Chapter 33 Isobel
Isobel
The hospital waiting area was a quiet place, with nowhere near enough distractions.
Every breath stung Isobel’s nose with the sharp scent of hand sanitizer.
She hung on to the steady sound of someone’s heart monitor beeping down the hall as she bounced her knee, glancing up from her shoes to where the Dawson family was gathered, waiting for Avi to finish giving Dane his official statement.
Isobel couldn’t stop seeing Avi’s face. Whenever she closed her eyes, she saw the blood smeared down his cheek and pictured the flowers growing out of his empty eye socket as though he were already gone and ready for rotting, a corpse not yet decomposed.
But he wasn’t a corpse. Whatever had happened up that trail, Avi had survived to tell it. Any minute, Dane would walk out of Avi’s hospital room with answers that would finally calm her beating heart.
Isobel unscrewed the cap of the bottle between her knees and sucked down the last quarter cup until the plastic crackled.
Her hangover migraine had thankfully downshifted into a dull throbbing behind her eyes.
She was angry at herself for slipping at all.
Shame never did her any good—she knew that—but it was hard to resist giving in to its pull.
She would focus on what she could control. Tomorrow, she would attend the hospital’s biweekly AA meeting. That was a step she could manage.
Her eyes lifted to the Dawson family again. Even June had come to support Priya, though June tellingly hadn’t said a word to Isobel all night.
As though drawn by a magnet, her former best friend lifted her gaze from where Esther scribbled in a unicorn coloring book on the floor. June’s expression stilled when it met Isobel’s, instantly becoming more guarded.
For a moment, the pair of them simply stared at each other. Years ago, they would have been pressed tight, as close to sisters as friends could get. Neither would have let the other wait in a hospital room alone.
The hollow in Isobel’s chest grew a little wider.
Across the hall, Avi’s door clicked open, and Dane stepped out. The family leapt into motion, crossing the hall to replace him at Avi’s side, a cluster of Mylar balloons trailing behind them.
Esther abandoned her crayons on the floor, leaving June to sweep them back into their canvas pouch while her daughter rushed to her dad.
Dane picked Esther up and squeezed her tight, landing a kiss on her stickered cheek.
“You good to keep her a little longer?” he asked June, who nodded, glancing back to where Isobel sat frozen.
“Yeah, I got her.”
When the door closed behind the last of the Dawson clan, Dane sank hard into a chair next to Isobel, rubbing his face in his hands. He wore exhaustion like a coat.
“What did Avi say?” Isobel hadn’t meant to jump on the question so fast, but she was practically vibrating with anxiety, the nerves running a current of stress down every one of her limbs. “Did he know where Lenny was going?”
He shook his head, not even bothering to look up. “They were following her trail,” he muttered.
The trail of wildflowers.
“What happened?” Isobel pressed, laying a hand to the center of Dane’s back as she forced her words to slow, to meet him where he was. Dane was grieving too, his brother’s involvement its own kind of loss.
“They were attacked by something inhuman,” he said slowly.
A chill skated down Isobel’s spine. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t know.” Dane’s lungs expanded beneath her touch as he turned his face. “Avi said it looked like a woman, but… wrong.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Don’t you?”
Something in his lowered tone made the hairs on Isobel’s arms stand up.
“Do you remember the fight Lenny and I got into before the wedding?” A new weariness fell over Dane as the words rolled out.
“After I learned what he did, or tried to do, to your sister, I reported him to the sheriff. Lenny got so angry with me. We fought, and I… I told him not to come to the wedding.”
Isobel had forgotten about the tension between the two brothers in the days leading up to Dane’s wedding.
“When I saw Lenny go into the chapel that night, I followed him. I wanted to believe he wouldn’t hurt her.”
“I know,” Isobel said softly.
Dane squeezed his eyes shut and pressed his thumbs to his eyelids in clear frustration. “I can still see her. So wild. Radiant and terrible… almost inhuman, the way she wielded the vines.”
Isobel’s heart tripped a beat, and she silently willed him to stop. Don’t say it.
“What am I supposed to think, Isobel? Avi goes looking for Eva, and comes back with an unbelievable story and wounds no one in this damn hospital can explain!”
Isobel felt like a live wire, her panic sparking. “It wasn’t her.”
Dane searched her face with hungry eyes. “Tell me I’m crazy, then,” he roughed out. “Tell me there isn’t a glaring common thread in these stories.” He glanced to the nurses’ station and lowered his voice. “Tell me the missing puzzle piece isn’t your sister.”
Alarm beat a drum in her chest. He couldn’t know this. She’d spent too many years covering Eva’s tracks, afraid of what might happen if Dane Walker knew the truth about what had happened to him that night.
“You can’t even say it,” he breathed out.
“You’re wrong.”
“Am I?” Dane countered, growing more agitated.
“Isobel, I woke up in this very hospital with a scar on my chest. No wound! I know you were there, and I know it was traumatic for you too. That’s why I’ve let you dodge my questions.
I thought it was too painful. I didn’t want to make you relive it, because I love—” He broke off, but Isobel heard what he’d left unspoken.
I love you.
She swallowed hard. “You don’t understand.”
“Then help me understand!”
He looked worn and weathered by the weight of it all, and Isobel wanted to tell him, she did, but she was so afraid.
If she told him the truth, it would be the end of them.
He wouldn’t forgive what she’d kept hidden all these years.
She did love Dane Walker, but that love had been swallowed up time and time again by her choice to love Eva more, and to keep her secret.
“Don’t I deserve to know the truth?” he asked her.
Before she could answer, a nurse wearing mint-green scrubs strode into the waiting area, lifting her gaze from her clipboard through a pair of tortoiseshell glasses. “Izzy Moreau?” she called out.
“Isobel,” Dane quietly corrected.
“That’s me.” Isobel popped to her feet, her thoughts spinning. To her surprise, Dane stayed right at her side, jaw set in a stubborn scowl, his eyes pure steel.
“I’m coming with you.”
After a moment, she gave him a sharp nod, and the two of them stepped into her father’s room.
Dr. Rosen swiveled to face them. The small, graying woman had a way of smiling with her eyes.
She was the only doctor Isobel trusted with her father’s care.
Though many specialists had taken an interest in her father’s sapling over the years, only Dr. Rosen seemed to care about his life outside the hospital.
“Take a seat,” she chirped. “I have good news.”
The words took a minute to sink in as Isobel plopped into the chair nearest her father’s hospital bed. Confusion stirred inside her. “Good news?” That certainly wasn’t what she’d expected.
The doctor nodded and looked at Dad.
“I get to go home,” he said, visibly stunned.
Isobel shook herself. “Wait, what?”
“Dr. Rosen says I am the picture of health.”
The doctor clucked her tongue and shook her finger at him.
“Don’t twist my words, Jack.” She turned to Isobel.
“I was just in the middle of telling your father that he’s low enough on iron that I’d like to get him an infusion before he leaves and keep an eye on his blood work over the coming months. ”
Isobel blinked. “Is that… all?”
Her father reached to take her hand in his much larger one, squeezing slightly. The dry texture of his calluses was a familiar comfort to her, each rough place hardened into his skin by meaningful labor.
“What about the aspen?” Isobel’s gaze landed on the stump still protruding from his sternum. Most of the branches were gone, but the base was still lodged inside him. They couldn’t remove that without disrupting the complex network of roots and viscera in his chest cavity.
“It’s remarkable,” Dr. Rosen said. “I wouldn’t have dared to follow such an aggressive course of treatment, snapping the branches off like that. The way the roots are webbed so near your heart and lungs, I would have thought such a shock too great a risk.”
Dane had chosen a place by the door and stood with his arms crossed. “But?” he asked when Dr. Rosen paused.
“Given the circumstances, I’m very pleased with how well his body is adjusting to a new normal,” Dr. Rosen said.
“We knew that without intervention, the roots would reach his heart eventually, and that’s still a possibility, so I want you in here every week, Jack.
” She turned a stern gaze on him. “No skipping appointments, you hear?”
Her father nodded. “All right.”
“I’d also like to set up a meeting with our new occupational therapist to help you adjust to any changes.”
“But he’s going to be okay?” Isobel cut in, a wash of disbelief surging through her.
Dr. Rosen’s crow’s feet crinkled in a kindly smile. “He’s going to be different from before. But different can be good. You’re very lucky. Whatever halted the sapling’s growth may have just saved your life.”
Saved his life?
Isobel’s body warmed in a flash of understanding, and she was suddenly glad to be sitting as a wave of dizziness passed over her.
Arthur had done this.
“Dr. Rosen, may we have a moment?” Dane asked. Despite the calm words, Isobel sensed the urgent current running beneath them. And just like that, all the unease she’d felt before they stepped into the room rushed back in.
“Of course.”
The moment the doctor exited the room, Dane moved toward the hospital bed. “Jack,” he said, and Isobel, sensing what was coming, did the only thing she could think of.
“Dane, wait.” Her voice broke as she looked between the two men who meant the most to her, both of them preserved by a miracle. Both of them forever changed.
Dane was right.
Isobel met her father’s gaze. They’d spent so long not talking about this, keeping their promise to conceal the truth so far that it had gone unacknowledged even between the two of them, for years. “He deserves to know,” she said softly.
For a long moment, Dad didn’t say anything, the beeping on his monitor the only sound in the room.
Then he turned to where the sheriff was watching the two of them with the wariness of a cornered animal.
“The tea I gave you to ease your chest pain,” he murmured. “I never told you where it came from.”
Isobel flashed to the jar of blue petals she’d found in the glove box of Dane’s patrol car.
The blue tea had become a permanent fixture in her surroundings over the years, a jar always set in a place of honor in their pantry.
How many times had she curled up beside her father and sister and a cup of that very tea while Dad regaled them with some new and tragic folktale about a honeyman whose venture into a magical world always seemed to end in tragedy?
“We call them Little Lotties. They only grow in the meadow I spoke of earlier.”
Dane let out a breath and put a hand flat on the rolling tray beside the bed. “What does that have to do with me?”
Everything.
“When dried, they are not so different from any other herbal remedy, if a bit more impactful. But concentrated into honey, they give a person power over life itself.”
Isobel cleared her throat. “There was an accident that night in the chapel,” she said. “When you went in after your brother, you tried to break up a fight between him and Arthur. And you were…” She trailed off, unable to even say it.
“Hurt?” Dane finished.
“Killed,” her father corrected.
Dane’s attention snapped back to him, all the blood draining from his face. “What?”
“I’d only ever used the life-giving power for home remedies.
To grow medicinal plants. To cultivate my garden.
To expand the fields behind our house. There was always a cost, but I didn’t mind the changes, at first.” Dad set a hand to the base of the trunk in his chest. “Nature makes no distinction between flesh and earth. The ground is simply another skin we carve into, our bodies a garden to sow and harvest from.”
The words sent a chill down Isobel’s spine.
“I didn’t know if it would work,” Dad said more softly. “But I… I had to try. If I didn’t”—his voice cracked, thick with emotion—“then my daughter would’ve been a killer.”
Dane’s knuckles were white. “So, what? You gave me some of that… honey?”
Her father shook his head. “I didn’t have any on me,” he admitted. “All I had was the spoonful of honey from my tea that morning still running in my veins. And it was enough.”
“Enough…?” Dane whispered, his throat bobbing.
“To bring you back,” Isobel said.
She’d never forget that night for as long as she lived. It wasn’t just the horror of it all. She’d been holding her dead friend, anguishing, when her father knelt and placed his hands on the wound.
When Dane had gasped awake, his cheeks flushing with new life, something in her had changed too. His rebirth had re-curved the path of her life forever.
“And…” Dane struggled through the question. “Your tree?”
“The aspen started growing that very night. A tithe, I’d guess, to balance what I’d done. I was lucky it didn’t kill me,” he said with a laugh. But Isobel didn’t feel like laughing.
A knock sounded on the door, and a nurse poked her head in. “Sheriff?”
“What is it?” Dane clipped. Then he caught himself and stood. “Forgive me. I’m… very tired.”
“No problem,” the nurse deadpanned in a tone that suggested she was used to people’s bad attitudes.
Dane cleared his throat. “What’s going on?” he asked, moving on instinct to straighten a tie that wasn’t there.
The nurse’s gaze flicked from him to Isobel and her father. “Emergency Services just contacted us about a satellite phone call from some injured hikers in the mountains,” she said. “They need to talk to Jack Moreau.”