The Unwanted Wife and Her Secret Twins (Mia and Kyle) novel Chapter 450

Mia

I'm kneeling in the garden now, though I don't remember deciding to kneel. One moment I was standing at the edge looking at the too-long grass, and the next my knees are pressing into the earth.

The dirt under my fingernails. I don't notice it happening. I think about how I'll have to scrub them later with the nail brush, the one with the wooden handle that sits by the kitchen sink.

My hands know what to do—wrap around the stem as close to the base as possible, feel for the resistance, pull straight up or dig deeper if it won't come. This is muscle memory from years of helping Mom in this garden.

The dandelions come up with their long thick taproots, the kind that go down forever, searching for water in the drought. Sometimes they break off halfway and I can feel the snap in my fingers, that small vegetable violence.

The crabgrass is harder—those shallow spreading roots that seem to go on forever, each clump revealing more, like pulling on a string and finding it attached to a whole web underground, everything connected, and if I could just find the center, the source, I could pull it all up at once, but I never find the center.

The sun beats down on my neck and I can feel it burning. I'm not wearing sunscreen. Should be wearing sunscreen. Mom always made me wear sunscreen. But Mom isn't here anymore. Mom is in the hospital with tubes and machines, or maybe she's already gone, the timeline is fuzzy.

A sound interrupts the rhythm of pull and toss, pull and toss—a chittering, high-pitched and rapid, like someone clicking their tongue very fast, like a scolding or a greeting or a question.

A squirrel.

Five feet away at the edge of the flowerbed, sitting on its haunches with its tail curved up over its back like a question mark.

It's small, young maybe, not one of the big gray squirrels that raid the bird feeder and scatter when you open the back door. This one is reddish-brown, the color of rust, of autumn leaves not yet fallen, of those terra cotta pots Mom used to plant herbs in.

Its fur catches the sunlight in a way that makes me see individual hairs, the way they layer and overlap.

It's watching me with black eyes. Its small round ears swivel independently, and I wonder what it hears, what the world sounds like at that pitch, whether the grass growing makes a sound, whether my heartbeat is loud to those sensitive ears.

Her hair is down, loose around her shoulders, darker than mine, catching the filtered light coming through the oak leaves in a way that makes it look almost black in the shadows, almost disappeared into the darkness behind her.

She's just standing there. Just watching me kneel in the dirt with my hand extended toward a squirrel that has now completely vanished—I don't see it leave, don't hear it go, it simply ceases to exist between one moment and the next, the way things do in dreams.

I just look at her and she looks at me and there's something in her face that I've never seen before.

She's not smiling. Not frowning. Her eyes are wet—not crying exactly, not tears running down her cheeks, just wet.

I'm still kneeling in the dirt, my hands filthy, my knees aching now in a way they weren't before. I stare at Taylor and she stares back and the moment stretches out. The garden is silent. No birds. No wind. Even the sound of traffic from the street has disappeared. It's just us. Me in the light, her in the shadows.

Then she turns. Just turns. And walks away.