Chapter 14 - The Unmarked Stone
On the one-year anniversary of the night on the bluffs, Julian and Katherine walked through the iron gates of Saint Patrick’s Cemetery in Oyster Bay.
The morning was gray, the salt fog hanging low over the granite headstones.
They walked to the DeLuca family plot, where an eight-foot monument of polished gray granite stood beneath the weeping willows. Carved into the stone was Katherine’s name, her date of birth, and the date of the accident that was supposed to have claimed her life.
Beside them walked four-year-old Mia, wearing a bright yellow raincoat and little red rubber boots, holding Julian’s hand with two fingers. Bruno walked off-leash, his nose sniffing the wet grass, staying within three paces of Katherine’s hem.
Julian had brought a stonemason’s chisel and a three-pound iron mallet in his canvas satchel.
He did not call a cemetery crew. He knelt before the granite monument, setting the hardened steel chisel against the first letter of her name.
"Are you sure, Julian?" Katherine asked softly, resting her hand on his shoulder.
Julian looked up at her—at the silver scar that crossed her cheek like an honorable ribbon, at the deep, untroubled clarity in her brown eyes, at the living, breathing reality of the woman he had loved since they were nineteen years old.
"A grave is for the dead, Katherine," Julian said. "This stone has told a lie for three hundred and sixty-five days. It doesn't get to speak anymore."
With three sharp, rhythmic strikes of the mallet, Julian drove the chisel into the granite. The stone cracked, a long diagonal fracture running through the letters, splitting the monument in half. With two more blows, the face of the stone sheared away, tumbling into the ivy below in a shower of gray dust.
Mia laughed, clapping her yellow mittens together. "The stone fell down, Daddy!"
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"It fell down, baby," Julian smiled, standing up and tossing the mallet into the grass. "Because it had nothing left to hold."
They turned their backs on the shattered granite, walking together down the gravel path toward the open road, leaving the empty cemetery behind them like a skin they had shed.
