His Love Was My Poison novel · Chapter 1 of 48
Chapter 1: The Name on the Stone
Seven years after Lenora found another woman carved on her general's family headstone and left in the night, she sits beside him at an Army dinner, hears he still lights a candle for her, and sees the marks of poison on his nails.
The man I lived with for eight years had another woman's name carved on his parents' headstone, with the words "beloved wife."
I didn't scream at him.
I didn't even ask him why.
I cut off my hair, packed one bag and left the base before dawn, and I never told a soul where I went.
Seven years later, I saw him again in the middle of the Mojave Desert.
The Army was running its biggest training exercise of the year at Fort Irwin.
I was there as a specially invited guest.
The welcome dinner was in a big white tent with string lights and folding tables and a bar made of ammunition crates.
I had barely found my name card when the old faces found me.
They were colonels now, with gray in their hair and wives on their arms.
Seven years ago they had been captains sharing frozen pizza on my kitchen floor in Alaska.
"Nora? Nora, is that you?"
One of the wives grabbed both my hands.
"Look at you! You cut your hair!"
"It's Lenora now," I said. "It always was."
Nobody heard that part.
"We always said he was waiting for you," her husband told me, very serious, like he was breaking news. "Seven years. He never married, you know."
His wife squeezed my fingers.
"Not once. Not even close."
I smiled, because there was nothing in the world to say to that.
Then the tent went quiet near the door.
He walked in.
Major General Royce Ashwell, in dress blues, with two stars on each shoulder.
People turned toward him.
Seven years had put gray at his temples and taken nothing else.
He was still the handsomest man in any room he walked into, and he still didn't seem to know it.
Everyone knew our history.
So of course they had seated us together.
He pulled his chair out and sat down beside me without a word.
All through the salad, he kept looking at me.
He looked like he was holding back a whole speech.
In the end, all he said was, "It's been a while, Nora."
"Yes," I said. "It has."
I cut my chicken.
My hands were perfectly steady.
There was a time when that voice saying my name would have melted me into the floor.
Now it was just a voice.
I was twenty-two when his family fell.
His father, a retired general and the most famous man in Lexington, Virginia, was charged with taking bribes from a defense contractor.
He died of a heart attack before the trial.
Royce's mother died four months after him.
And the Army sent Royce to Fort Greely, Alaska, which is about as far from anything as the Army has.
I had a place in a chemistry graduate program waiting for me.
I gave it up and got on the plane with him.
For five years I lived in a small house on a frozen post where the sun barely came up in winter.
Then he clawed his way back.
At thirty-five he got his first star, the youngest general in a generation.
We moved to Fort Myer, outside Washington, into a brick house with a flagpole.
He never once brought up marriage.
I told myself he didn't need a piece of paper.
Then one night, three years after his star, I woke up and his side of the bed was empty.
I found him in the living room in the dark.
He was kneeling in front of the framed photo of his parents.
One white candle burned on the shelf beside it.
It was his mother's candle.
He had asked me to light one there every night he was away, and I had, for eight years.
"Dad, Mom, forgive me," he whispered. "I couldn't make it to the cemetery this year. The exercise ran long."
He bowed his head.
"Please look after Nora. Keep her healthy. And let us last forever."
I stood in the hallway with my hand on my heart.
I had been sick for years by then.
Headaches, numb feet, hair coming out in my brush.
And here he was, asking his dead parents to keep me well.
I decided right there that I would drive down to Lexington and visit their grave for him.
That was how I found the stone.
It was gray granite, with his parents' names at the top.
Below them was the space I had always known was meant for Royce and his wife.
It was already filled in.
ELEANOR VARLEY, BELOVED WIFE OF ROYCE ASHWELL.
Under it was her birth year, 1982, and an open dash with nothing after it.
Families carve a name like that ahead of time, for a living wife, so the stone is ready when it's needed.
It's a promise in granite, for the whole town to read.
For eight years I had thought that line was waiting for me.
I knew Eleanor Varley.
Everybody in the Army knew her.
She was a singer who toured military bases, and the troops called her by her stage name.
Nora Varley.
I stood there in the wind and understood everything at once.
"Nora" had never been short for Lenora.
An old groundskeeper came up the path with a rake.
"You family?" he asked. "I don't know your face."
Good question.
What was I to them?
"A distant relative," I said.
He nodded.
"Figured. Close family would've been here for the big day. Three years ago. The general brought his wife and baby boy and introduced them to everybody, right here."
He pulled out his phone, proud.
"His wife sings for the troops. Pretty thing. I took a picture."
On the screen, Eleanor Varley stood at this stone holding a newborn in a white blanket.
Royce stood beside her with his arm around her waist.
He was looking down at her and smiling.
I had never once seen him look at me.
The date in the corner of the photo said November 6, three years ago.
The day before, I had sat in the base clinic and heard my test results.
Nerve damage in both feet, cause unknown, see a specialist.
I had called Royce and begged him to come with me.
He'd said he was stuck in a classified briefing all the next day.
That night, back at Fort Myer, I took the kitchen scissors into the bathroom.
My braid hung to my waist.
He loved it.
I cut it off at the nape in three bites of the blades.
I laid it on his pillow with my house key on top, and I walked out the door.
Now he sat beside me, seven years later, smelling of the same shaving soap.
"I still light it, you know," he said quietly. "Every night. My mother's candle. I light it for you."
He reached across me to fill my water glass.
That's when I saw his fingernails.
Pale white bands ran straight across every one of them, like chalk lines.
I knew those lines.
Seven years ago, I'd had them on all ten fingers.
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