He Destroyed My Youth, Killed My Child, Now He Begs, But I Am Gone Forever novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Date on the Stone

At Cedar Ridge Linnea is kind, and the stone's date is two days wrong. Then the old Luna steps out of the trees.

The Cedar Ridge gate was the same iron arch I had walked under at eighteen, when I thought I was coming home.

Two sentries stood beside it.

They saw my face and neither of them said a word.

Hamish rolled down his truck window. "She's my guest. Let her through."

The sentries stepped aside, and I drove under the arch with my hands tight on the wheel.

A woman was waiting on the gravel at the top of the drive.

She was about my age, with a blond braid over one shoulder and a thermos in each hand.

I almost drove past her.

Then she lifted one of the thermos bottles and gave me a bright, nervous smile, and I stopped the car.

"You'll want this," she said through the window. "It's forty degrees up by the cedars, and you drove two hours in a clinic coat."

"Who are you?"

"Linnea." She winced. "I'm Hamish's wife. Please don't throw the tea at me."

I stared at her.

"On paper," she said fast. "The council arranged it two years after you left. I've never slept in his room, he's never touched my hand, and he looks at me the way you'd look at a very nice coat rack."

That was so unexpectedly honest that I laughed.

She looked relieved, and she passed me the thermos through the window.

It was hot ginger tea with honey, and it was the first kind thing anyone in that pack had done for me in five years.

I told myself to be careful with it.

"Finlay's inside with his nanny," she added. "He asked me last month why Daddy has a name on his chest, and I told him it belonged to a friend."

I did not know what to say to that.

She walked beside my car as I drove up the path, and Hamish's truck drew up ahead of us at the edge of the cedars.

The family lot was a flat clearing with a low stone wall around it.

Hamish's grandparents were buried there, and his father, under dark granite.

At the back, in the corner nearest the trees, was one small stone.

I got out of the car and my legs didn't want to hold me.

Linnea took one arm and Hamish, ten feet away, kept his hands at his sides.

I read the stone twice.

BABY ROAKE.

Under the name there was a date.

March 11th.

I had given birth on the ninth.

I knew it the way I knew my own name.

It had rained so hard that night.

I had fought the cuffs until they rubbed my wrists raw.

My mouth went dry.

"The date's wrong," I said.

Hamish's head came up.

"It's the day of the burial," he said. "I had the stone cut that week."

"A stone like this has one date, and people read it as the birthday."

"I know." He said it slowly. "I wasn't thinking clearly, Yvaine. I wasn't thinking at all that week."

"There's no name on it."

"My mother said you'd never agreed on one."

"I never got to agree to anything."

I went down on my knees in the wet grass.

I laid my bare hand flat on the cold granite, and nothing happened.

I had expected something to happen.

I had wanted the earth to say something, or my body to remember.

I felt the stone, and it was only a stone.

"Hello," I said, because I didn't know what else to say. "It's me. I'm sorry it took me so long."

Behind me, Linnea made a small sound and walked away to give me room.

I don't know how long I knelt there.

Something in my chest, in the dead place where my wolf had lain silent since the night of the cuffs, turned over once and went still.

I put that down to grief.

I was still holding the thermos in my other hand, and I set it on the wall so I could press both palms to the stone.

"I want to know who dug this," I said. "I want to know how deep, and who stood here."

Hamish said, very quietly, "It's right there, Yvaine."

"Nobody let me see anything."

He opened his mouth to answer.

A cane struck the gravel behind us.

It struck it twice, evenly, with a pause between the strokes, and my whole body went stiff.

I knew that sound.

I had listened for it in my sleep for five years.

I stood up and turned around.

Beatrix Roake came out of the cedars in a gray wool coat, with her iron hair in its tight knot and her amber eyes on my face.

She didn't look at her son.

"Well," she said. "A bond-breaker on my land."

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