The sunflowers Todd brought her are nowhere in sight. She threw them out the second he was off the property.
I watched her do it through my front window—straight from the porch rail to the trash bin at the side of her cabin, plastic and all.
The framed wedding photograph is still on her porch rail.
She hasn’t touched it.
She's been on the porch for forty minutes, working in her garden, and she has not once looked at that photograph.
I drink half the beer.
I look at the photograph on her porch rail.
I think about going to get it.
About walking across the gravel, picking it up, and taking it to my cabin and burning the picture in my fire pit while she watches from her porch and not saying a single word to her about it.
About every way I could take it without making her think about it any more than she already has, because the only thing worse than that photograph sitting on her porch rail tonight is her having to make a decision about what to do with it.
The decision is mine. I'll get it after dark.
She doesn't have to know it's gone until she wakes up tomorrow and finds the rail empty.
I finish the beer and watch her teach my boy how to pull a weed.
That fucker called her honey.
That alone earned him a grave.
CHAPTER SIX
Hadley
Five-fifteen in the morning and I've been awake for the better part of three hours, and I’m angry.
Not sad. Not scared. One hundred percent, completely fueled by rage sort ofangry.
I've kicked the sheet off twice. I've punched the pillow into the right shape and then punched it again because the right shape was wrong.
I've replayed yesterday's porch visit in my head six different ways and in every one of them I'm louder than I was at the time.
The first three times, I tell Todd to get off my porch the second he says the wordhoney.
By the fourth, I'm telling him the second he climbs the steps.
By the fifth, I never let him through the gate at all.
In the sixth I'm in the kitchen and I've got the cast iron skillet in my hand.
That's the one I keep coming back to.
I sit up in bed in the dark and I press the heels of my hands against my eyes and I let myself be angry for a long minute.
I'd rather be angry than anything else I could be right now.
Sad means he won. Scared means he won.
Angry is the only thing that feels like it’s still mine.