She Steps Out Of Betrayal's Shadow To Rebuild Her Broken Home novel · Chapter 20 of 24

Chapter 20: Cuttings

Zachary Maddox stood in the lean-to behind the gatehouse at midnight, among forty pots of dirt.

The troopers had gone and the tent was dark.

Posy was asleep in the big house with her grandmother in the next bed, and the investigator had told him the court order against him had died with the judge's warrant.

He still couldn't make himself walk up the lawn.

The lean-to door opened, and Melinda came in with a flashlight.

"Mom said you'd be here," she said. "She said you always hide in the plants."

"I'm not hiding. I'm checking them."

"At midnight."

"They like it quiet."

She lifted the flashlight and looked along the bench.

Each pot held a stick no longer than her hand, with two red buds on it.

"Are those maple?" she asked.

"They're hers." He cleared his throat. "Your father planted that tree the morning you were born. My dad held the root ball. They put a bottle of the good whiskey in the hole, and your mother never forgave either of them."

Melinda smiled a little, with her face turned to the pots.

"The week before the saw came, I took cuttings off the lowest limbs. Forty of them. Dad's rooting powder, a heating mat, a lot of swearing." He shrugged. "Six took."

"You saved it."

"Six sticks aren't a tree."

"They're six more than I thought we had."

She set the flashlight on the bench and stood in front of him with her arms wrapped around her ribs.

"Zach, I stood on that stage today and I didn't feel anything," she said. "Everyone clapped, and I knew I'd won, and I was waiting for it to feel like ten years of something. It didn't."

"You didn't lose ten years of feeling. You lost the days."

"I don't know when Posy first walked. I don't know if I cried at my wedding. I don't know a single thing I loved about him except the sentence he said under a tree."

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