YARA I don’t tell anyone about the claw marks.
I don’t know what I’d say.
The man courting attention in this house isn’t entirely human isn’t a sentence that survives being said out loud in a room with my mother in it.
I find Nola in the garden that afternoon, cutting roses for the hall table.
Her eyes flick, for just a second, toward the guest wing windows before she catches herself, the same quick, wary glance I’ve seen her give a wasp’s nest she hasn’t gotten around to having removed.
I linger near her without meaning to start a conversation, just needing to be near someone who feels solid after a morning that didn’t.
“You’ve been quiet,” she says, not looking up from the shears.
“Is something wrong?” “I’m fine.” She glances at me then, and something in her face shifts, careful, assessing, the way she looks at weather she doesn’t trust.
“This is about Mr.
Callahan,” she says, flat.
I don’t answer fast enough.
That’s answer enough for her.
Nola sets the shears down on the stone bench beside her, and her hand hesitates over them a second too long before she lets go, the way it hesitates lately whenever his name comes up at dinner, like she’s bracing herself before she can finish a sentence with it in her mouth.
When she turns to face me fully, there’s a tightness around her eyes I don’t often see, something closer to fear than disapproval.
“I want you to be careful with him,” she says, low.
“Nola.” “I mean it, Yara.
He’s not our kind,” she says, plain, the same way she’d tell me a horse wasn’t broke yet, a simple fact rather than an opinion, and something about the certainty in her voice unsettles me more than if she’d shouted it.
“What does that even mean?
Not our kind?” “It means what it means.” Her jaw sets, and she picks the shears back up, though her hands aren’t steady on them anymore.
“There are families you marry into and families you don’t.
He’s from someplace wild, someplace that never learned to civilize itself the way we did.
I don’t want that wildness anywhere near this house.
Anywhere near you,” she says, sharp.
I want to tell her she’s not entirely wrong, though not in any way she’d understand, and the urge to say it out loud, to finally hand someone in this family the truth of what I’ve been collecting, presses hard against the back of my teeth.
I don’t say it.
I’ve learned by now what happens when I hand this family my truths.
We walk back toward the house together, Nola with her basket of roses, me trailing a half step behind.
The path curves near the old boxwood hedge at the edge of the lawn, the one Nola’s kept so carefully trimmed for as long as I can remember, and my gaze catches on the shadow behind it.
That’s when I see it again.
The stone.
It’s small, easy to miss if you don’t already know it’s there, tucked into the shadow behind the boxwoods where nobody would think to look unless they were looking specifically.
No name carved into it.
Just a date, weathered soft at the edges from years of rain.
I’ve seen Nola visit this stone exactly once a year, always alone, always at the same time in early spring, standing over it for exactly as long as it takes the church bells to finish ringing the hour, then walking away without a word to anyone about where she’s been.
I’ve asked her about it twice in my life, once as a child and once a few years later, and both times she shut the question down so smoothly I understood it was never meant to be answered.
I slow my steps now, glancing at the stone the way I always do passing it, half out of habit and half out of something I’ve never been able to name.
Nola notices.
She always notices.
“Don’t,” she says, quiet, before I’ve said anything at all.
“I wasn’t going to ask.” “You were thinking about it.” She stops walking, the basket of roses balanced against her hip, and looks at that stone the way you’d look at something that still had teeth even after all these years.
“Some things in this family aren’t meant to be understood, Yara.
Only carried,” she says, quiet.
“That’s not an answer.” “It’s the only one I have,” she says, tired.
We stand there a moment, the two of us and that small unmarked stone between us.
Her face has gone still in a way I don’t recognize, the muscles around her mouth pulled tight, her eyes fixed on the stone and not on me.
Whatever grief lives behind that marker is old enough and deep enough that even she doesn’t have words for it.
That’s new.
In nineteen years, I’ve never once seen my mother look at anything like she’s afraid of it.
I wonder, walking beside her now, whether whatever she buried under that boxwood hedge is the same thing that’s making her hands shake at the mention of Dean’s name.
Whether grief that old teaches a person to recognize danger long before they understand what they’re looking at, or whether it just leaves them seeing danger everywhere, in every stranger, every shadow, every man who moves like he isn’t entirely what he claims to be.
We start walking again.
I think the conversation’s over, that we’ve reached the edge of whatever she’s willing to give me today.
Then, without warning, Nola’s hand shoots out and closes around my wrist.
Hard.
Harder than I’ve ever felt her grip anything, her fingers digging in enough that I gasp.
When I look at her face, the calm, composed mask she wears for this whole family has cracked wide open.
Her eyes are wild, wide and bright in a way that doesn’t look entirely sane, something feral moving behind them that I’ve never seen in my mother’s face before, not once, not in any argument, any grief, any moment I can remember.
“Promise me you’ll stay away from him,” she says, her voice low and urgent, almost pleading.
“Whatever you think you’re feeling, whatever’s happening between the two of you, you end it.
Now.
Tonight.” “Nola, you’re hurting my wrist.” “Promise me,” she says, gripping tighter.
“I know what he is.
I don’t understand how I know.
But I know it, the way you know a storm’s coming before the sky changes, and I am telling you, I am begging you, stay away from Dean Callahan.” I stare at her, my wrist throbbing under her fingers.
For the first time in my entire life, I don’t recognize the woman standing in front of me at all.