Chapter 19
Eliza
Jasper was just carrying in the last of the plants for the bed I was finishing in the conservatory.
He’d been in the conservatory when I’d arrived this morning and offered to help.
I was nervous about being so close to him again, but I wasn’t going to turn down the opportunity to find out more about what might have happened last night.
My phone pinged in my pocket. I saw the text from my mother, and my face fell. I had been doing such a magical job of tucking my problems away and avoiding them. I knew it couldn’t go on forever, but it had been such a freeing change.
I cleared the emotion from my throat. “Sorry, it’s my mom.
” I tucked the phone back inside the pocket of my gray hoodie.
“She’s having another tantrum.” It was uncanny the ability she had to tether and drown my spirits with a simple call or text.
Jasper had taken the weight of a cement block from my shoulders, and she had just tied it to my ankles.
No one should be capable of having such command over another’s feelings. Sometimes, it felt like murder.
“Is everything okay?” Jasper looked concerned.
“She actually did it. I didn’t think she really would, but I obviously should have known better.
She got rid of all my things and told her friend, my fucking landlord, to re-rent the apartment.
” Needing anything to distract me, I pulled the hair tie out of my ponytail and ran my fingers through my dirty, tangled hair before piling it back on top of my head in a messy bun.
The familiar sting of acid swirled in my stomach.
I needed an antacid. I needed to get this conservatory finished and find a way to fucking help Hester and get back before my mother did any more fucking damage.
“She got rid of your apartment?” he said, his eyebrows lifting in shock.
“Yeah,” I snapped, resting my hands on my head.
I should have let her in the gates when she came the last time.
I had never pushed back, ever, and now she was retaliating.
I didn’t want any of this. I already knew she was stronger than me; there was no competition.
“It will be fine; one of my sort of friends at work has a spare room. I’ll text them to see if I can stay there for a bit; he always tries to get me to stay anyway when I watch his pets.
I’ll figure out the rest later. I literally don’t have time to worry about this now.
If I don’t get these plants propagated soon, I will genuinely not have a job to go back to and won’t have to worry about finding a new apartment because I’ll be left with nothing and forced to move back in with my parents, which is exactly what she wants.
” A migraine was threatening to come on, which would definitely not help this situation.
I shot off a cursory text message to my friend.
The phone rang seconds later.
With a wave of his hand telling me to take the call, Jasper turned and began to wander aimlessly around the garden.
I picked up the call. “Hi, did you get the pictures of the Black Dahlia pinnata?”
Nick’s voice came over the line. “I did, but who cares about those when you get to look at black hellebores? Are you a wizard? How is it blooming right now?”
“I know, right? It’s definitely not me. It’s wild.
None of the plants I bring into the conservatory act like they’re supposed to,” I said with a forced chuckle.
He had no idea; sometimes, I convinced myself that the plants inside the conservatory were all sentient.
It always felt like they were watching me, and most of the time, I didn’t mind—even kind of enjoyed the company.
But every now and again, they would move around—and not just in the nursery pots but also in the beds.
Stupid, I knew, and more than likely, I was just being forgetful about where I planted or set them, but after everything I’d seen the locket do and just seeing Hester in general, it didn’t feel all that far-fetched to think that the plants in the conservatory were…
different. I turned to look at the stunning deep purple blooms of the black hellebores.
“Hey, do you still have that spare room available? I had…an issue, and in a month, I’ll need somewhere to stay for a few weeks while I look for an apartment.
I don’t have time to look before the party; you saw how fast the corpse flower is progressing.
Please don’t be afraid to say no. I know it’s an awful lot to ask. ”
“Of course!” Nick shrieked excitedly. “It won’t bother you if the cats sleep in your room, right? Tobias and I just got another one. Mrs. Shushu is the reason I had to move all of my aglonemia to the office; she won’t stop eating them. Alas, that’s the sacrifice a good mother has to make.”
“No, I’ll be fine,” I said. “I’ll call you later to work out details, but it won’t be until the party. I’ll be leaving right after.” My migraine worsened at the thought.
“Okay, sounds good. I can’t wait to tell Tobias someone will get to sleep in the room he redecorated. Chat soon, Eliza.”
“Bye, Nick. I’ll call you later.” That wasn’t so bad. Maybe things really would be okay. There were worse things in the world than moving in with your super-nice coworker and his interior designer husband in their beautiful house, where they collected ragdoll cats like Pokémon.
What if I didn’t tell Mom where I was going? Kept some space. It sounded great, but it wouldn’t last long before she found me. In the end, I was only making things worse for myself by making her mad.
“Nick?” Jasper appeared behind me. “You’re going to move in with a man?” The darkness that he’d shown last night simmered in his eyes but remained leashed.
I almost snorted in his face, hearing the clear, uncamouflaged jealousy in his possessive tone. I would have laughed if it had not been so disarmingly attractive to my ego.
“And?” For all intents and purposes, I most definitely would not be letting him in on the fact that Nick was very much not interested in me and my lady bits to the delight of his husband.
“You sleeping with him?” His jaw hardened, and I found myself too hyperfocused on the flutter of his masseter muscle to be offended by his question.
Internally, I was giggling and kicking my feet.
I liked that he cared about me enough to get jealous.
It made me feel a whole lot less dumb for caring about him when I shouldn’t.
But externally, I scoffed loudly. “You know, not every woman that lives with a man is fucking them,” I scolded, making sure my face was halfway down a terracotta pot before I let myself smile. “Look at you and Leah or you and me.”
“I don’t think it’s a good idea,” he stated in the same way one might reference owning a tiger.
I squinted at him, actually getting a little annoyed. “Who are you, my mother?”
He had the decency to flinch. “Don’t leave after the party.
You can stay at the manor as long as you want, until you find a place.
Behind the gate, away from everyone.” A surprising tenderness in his voice struck me right in the chest. Whether he would ever admit it or not, he was actually becoming a real friend.
A teasing, infuriating, scary, unpredictable friend, but a friend was a friend.
I stood up and looked at him, taking a hold of all the odd sweetness that seemed to emanate from him. “I can’t.”
“Why not? I want you to stay,” he said sharply.
I looked down, caught completely off guard by his vulnerability.
There was an edge to his voice that told me this wasn’t the first time he’d thought about me leaving.
He could hide behind the filthy comments, but the truth was he cared.
A feeling that lodged in my ribs. “I can’t drive four hours to and from Pinehurst every day.
” That was the least of the reasons why I couldn’t stay.
Dreams are only coveted because you have to face reality for a while to truly appreciate them. I had to wake up eventually.
He stared, reluctantly admitting that it wouldn’t make any sense.
His phone rang loudly, and his eyes fell closed as he pulled it out with a burdened sigh.
“I’m sorry, I have to take this. It’s the estate lawyer,” he said before he walked toward the door to the house. “Yeah?” he snapped into the device.
I silently waved a weak goodbye and turned back to my task of potting a few shadow ferns.
I heard the door open.
“Eliza,” Jasper called out.
I whipped around to see him holding the door open with the phone to his chest as he watched me with an unusual look in his eye.
“Have dinner with me tomorrow night. If you’re interested in trying more wine, I brought back a few from the vineyard I thought you might like. We could set up a tasting in the wine cellar.”
Butterflies tried to escape the confines of my stomach. “Okay, that sounds fun.”
A devilishly charming smile flashed before dropping back into a stern line as he returned the phone to his ear and left the conservatory.
I shouldn’t have dinner with him. I didn’t have any extra time, but the garden was only half my stress. I still needed to find a way to help Hester before I left, and I was completely at a loss on what to do. Maybe I should tell Jasper about Hester. Maybe he would know how to help her.
I turned away from the closed door and stared at the soil in front of me when I got an urge to check the locket. Wondering if it was still empty, I pulled it out of my pocket. I had stopped wearing it when Hester began getting angry—in fear that she would do something scary like choke me with it.
At first glance, I thought it was empty, as it had been for days, but to my surprise, a small dark-green stem had formed and begun to grow now that there was room for it to do so.
My mouth fell open in wonder as I watched the small bud of what looked like a rose the same color red as Hester’s gown form.
My face scrunched as the deep-red bloom continued to grow and grow until it was ready to unfurl.
“You hated roses,” I said softly to Hester’s locket as I watched the velvet leaves burst open.
The sweet herbaceous scent of the fresh rose lingered before the full-bodied floral scent suddenly overpowered my senses, and all I could smell was the rose.
I leaned down and pressed my nose against the flower without a second thought—unlike Hester, roses were one of my favorite flowers.
As fast as a flash of lightning, its thorned leaf petiole struck out as if it were slapping me, puncturing my lip with its barb.
I gasped, dropping the locket and the rose to the ground.
I watched in horror as the small rose used its two side branches as if they were arms to push itself out of the locket and burrow its loose white roots into a crack in the pavers. To anyone else, it would have looked as if it a rogue rose had grown up from the floor of the conservatory.
I pulled my hand away from my lip, a smear of blood on it.
Fear flooded me, as it had already begun to burn and swell.
With a weary hand, I reached over and picked up the empty locket, avoiding the small rose that now was indistinguishable from a normal rose, and let out a string of curse words.
What the fuck was that all about? What was I supposed to do with the devil rose now?
The thought occurred to me that Hester may have given up on trying to communicate with me and was just… well, haunting me now.
With a heavy sigh, I left the conservatory to get my migraine medicine and some ice for my lip.