grave, only dirt. Like nothing ever happened here.
He will disappear from this earth and no one will even realize he’s gone. Not a soul will miss him.
The storm begins to ease on my walk back to Foxglove, the thunder farther off in the distance. The woods are dark, but the moonlight leads me.
I don’t look back, only forward, though I move without haste.
When I get back to Foxglove, I will light the fire. I’ll wash the dirt and blood from my hands and change out of my dress, then toss it into the flames and watch it burn.
When there’s nothing left but ash, I will open the cellar and hand Nancy our daughter.
Her daughter.
And I will make her swear to never, ever come back to Foxglove again.