Chapter 25
By noon on the second day, Grace is partway convinced that the sun is singling her out for its wrath.
Her body is unmade by its relentlessness, and there’s no solution—if she keeps her clothes on, the heatstroke will come for her, and all alone out here, she’d likely die.
So, she takes off her clothes, walks in meticulous, painfully slow lines up and down the field, and the sun continues to enact its particular brand of torture by beating its red remembrance onto her skin.
Her fingers and hands are dry and brittle, covered in rock dust that she can’t fully get off. Any nails she had are now jagged or ripped down to the quick, and a couple are bleeding at the cuticle, freckling the stones with dots of red as she tosses them haphazardly into the wheelbarrow at her hip.
The previous night, in the ramshackle tent they’ve given her to sleep in, she’d cried.
An ugly, wailing kind of cry—she’d known she was far enough away that no one would hear her, so she’d let herself scream and whine and whimper, a rare moment of allowing self-pity to overtake all other emotions.
She’d wallowed and lamented her life, angry and spiteful toward whatever cruel cosmic force had intervened and shown her what she could have had—shown her the beauty that lay beyond this barbed-wire-lined hell.
Halcyon, she’d thought, as her throat grew hoarse from the sobs.
The sun never hurt at Halcyon. And how appropriate its name felt then—a long gone oasis—a place that, for Grace, would live on only in memories.
She’d given herself the space to mourn its loss, but then had quickly come to realize that crying would only dehydrate her faster, and after endless hours without laying eyes on a single soul, she’d figured it would be smart to conserve any water that was still in her body.
The next morning, she’d started counting the rocks as she tossed them into the wheelbarrow, and she had gotten to about fifteen hundred when she had the thought to stop talking altogether, to stop exposing her mouth to the dust and exacerbating her thirst. But she’d mentally done the math after hitting that number, and a dark realization had begun to settle into her gut: This was going to take weeks.
During that magical stretch of time at the summer pasture at Halcyon, she’d taken away a few heat-safety tips—the kind she’d never before been offered, because Bellamy never gave two shits if the people on his staff were healthy and knew how to protect themselves.
But Forty cared. Forty cared for every single person and animal on Halcyon grounds.
Forty was protective and loyal and kind; he’d become more of a father to Grace in those short months than any other man in her life, dead or alive.
And when a little voice in her head had encouraged her to be strategic about her time, to seek the shade of trees, to sip water slowly and sporadically to encourage absorption and not urination, she realized it was his voice.
Deeper than the hollers of the Hill Country, raspy and gentle and seasoned with decades of life and pain and love under his cowhide belt.
Once that realization had set in, she’d listened, carving out times throughout the spread of the day to work, rest, and drink.
All in the name of not overheating and dying alone out here, not becoming a corpse left to sizzle and shrivel up beneath the baking sun.
She’s counting in her head now, using each clunk of the wheelbarrow to stay on track.
She nears the edge of the left-hand quarter of the field, and behind her, piles of discarded rocks continue to grow taller, spread out evenly beyond the perimeter.
A cairn sits at the front of each one, all of them different but serving the same purpose—to remind Grace every time she looks at them that she is a person and not merely a pawn in her uncle’s demented schemes.
She’s the person who moved these stones.
The person whose blood and sweat and tears coats them.
The person who has tried to construct something lovely, even in the midst of a waking nightmare.
Trey brings her a hunk of overcooked steak and a dry, undercooked baked potato on a plate wrapped in foil at dinnertime.
He refills her canteen from an old Igloo cooler sitting in the back of the Gator, and denies her with a laugh when she asks him to leave the whole thing.
He drives off with a dismissive wave after remarking on how shocked he is with the little progress she’s made.
Grace sits in the sad excuse for shade she’s found beneath a dying oak and eats, chewing the meat until her jaw hurts and taking tiny bites of the potato to avoid getting overly thirsty from its graininess.
Her stomach begins to hurt upon finishing the meal, the result of hastily scarfing everything down.
She should’ve known better—should’ve taken her time and rationed it out—but she was so hungry.
So hungry that she couldn’t sleep. She lies down on her back and breathes through her mouth for a while, hoping the pain will pass.
Eventually, it does, and she gets back to work, because there is nothing else she can do.
She returns to the field, to the unforgiving sun, to the rocks that seem to sprout from the ground like weeds.