The Moonlight Healers

7. Louise

7

LOUISE

Louise lay awake in the old wooden spool bed in the guest room, watching her mother’s face on the pillow next to hers. Her grandmother had offered to sleep on the couch so Louise could take her bed, but Bobbie had refused, unable to accept any peace offering, no matter how small.

Louise had tossed and turned the entire night. Being back there with her mother had brought all of the old memories back, flitting through her consciousness like a slideshow: driving away from the orchard in the moving truck, her mother silent beside her as Louise cried, begging her to let them stay. Her monthly visits after she left, when her mother dropped her off but refused to get out of the car.

Her great-grandmother’s funeral, sitting in a folding chair at the community center in town, the space packed full of people Louise had never met, men and women from all over Virginia, driving hours to say goodbye to the nurse who had cared for their loved ones. Bobbie had been unwilling to bend even then, sat stiffly beside Camille without touching her, stayed out on the porch at the reception.

As though she could feel herself being watched, Bobbie’s eyes opened with a start. She blinked several times before pressing her cheek into the worn yellow sheets. “I forgot how uncomfortable this bed was.” She groaned as she sat up. “Spring beds were not made for someone middle-aged.”

Louise sat up too and leaned back against the wood frame. “How long have you known you could…that we could heal people?” She had to say it quickly, before she lost her nerve. Though her mother told her the basics after the accident, that healing touch was an ability passed on to each new generation through the female line, Louise still couldn’t wrap her mind around the fact that her mother would have quit nursing if she were a healer, that she would hate the profession so much if she had such an extraordinary, innate skill to use as a nurse.

“A while,” Bobbie said. She pushed herself up and out of the bed and walked to the dresser for her glasses.

“How long is a while?”

“It’s complicated. More than you could know.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Louise asked in a small voice. Of all the questions that crowded her mind, that had kept her awake for hours the previous night, this one was the most painful for her. But she had to know.

Bobbie’s face sagged slightly. “I didn’t… It was complicated.”

“Stop saying that. It’s an excuse.”

Bobbie wrung her hands, and the vulnerability in her features made Louise’s anger subside slightly. “I promise we can talk more later. But I have some work calls to make this morning. One of my clients wants to make an offer on the house we saw yesterday morning, before…before the accident. The internet here is terrible so I’ll have to go to the coffee shop in town.”

“You’re leaving?” Louise was incredulous. Her mother was going to leave her there alone without answering a single one of her questions, after everything that had happened?

“Just for a little bit. While you spend time with your grandmother. And then we can all talk more later before I take you back home.”

Louise’s mother was running away, refusing to put her anger in the background, even for Louise’s sake. “What about Grandma? What about me?”

“Your grandmother doesn’t need me here.” Her expression softened. “And you’ll be okay, honey. It will…it will all be okay.” Bobbie turned away and opened one of the dresser drawers. “I guess I’ll have to wear what I wore yesterday. All that’s in here are my old field hockey uniform and some cloth napkins.”

“Mom.”

“I’ll call you, when I’m on my way back. Shouldn’t be later than noon.”

“Mom!”

“I can’t stay here,” Bobbie said, her back still to Louise. Above her was one of her grandmother’s newer paintings, an impressionistic portrait of the orchard in the spring, dashes of pink against green ripples. “I’m sorry, honey, but I can’t. I want this to all make sense to you. I want you to understand what happened, and why I didn’t tell you, why…” Her shoulders rose and fell, and she shifted around to face Louise. “I want to tell you all of it, Louise. But I can’t. She can. And she will. She owes me that. She owes us both that. Grandma will tell you everything. Answer any question you have. I promise. I thought I could be here. But I can’t… I just need to get out of this house. Can you understand that?”

Louise wanted to question her mom, yell at her, make her explain, stay. But their roles were too ingrained, and after all this time Louise didn’t know how to be anything other than what her mother needed her to be.

“Okay.”

* * *

After her mother left, Louise found her grandmother in the kitchen. She sat with a crossword at the kitchen table, her forearms already stained with paint, a pair of red-rimmed reading glasses balanced on her nose.

“Mom’s really busy,” Louise said, hovering near the table. “With work. I’m sure she would have liked to stay.”

Before Louise could come up with more lies to explain Bobbie’s absence, she noticed the smell of something burnt and slightly sweet. “What is—” There was a small plume of smoke rising from the range against the wall.

“Oh, damn it,” Camille said loudly as she got up to grab a towel and moved an old cast iron frying pan off the heat. She sighed as she waved away the smoke. “I wanted to make you French toast. Like I used to. Our little tradition.”

Whenever her mother worked a night shift at the hospital, Louise would stay up in the big house with Camille and her great-grandmother, Helene, and in the morning, her grandmother always made French toast, slathered in butter and oozing with syrup. “It’s no big deal,” Louise told her now. “I don’t even usually have time for breakfast before school.”

“You should always eat breakfast. Especially when you’re away this summer on your own. If that’s still the plan?” Camille turned from the stove. “I didn’t know, with the accident, with what happened…” Her eyes searched Louise.

“Of course it’s still the plan,” Louise said.

Camille waved away a wisp of smoke above her. “I’ve been meaning to ask you though, how is your friend?”

Louise pulled out a kitchen chair and sat down. Peter had called her several times the previous evening. Every time she answered, he asked her to go over the accident again, explain it in more detail. With each telling, she felt herself spinning more lies, glossing over a new detail, minimizing things to make it more logical for him.

“He’s fine,” Louise said. “Completely fine. That’s why I’m here, isn’t it? Because he’s alive. Because I brought him back.”

“Of course,” Camille said. She walked to the table and patted her arm. “I promised I’d explain it. Would you still like me to show you?”

A trickle of anticipation ran down Louise’s spine. She had been so caught up in the fear of all that she had almost lost, that she hadn’t let herself think much of what she had gained . But at her grandmother’s words, she could feel an unspoken world blooming before her. All she had to do was enter it.

Camille went to the small bookshelf near the door to the back porch. The top was scattered with papers and sunglasses and cans of bug spray, and the shelves were full of books, mostly paperbacks.

Camille squatted and removed a thin leather journal from the bottom shelf. “I wanted to show you this first.” She carried it across the kitchen and sat down.

Louise examined the red leather cover. There was no inscription, but it looked decades old.

“This was my mother’s. Her mother, my grandmother, Agnes, started it in France. About halfway through, my mother added to it when she was working in Virginia as a home hospice nurse. And then I even have a few pages at the end, although nothing I wrote in here is as useful as what they wrote.” Camille’s expression softened. “I should keep it in a safe, or under glass. To protect it. But I also like it to be nearby.”

“What is it?” Louise asked, mesmerized by the tender way her grandmother traced the cover with her finger.

Carefully, Camille opened it. The yellowed paper inside held drawings mixed with words and phrases that appeared to be in French. She thumbed through a few pages, revealing additional illustrations, flowers and herbs and trees. There were even a few dried flowers pressed between the pages, so fragile they would blow away in the wind.

“A guide, of sorts. My grandmother and mother wrote about herbal remedies and plant medicine, a heritage that was passed down in writing and word of mouth from generations before them.”

She touched the faded ink on the page with her fingers.

“But they also wrote about the magic in our blood, what you just experienced with your friend, the gift of our touch. Healing.”

“What does that mean exactly?” Louise asked as she craned to get a better view of the journal. She recalled the power she had felt when she brought Peter back, the raw intensity of it.

Camille was thoughtful for a moment. “What my mother always taught me is that the foundation of our healing, the very essence of it, is taking away someone’s pain.” She looked at Louise intently. “You can do that, my dear. Put your hands on someone who is suffering. And make it go away. It’s a tremendous gift.”

“But what about the rest of it?” Louise asked, thinking of the way her mother had erased the bruise from her seat belt. Her mother hadn’t only healed the pain, but the injury itself. “What else can we do?”

“There are limitations to our touch, Louise. It’s not a magic wand. There are little things we can ‘cure’ or ‘fix,’ yes, small cuts or scrapes or burns. But cancer, heart disease, diabetes, strokes, those are beyond our abilities.” She paused. “I didn’t really understand this myself, when I was your age, but healing and fixing are not necessarily the same thing, not always. And much of what we do, our touch, has nothing to do with curing.”

She looked down at the journal, then up at Louise, her eyes full of both grief and pride. “I’m a hospice nurse. I’ve spent my career caring for people who are dying, and there are times medicine isn’t enough. When no amount of opiates will grant someone peace. And I’ve been able to help people who are suf fering, give them some small respite from the pain, some dignity in their final days. I know to you it could seem like it’s not enough. But…to them, it’s everything.”

Camille closed the journal. “Here I said I would show you, and all I’m doing is blathering on. Come with me out to the garden. That’s where we begin.”

* * *

The ground was warm as Louise stepped out from the screen porch. She was barefoot, the way she’d always been as a child here, when the land and the mountains and orchard had been Louise’s home.

She followed her grandmother out into the wide, sprawling garden behind the house. At one point, the area had been nothing more than a blank slate, mostly grass, home to the chickens they used to keep. But Helene had started a garden in one corner and Camille eventually took over. Between the two women, nearly every inch of soil had been cultivated, with a small, winding walking path that ran through all the color and greenery. Each pocket of the garden was full to the point of bursting, with containers and raised beds exploding in color, a high wire fence tangled with vines and weeds.

“What are all these?” Louise asked as she approached the bed where Camille had stopped.

“Lavender, bergamot, pokeweed, peppermint.” Camille leaned in toward a large, sprawling plant that was nearly her height, with huge heart-shaped green leaves and prickly pink flowers the size of grapes. She plucked off one of the flowers, and turned it in a slow circle.

Louise tried to focus on her grandmother’s words and the flowers in front of her, but she didn’t want to talk about plants. She wanted to know about healing. She wanted to know everything.

“Are there still other people like us?” she asked as Camille straightened up beside her on the garden path. “Have you ever met other healers?”

Camille nodded. “Yes, there are. And yes, I have. But there are fewer and fewer with every generation.”

“Why?”

Camille let the pink flower drop to the ground. “Smaller families. Not as many daughters to pass the genes on.”

Louise shivered. It was strange to hear something that seemed like a fantasy described in such practical terms, as though her grandmother was talking about eye color or any other hereditary trait.

“And some choose not to practice it,” Camille continued. “Pass it on. There’s less of a need for it now, of course. Communities have doctors and hospitals. It’s not like it used to be, when it was all midwives and healers, when these women were all that people had from birth to death.”

“But you chose to practice it?” Louise asked, turning to observe her grandmother.

“It never really felt like a choice for me. It was always who I was.” Her eyes were distant as she spoke, as though lost in the remembering.

Louise tried to make sense of it all, rearrange the parts of her past, all the way back to her earliest memories with her great-grandmother, Helene, who had been revered in Crozet. People would talk about her like she was a saint, the French nurse who used to run the old Winston orchard and spent her career seeing patients deep in the mountains and valley. She hadn’t simply been a nurse. She was also a healer.

Camille motioned for Louise to follow her toward the edge of the garden, where the land began to slope down to a creek at the base of the mountain.

“I haven’t gotten around to cleaning up over here yet,” Camille said as she took in the gray-and-brown plants that peeked out from the soil. She squatted and pointed to a shriveled, nearly black collection of stems. “This is a daylily. Has no medicinal use. I just think it’s pretty. It looks like this because of rust, a kind of fungus.”

Louise didn’t know why they were talking about plants again, but it did seem messier here than she remembered.

Camille’s eyes were intent. “I want you to try to heal this.”

“I’m sorry, what?”

“You heard me.” She gestured toward the garden bed. “Revive it. You asked me how it works. This is how you practice. It doesn’t work quite the same with a flower as a person. But it’s a good place to start. They’re living things too after all.”

Louise fought the instinct to argue that it was ridiculous. A small, stubborn part of her was still unwilling to submit to the new reality right in front of her. However, at her grandmother’s encouragement, she crouched beside her and reached out toward the daylily, let her hand brush its soft petals as a little bumblebee zoomed up from the ground.

Around them, the sounds of birds and insects deepened.

“I don’t feel anything,” she said.

“Close your eyes,” Camille requested, just as Louise started to draw her hand away. “Do it with intention. Picture it in your mind, not as it is now, but how it was, green and upright, the petals bright yellow.”

Louise did as her grandmother suggested. She knew, on a logical level, the ability was inside of her. She could still feel echoes of the electricity that surged through her body when she’d saved Peter’s life. She remembered how she had willed his heart to beat, begged him to come back to her.

A warm breeze tickled the back of her neck, and the noises of the garden came into focus again, the low vibration of hummingbirds at their feeders, the rustle of leaves as blue skink lizards darted out from rocks, the cries of birds as they swooped in and out of the rows of peach trees.

And then Louise felt it, a little heat inside of her skin, pull ing her toward the lily as though a tide toward the moon. She opened her eyes as it spread into her hand and flowed into the plant, all the places inside of it that weren’t dead, but simply silent.

The lily curled further toward the ground, as though stooped by a heavy rain, and then in one swift motion righted itself, stretching toward the sun as its leaves turned green, as the flower fell to the earth, replaced instantly by a delicate, new yellow bud as soft as a marshmallow. Faint lines of red spread along the edges of the bud.

Louise let go of the flower and lowered herself the rest of the way to the ground. Even after what had happened with Peter, even after everything her grandmother had explained to her, a part of her had still not been able to truly believe it, to accept this new, wilder world.

“That’s healing?” she asked, overwhelmed.

Camille knelt beside Louise and grazed the lily with her fingers. “It’s a small part of it. That energy you just felt, and heat. A flower requires much less from a healer than a person does. You could bring nearly any plant back, as long as there’s a bit of life left in it. A plant has a much fainter life force. It’s a living creature but it doesn’t have a soul, desires, wishes, fears. Same for animals, although they have a stronger life force than a flower of course. But with people, it’s different. We can’t simply cure someone if they are too sick or too hurt.”

Despite the awe Louise felt at seeing her ability in action, she sensed a tug of confusion, a contradiction between her grandmother’s words and what she had experienced. “But Peter. I fixed him. I brought him back. He was dead.”

Camille didn’t answer at first, her hand still caressing the lily.

“My mother told me stories. I knew it was possible, what you did, but it’s incredibly rare. It must have been years of pent-up abilities. It’s not something you could repeat.”

Camille finally looked at Louise, and her expression was seri ous. “You need to understand, despite what you did, that healing isn’t about cheating death. There’s a reason why healers are usually nurses and not doctors. Because the people who want to be doctors tend to be people who think that death is a failure. They spend their careers chasing it away.” A faint smile slipped onto her lips. “Nurses know better. We treat the whole person. In sickness. And in death.”

Before Louise could say anything else, a loud alarm went off on her grandmother’s phone. “I’m supposed to be at Sarah’s house. The home visit I mentioned.” Camille stood and wiped the dirt off her hands. “I hadn’t gotten around to telling you this, but since the last time you visited, I actually have… I retired. I was only part-time anyway the last few years with the hospice agency, barely worked enough hours for that. It was overdue really. Not many nurses doing bedside care in their seventies. I was ready. Now I have time for painting. It used to just be something I dabbled in from time to time, a mental break from hospice work, a place where I could always find some beauty and peace. And now…now I can do it every day.”

Louise thought of the dining room, the sudden decision to transform it into an art studio a few months earlier. How long had her grandmother waited to tell her she had retired?

“I’ve put it off for years.” She reached out a hand to Louise, who accepted it and climbed to her feet. “But it’s a good thing. I’m thrilled about it really.”

Her grandmother was rambling, and the lightness of her tone wasn’t enough to convince Louise she believed her own words. Nursing—and healing—had been the most essential part of her being, like something she would be practicing forever. Louise couldn’t imagine her grandmother existing without her life’s work.

“I was going to tell you both,” Camille said. “I just hadn’t gotten around to it. I’m still seeing a few of the people who were in my care, before I retired. Just as a favor to them and their families. Today is Sarah. You know her actually, I’m afraid to say. You remember Caroline Henley’s mother?”

Louise did have memories of Sarah. She was tall and muscular and tan and used to run races with Caroline and Louise down the hill to the creek, her arms strong and sure as she showed them how to catch tadpoles, her feet bare and muddy.

“She’s in hospice?” Louise asked, although she already knew the answer.

“Unfortunately. Colon cancer. She was diagnosed a few years ago, went into remission but then it came back. Everywhere.” She studied Louise. “I’m sorry. I didn’t really think about how hard it might be for you, to see someone you know in that state. I sometimes forget what I do isn’t normal for everyone.”

Louise wiped red clay dust from the back of her pants and looked toward the magnolia tree as a wind chime hanging from one of its dense branches chimed in the breeze.

For a moment, she saw herself at five years old, balancing on the largest branch that ran along the ground, watching her mother’s headlights light up the dusk as she arrived home from her long shift at the hospital in Charlottesville. Louise would race to her, jumping into her arms, inhaling the smell of hand sanitizer and hospital lotion. Her mother was always exhausted after work in the ICU, her hair messily piled into a bun, whatever makeup she had applied that morning worn off. But she was also content, her expression full of pride as she told Camille stories from her day. Louise had been certain she wanted to be just like her mother when she grew up, take care of people the way she cared for the animals at the orchard, the chickens and barn cats she pretended were her patients. But so much had changed. Louise had grown up, and her life had veered in a completely different direction.

“You don’t have to come with me,” Camille said gently. “It’s okay if you’ve changed your mind. You can wait here for me to come back. And then we can talk more about all of this here, spend more time in the garden.”

Louise brushed her hands off, letting a tiny cloud of clay disperse through the air. She couldn’t deny the tiny tug inside of her, the curiosity to see her grandmother work, to practice her healing abilities on a person.

“No, I’m ready. I want to go.”

* * *

Caroline’s father, Jake, answered the door in a baseball cap, flannel shirt, and work pants. He seemed shorter than Louise remembered, and thinner, his gaunt cheeks visible beneath his unruly, gray-flecked beard.

“You remember my granddaughter, Louise, don’t you?” Camille asked him. “She’s here visiting, and asked if she could come along, to say hi to Sarah. If that’s okay with you?”

Jake’s tired brown eyes were emotionless. “Fine,” he grunted. “Just make sure Sarah is okay with it.”

“Of course,” Camille replied as Jake stepped aside for them to enter.

When they reached the back of the house, Jake stopped at the doorway that led into the den, its ceiling framed by large oak beams. There was a low hum and rhythmic clicking from the IV pump set up next to a large hospital bed, as well as a faint hissing noise from the oxygen. The sharp, acrid scent of alcohol mixed with a cloying lavender from a diffuser on a bookcase in the corner.

Louise stayed in the doorway, but Camille walked to the bed and squirted hand sanitizer from a bottle on the plastic bedside table. “Morning, Sarah,” she said warmly.

There was a rustle of movement. “Hi, Camille.”

The voice from the bed was the same voice Louise remembered, only faded.

“How are things this morning?”

“Oh, can’t complain,” Sarah said. “Or I guess I can, technically.”

“How is your pain?” Camille asked with a glance up at the pump hanging on the IV pole.

“I’m doing okay.”

“I have to get to work,” Jake said, checking his watch. “The day nurse, Gena, can’t be here until ten. I usually go in later on Thursdays but there’s this meeting with the electrician.”

“I’ll stay until she gets here,” Camille said.

He leaned down and kissed Sarah. “I’ll call if I hear anything back, from Duke,” he said, gentler than he had been since they’d arrived.

After he left, Camille sat on the edge of the bed. “What’s at Duke?”

There was another rustle from the bed. “Oh, you know. Some trial or treatment that’s too expensive or too experimental or that will reject me outright because I don’t have the right genetic markers. He thinks it’s something promising. But he always does.”

“I can’t believe I forgot,” Camille said, her eyes bright as she motioned for Louise to come around the bed. “My granddaughter, Louise, is here. Is that okay with you?”

“Oh my God, little Wheezy,” Sarah said, and Louise could hear her shift her weight in the bed. “Oh please, yes, I’d love to see her, Camille.”

Louise made her way into the room and to the other side of the hospital bed.

“My goodness,” Sarah said as her chapped lips softened into a faint smile. “Is this really sweet little Louise?”

Louise tried to speak, to say hello, to do anything but stand there.

“Impossible, isn’t it?” Camille said, and Sarah nodded slowly, her eyes still on Louise.

“Hi, it’s nice to see you again.” The words hung in the air, meaningless and awful, but Sarah only smiled more.

“You too, honey,” she said, wincing as she pushed herself up in the bed. “You too.” She shook her head at Camille. “I can’t handle these little girls growing up into beautiful women. She’s supposed to be four years old and sitting at my kitchen counter eating a tuna fish sandwich.”

Louise felt a little of the tightness in her chest loosen at the memory.

“I completely agree,” Camille said.

Sarah looked back up at Louise. “How are things, hon? Graduation? Getting ready for college? Do you know where you’re going?”

“Things are good,” Louise said. “I’m going to NYU. I leave in a few days actually for their freshman summer program, for students who want to get a head start, get some course credit and settle in to the school early. I’ll be taking a Calculus II course, since I did AP calculus this year.”

Sarah beamed at her with a pride that made Louise feel strangely uncomfortable, as though it weren’t fully earned. “Wow, that’s incredible, Louise. Although you always were such a bright, curious kid.”

Camille went back around to the foot of the bed. “I’ll go get some towels and water. Be back in a few minutes.”

Sarah nodded and turned back to Louise. “How’s your mom doing?”

“She’s fine.” Louise’s gaze lingered on the clear tubing that ran out of the top of Sarah’s chest, the oxygen pressed into her nostrils. “She’s back home, in Richmond.”

“Is she still working in a hospital?”

“Oh, no. She’s not a nurse anymore. She’s a Realtor.”

Sarah’s eyes widened. “Bobbie is a Realtor?”

“She changed careers when we moved.”

“That’s surprising. Nursing seemed to always fit her so well.”

Louise’s mother had never explained the reason she left nursing. Louise only knew that for a month before she quit, her mother had been quiet and worried, her mood dark. And then one day she simply never went back. They moved to Richmond a few weeks later.

“I guess she just wanted something different,” Louise said, pushing back the memories of that time in her life, her mother adrift, Louise confused and lonely in a new city.

“Honey, do you mind handing me my water?”

Louise picked up the large plastic hospital pitcher.

“Thank you,” Sarah said as she put the straw to her dry lips and took several gulps. She started to cough and her face contorted with the movement, her body tensing as she squeezed her eyes shut. She gripped the bedside rail so tightly that her knuckles turned white, and Louise waited for it to end, for her to open her eyes, but she seemed trapped.

Without thinking, Louise set a hand on her back, letting it rest on the thin fabric of her T-shirt. She felt nothing at first, only the rigid muscles of Sarah’s back.

Louise watched the door, wishing her grandmother would come back, to help. She tried to remember her grandmother’s words: Do it with intention. She closed her eyes as Sarah let out a low moan. Louise tried to visualize Sarah’s pain melting away, but she felt only panic.

For an agonizing moment she was no longer in the room in Crozet but on the side of the road again, standing above Peter, willing his heart to beat—

“Breathe,” came a voice from far away.

Louise’s hand shook as she rested it on Sarah’s back.

Camille stood a few feet away, a plastic basin of water on one hip. She looked straight at Louise and repeated herself. “Breathe.”

As she exhaled again, Louise felt her body grow heavy, her weight sinking down toward Sarah as she pressed into her hand. She closed her eyes again, felt a familiar heat spread into her fingers, only this time it wasn’t a surge or jolt, like an electrical shock, but a slow warmth, like dipping beneath the surface of a hot bath.

It took Louise several moments to notice the silence of the room, the softening of Sarah’s body.

She opened her eyes. “I’m so sorry,” Sarah said, her voice hoarse. “Muscle spasm. From the cough.” She looked up at Camille. “I probably scared her to death.”

“She’s fine,” Camille said, her gaze moving past Sarah, finding Louise again. “Aren’t you, Louise?”

Louise’s hand on Sarah’s back was still heavy as the heat dissipated. “I…” She glanced from her grandmother back to Sarah.

Camille put the basin of soapy water on the bedside table. Beside it she set a stack of clean linens, sheets and towels and pillowcases, the smell of fabric softener wafting toward her.

Sarah leaned forward as Camille began to clamp and unhook the IV tubing. Camille helped lift her shirt over her head, covering her with a clean sheet as she moved the washcloth over her back in slow, smooth circles.

“It’s okay, Louise,” Sarah said. “You can help. I stopped being shy about all of this a long time ago. And who knows, maybe your grandmother will convince you to go into nursing, carry on the family legacy.”

“She’s kidding, you know,” Camille said gently as Louise hesitated, unsure of how to reply. “But you can still help me. If you’d like.”

For a few minutes, Louise only watched her grandmother work. Each time she touched Sarah, Louise could sense some of the tension leave her body. After a little while, Sarah’s breathing turned to snores.

“Would you like to try it again?” Camille asked.

Louise felt herself nod. Easing Sarah’s pain was a sensation unlike any she had felt before. Terrifying. But also in a strange way, like a release. As though her body had been waiting eighteen years to serve its purpose.

Camille dropped her washcloth into the basin, took Louise’s hands, and guided them to Sarah’s back. Her skin was cool, the bones beneath palpable.

“Go on,” Camille said in a quiet voice.

Louise closed her eyes as a gentle flush once again settled into her palms like the first pale streaks of morning sun. Her hands moved toward Sarah’s pain as though controlled by an invisible magnet.

And with every flicker of heat across her skin, Louise understood just how much of herself had been hidden, lying beneath the surface like a dormant spring.