Chapter 24 - HOW TO LOVE A MONSTER
Adrian Voss never came back to life.
Not while we were watching.
Someone stole his statue from federal evidence before sunrise and vanished with it across the Canadian border.
A collector, probably.
Maybe one of his old clients.
Maybe someone worse.
That frightened me.
It also solved one decision I did not want to make.
I had four reversals left after restoring the three people my mother had accidentally petrified.
The cost was not neat.
I lost the taste of peaches.
I lost the name of my fifth-grade teacher.
I lost two weeks from the summer I turned sixteen.
And after the third reversal, I lost the memory of Noah proposing to me.
He told me about it later.
Apparently, he had planned candles by the lake.
Then rain started.
A raccoon stole the sandwich bag containing the ring.
Noah chased it for twenty minutes in dress shoes.
He finally proposed beside a dumpster.
“You said yes while laughing at me,” he told me.
“I’m sorry I forgot.”
He shrugged.
“I remember enough for both of us.”
That was the kind of thing he said now.
Not perfect.
Not always helpful.
But ours.
I never reversed his arm.
He asked me not to.
The stone stopped at his elbow after Celia developed a stabilizing treatment. His left hand remained gray marble, warm at the wrist, cold at the fingertips.
He learned to drive one-handed.
He hated button-up shirts.
He dropped plates constantly for three months and blamed the plates.
We moved out of Blackwater under a federal protection agreement that was really just paperwork admitting nobody knew how to protect us.
June sent letters.
Katie sent speeding tickets as jokes.
Sheriff Ortiz sent nothing for six months, then mailed a Christmas card that said, PLEASE NEVER STEAL ANOTHER DEPUTY’S CAR.
Ben wrote underneath: June says hi.
Eli went to prison.
He testified against Adrian’s network first.
He apologized again.
I still did not forgive him.
I was learning that forgiveness and mercy were different things.
Tyler Beck’s mother died in October.
I did not petrify her.
That choice kept me awake for weeks.
Maybe freezing her could have bought time. Maybe it would have trapped her in conscious stone while her son waited for a cure that never came.
I did not know.
Not knowing did not make the decision less mine.
That was adulthood, apparently. Terrible branding.
Celia helped manufacture new protective lenses. She served eighteen months for her role in Adrian’s operation and lost her medical license.
She also became the person I called when my vision flickered gold at the edges.
People are messy.
I stopped expecting them not to be.
Noah and I did not return to normal.
Normal had been built on a lie.
We built something else.
He learned not to surprise me in dark rooms.
I learned to tell him when I was scared before it became a plan involving stolen vehicles.
We fought.
Once I slept on the couch because he called my mother “the queen of catastrophic communication.”
He was right.
I was still mad.
On our seventh anniversary, we sat on the porch of a rented house where nobody knew our names.
I wore new glasses with thin black frames.
Noah held my hand with his right one.
His stone left hand rested between us.
“Do you ever wish you didn’t know?” I asked.
He thought about it too long.
I appreciated that.
“Sometimes,” he said.
The answer hurt.
Then he added, “But I don’t wish you were different. I wish the world was less stupid about what you are.”
“That was almost romantic.”
“I had a better version. Lost it.”
I smiled.
After a while, he said, “Can I see them?”
I knew what he meant.
We had practiced this with mirrors.
Safe angles. Distance. No direct gaze.
I took off my glasses and looked toward the dark kitchen window.
My reflection appeared.
Gold eyes.
Noah looked at them in the glass.
For the first time in our marriage, he saw my whole face without fear between us.
Not directly.
Not perfectly.
But enough.
His reflection smiled at mine.
“My wife is Medusa,” he said.
I groaned. “Please never introduce me that way.”
“No promises.”
Somewhere out in the world, Adrian Voss was still stone.
Maybe conscious.
Maybe waiting.
Maybe someone was trying to wake him.
I should have been terrified.
I was, a little.
But Noah’s shoulder touched mine.
The porch light buzzed.
A moth kept throwing itself against the bulb like it had learned nothing from experience.
I understood the moth more than I wanted to.
For most of my life, I thought being seen was the same thing as being exposed.
It isn’t.
Sometimes being seen is just someone staying after they know where the danger is.
Sometimes love is a man with a stone hand looking at your reflection because direct eye contact could kill him.
Not perfect.
Not safe.
Still love.
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