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.

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