Chapter 23
SIX MONTHS BEFORE
The room is warm.
I am in our bed. My bed. Nicholas’s bed.
The scent of fresh roses fills my nose as I open my eyes and stare up at the familiar ceiling above me.
I have studied every crack and watermark through the hours lying too long and too still in this bed.
The curtains are drawn against the afternoon light, which means Agnes has been in and decided I needed sleep more than sun—which means it has been a bad day.
By now, I have lost count of how many bad days there have been.
I count the cracks in the ceiling plaster again. Seven.
The cough, when it comes, arrives as it always does, gathering in my chest, rising up through my lungs, entirely indifferent to whether I am ready for it. I press the handkerchief to my mouth and breathe through it until the spasm passes, then lower the cloth and look at what it has collected.
Crimson blood stains the white fabric.
More than yesterday.
I fold it and set it on the nightstand face-down so Agnes will not have to see when she comes in.
I am dying.
Nicholas refuses to believe the truth, but I see it in his face each time he listens to my lungs. He manages the devastation carefully around me, but I catch it sometimes when he looks at me with that expression that already contains grief.
The consumption is ravaging my lungs, starving my body of oxygen. Each time I breathe, I feel it burning through the tissue, hot and searing.
There is only one way to save me and he refuses to acknowledge it.
I push myself upright, ignoring the protest of my lungs, and reach for the journal on my nightstand. I have run the calculations when Nicholas is asleep or away in the greenhouse, desperately trying to find a cure when only one exists.
I have read my own notes so many times that pages fall open without searching.
The diagram I drew weeks ago looks back at me.
The body rendered in perfect detail, her throat opened and labeled, the Verdant Vespera vine threaded through with an exactness that required me to study my own anatomy in the mirror while I drew it.
The woman in the diagram is me.
Nicholas will refuse. He has done so already a dozen times.
He refuses because he loves me, because he is afraid. He refuses because Hawthorne’s episodes still have no explanation, because the vine’s behavior is volatile and the research is not complete—and threading it through a living human body is theoretical rather than tested.
He will refuse because he cannot be the one to hold the scalpel to my throat.
He gives me these answers every time I ask.
I close the journal and sit with it in my lap.
Nicholas says he will find another way.
There is no other way. I have researched my condition, read every medical paper and sat with the evidence until it was too dark to read by.
There is no other way.
Nicholas knows this.
I need the vine.
I know that if I plead, Nicholas will relent.
But I also know that he will never forgive himself if it does not work and it is his hand that takes my life.
So I will not ask again.
I set the journal on the table and swing my legs over the edge of the bed, sitting with my feet dangling until the dizziness passes.
I have known for some time what I must do.
I do not want to die.
I do not want to leave Nicholas to grieve me.
I want more years in this house with the man I love and the work I have spent my entire life building. I want to watch Hawthorne move through the garden at dusk, tending his beautiful flowers, and I want to sip tea while Agnes hums in the kitchen.
I want decades more of it all.
And I am willing to do something terrible to have it.
Nicholas falls asleep easily, unaware that I am awake, that I felt his warm lips press into my hair before he laid down. I lie beside him and listen to his breathing, and I watch the cracks in the ceiling, counting them over and over until I reach one hundred.
I slide from the bed, suppressing the cough that threatens to wake him, and retrieve my journal, clutching it to my chest.
I watch him for a moment longer as I stand in the threshold, just in case.
Just in case I do not come back, his face is what I hope to see when death takes me.
The house is cold and silent as I move through it, my steps familiar even in the dark. I have walked these halls so many times that I know which floorboards to avoid and which will keep my secrets.
I move down the stairs and through the corridors that lead out into the garden.
The small greenhouse Nicholas never tends to anymore waits in the distance. The gentle green-gold light pulses through the grime on the window panes, beckoning me forward.
Inside, the vines wait for me with the beautiful glow I have spent the last year studying and have come to love.
I run my fingers over it and it seems, impossibly, to reach back—the tendrils drift upward with a responsiveness I have catalogued and re-cataloged a dozen times without ever truly being able to explain to my own satisfaction.
I reach to touch the small luminescent flowers that are always present in the cemetery, wrapped around the vine like two small lovers clinging to one another.
They are warm against my fingers, pulsing with a light that is softer and yellower than the Verdant Vespera’s harsh green.
I have been studying them separately for months—they seem to moderate the vine’s growth rate and suppress its invasive root, almost as if it soothes it into dormancy.
I open my journal and read through the process.
Flowers may complicate integration and introduce unpredictable variables into the grafting process. Remove before the procedure.
For a moment I stare down at the two specimens, hesitating to separate them.
I untwine them carefully and set the last of the flowers on the bench. I look at them, lined up, their warm glow fading as the seconds tick by.
Then I sweep them into the waste bin.
A strange sadness moves through me, a grief so sourceless and sudden that it stops me, my hand poised over the bin as I frown, puzzled by the emotion.
I straighten, pushing it away as I turn my attention back to the vine, reaching for a scalpel.
The slit along the vine's length goes cleanly, the small blade parting the tissue in a perfect thin line. The sap beads along the cut, luminous and warm and viscous just as I have noted in every extraction—alive in a way that no inorganic compound has any right to be.
I prepare a clean, sanitized scalpel.
I prep the needle and thread.
I stand there with the scalpel in my hand. The greenhouse is very quiet.
I think of Nicholas’s warm kiss.
I think of Hawthorne bringing me roses from the garden.
I think of Agnes’s rosy cheeks and dimpled smile.
I think of decades more with the three of them.
I lift the scalpel to my throat and my hands are perfectly steady, because the decision is already made, because decisions made with determination carry their own strange and terrible calm, because I am a botanist and a researcher and a woman who loves her life and intends to keep it.
I make the incision, slitting my skin from one side of my neck to the other.
The pain is real and immediate, and though I had accounted for it in my calculations, I had not accounted for it sufficiently.
Pain experienced is different from pain anticipated, and the body has its own response to being opened that no calculation entirely captures.
I breathe through it and reach for the vine with my free hand, knowing that once this is over, all the pain will go away.
The vine threads into the incision with an eagerness that would have alarmed me in any other context.
It knows the warmth of living tissue, has been reaching toward it since I first found it in the cemetery—and now, given entry, it advances with the hunger of something that has been waiting for exactly this.
I guide it, my hands slipping with blood and sap, the light of the vine painting everything green-gold as it finds its way into the structures I have drawn so many times on paper.
It hurts.
The tendrils leech to every muscle, every artery, pulling and sucking as it slides down my throat and up into my brain.
I press forward. I thread and graft and push and hold, my hands working with a sureness that I am grateful for because I do not know how much longer I will be able to hold them steady.
But now I must close the opening.
This is where the calculation had the widest margin—the window between the vine being sufficiently integrated to hold and the blood loss reaching the point where I can no longer perform the suturing.
I had estimated it, and sitting here now with blood running freely into the collar of my nightgown and my vision beginning to gray at the edges, I understand that I had estimated it incorrectly.
My hands are covered in blood and sap, slick and sticky.
The thread keeps sliding, the needle difficult to grip, my fingers responding with a delay that tells me something about blood pressure and oxygen that I would find clinically interesting under other circumstances.
I manage two sutures. Then three. The wound is holding but I am not, my body doing what bodies do when they have been opened and have lost more blood than they can comfortably spare.
I need help.
The thought arrives very simply, stripped of everything except its own plain truth. I need help and I am in the greenhouse and the greenhouse door is locked—I locked it. I locked it to prevent Nicholas from following me if he woke.
I reach the door.
The handle is cold and my hands are wet and the handle will not turn, the blood giving no purchase.
My fingers keep sliding off the iron again and again while I try to make sufficient contact to work the latch.
I press my palm flat against the door instead and push with my shoulder, as though the door might simply yield to pressure if the handle will not cooperate, but the door does not budge.
I scratch at the wood.
My fingers find the surface and they press and they drag, the nails catching in the grain, and I call for him in a voice that has gone wet and thin and strange.
“Nicholas, help me! I cannot get out!”
The vine is moving in my throat. I can feel it, the roots extending through tissue and pressing against structures that had not been consulted about any of this.
My throat feels full. My lungs feel wrong.
I cannot breathe. The green-gold light pulses in front of my face, cast by the vine now living inside me, and I think distantly that I should note this in the journal—the internal bioluminescence, the subjective experience of the sap beginning to circulate, the pain shifting from sharp to something more diffuse and spreading.
I am going to write it all down.
I am going to write it all down when Nicholas opens the door.
He will be angry. He will be so angry, and so frightened, and I am going to let him be both of those things because I am going to be alive to receive it and that is the entire point.
I scratch at the door.
“Nicholas!”
The light goes green and then it goes dark and the floor comes up to meet me and the vine keeps growing, claiming its new territory with a hunger and rage so profound that it seeps through my veins.
I hear a voice. It is quiet and full of cold, seething anger. It is inside my head.
I will revenge my injuries. If I cannot have my love, nor shall you.
My gaze tunnels on the bin, the bin I swept the vine’s companion flower into, and I realize too late that I have made a terrible mistake by separating them.
When I open my eyes, Nicholas is there.
I am on the worktable and his hands are warm and calm and sure of themselves as he threads the needle back and forth across my throat, his face bent close, his jaw set with a concentration that is holding grief at arm's length through sheer discipline.
He is so handsome.
He is so brilliant.
He will save me.
I need to tell him about the flower.
The voice in the back of my mind hums with a sudden desperate approval as I part my lips to tell him the vine must stay with the flower.
The vine needs its flower. They are lovers. Two parts of a whole.
The flower soothes the monster. The monster cannot live without its flower.
I know these things now because the monster is inside of me.
It is in pain.
It is angry.
It will destroy everything in its path, including me, if it does not get its companion back.
“The flower,” I say, my voice a strangled whisper.
Nicholas's hands still. He looks down at me, ties off the thick thread with fingers that tremble just slightly, and cups my face in bloody hands. His face comes undone entirely now that the concentration holding it has been released.
But he did not hear the words.
Perhaps I did not actually say them.
There are tears in his amber eyes. I can see them as he leans close, his lips warm and desperate as they find mine.
“Shhhhh," he breathes. "It is alright, my love. I am here.”
But I am already leaving.
Because I did not tell him about the flower soon enough. I did not try hard enough. It is too late. He has already closed the wound and the monster inside me has burrowed into my brain. It is enraged. It is sad.
And now it will have its revenge.
I do not know where I am.
I do not know who I am.
I do not know who this man is with his lips pressed to mine.
I am not me anymore.
I am the monster I created.