The moment my heart shattered wasn’t dramatic. There was no thunder, no ominous music, just the ordinary crunch of gravel under my tires as I pulled into the driveway of my ranch house outside Austin, exhausted from a ten-hour work marathon debugging a client’s interface. Then I saw it.
Or rather, I saw where it used to be. My Aunt Alice’s rose garden—two hundred square feet of antique heritage roses, bourbon roses, and climbing Cecil Brunner that had taken her thirty years to cultivate—was gone. Erased.
In its place was a flattened patch of brown dirt, smooth as a putting green, with industrial rolls of artificial turf stacked at the edge like oversized carpet samples. A small bulldozer sat nearby, its bucket still caked with soil and what looked like shredded roots. I sat frozen in my car, hands still gripping the steering wheel, staring at the carnage.
The garden had been right there this morning. I had passed it on my way out, noted the early blooms on the Madame Isaac Pereire. Now there was just…nothing.
My vision tunneled. I couldn’t breathe. I stumbled out of the car, my laptop bag forgotten on the passenger seat, and walked toward the destruction on legs that didn’t feel attached to my body.
The air smelled wrong—diesel and torn earth instead of the faint rose perfume that usually drifted through the yard on spring evenings. “Oh, you’re home early.”
My father’s voice cut through my shock like a hacksaw. “What do you think?
Pretty impressive, right?”
Arthur Bennett stood near the artificial turf rolls, hands on his hips in that self-satisfied pose he always struck when he thought he’d done something clever. At sixty-two, he still had the build of a former high school football player gone soft—broad shoulders, thick around the middle, with silver hair he kept meticulously groomed. He was wearing khakis and a polo shirt, like he was about to tee off at a country club instead of standing in the ruins of something irreplaceable.
“What?” My voice came out strangled. “What did you do?”
“Upgraded the property.” He gestured grandly at the dirt. “Those thorny bushes were a liability, Skylar.
Lowered the property value. Do you know how many times I’ve gotten scratched just walking past them? A putting green, though—now that’s class.
