Epilogue
TWO MONTHS LATER…
The garden had never looked more beautiful.
Summer had arrived with a vengeance, transforming the bare branches and rain-softened soil into an explosion of color and life.
Roses bloomed in shades of crimson, gold, and white, their petals opening beneath the sun with shameless abundance.
Wisteria draped over the arbor in cascades of purple, heavy with fragrance, while bees moved drunkenly from flower to flower, intoxicated by the very excess.
I knelt beside the botanical riot with my hands buried in rich soil, pruning dead growth from the rose bushes.
There was satisfaction in the work—a quiet, steady pleasure in cutting away what had withered so something healthier might bloom in its place. Once, such a thought would have invited some grotesque observation from the dark corner of my mind.
Now there was only silence.
The vine inside me had its companion.
Agnes came up the stone path carrying a tray of tea and tiny sandwiches, the china clinking with every careful step. She walked more slowly these days, or perhaps I had only become more aware of how much she held.
Agnes Bramblewick carried all of us in one way or another, with flour on her sleeves, worry in her eyes, and a will strong enough to drag the dead back across the threshold when science and love had both failed to make themselves useful.
I sat back on my heels and shaded my eyes from the sun with one hand.
She smiled when our gazes met, her cheeks already flushed from the warmth.
We had become quite the team, the two of us. The woman who had slaughtered everyone she loved, and the woman who had loved all of us too much to let us go.
“Dr. Ambrose says you have been in the sun too long without nourishment,” she said, tsking as she bent to place the tray on a small table beside the bench. “And I will not be fixing you up again if you collapse. The lot of you will be carted to the cemetery next time.”
I laughed softly and pushed myself to my feet, brushing soil from my palms. “I suppose I cannot blame you. It must have been rather stressful for your nerves.”
Agnes huffed, waving one hand as though batting away a gnat. “Stressful for my nerves, indeed. You were out of your mind, he was bleeding, Hawthorne was half-severed from himself, and there I was with three impossible creatures, one set of hands, and no one sensible to assist me.”
“You did beautifully.”
“I did adequately,” she corrected, though her mouth softened. “And I have no desire to do it again.”
I looked at her then, really looked at her, at the woman who had once lied to me with kindness, hidden truths from me with trembling hands, and loved this house full of monsters with a loyalty so fierce it had become its own form of courage. My lips curved despite the ache that rose in my chest.
If a story required a hero in order to reach its conclusion, Agnes would be the gallant savior in mine.
I had awoken flat on a table, my throat raw and stinging beneath a fresh bandage where the green ribbon had concealed ruined skin for so long.
The air had smelled of blood, alcohol, crushed leaves, and the sharp green scent of opened stems. Lantern light swung overhead, turning the ceiling into a blur of gold and shadow.
For several moments, I had not understood where I was or why every part of me hurt as though I had been taken apart and placed back together by hands too hurried to be gentle.
Then I remembered.
Hawthorne’s throat beneath my blade.
Nicholas stepping toward me, his voice breaking around my name.
My hand lifting again.
The knife opening him.
I remembered the terrible heat of his blood across my fingers.
I remembered the shock and grief in his eyes—so profound it seemed to hollow him from within as he reached for me anyway.
I remembered thinking, with some distant and monstrous calm, that his throat opened more easily than I had expected.
Then nothing.
When consciousness returned, Agnes was hunched over Nicholas, who lay on a separate table beside mine. His bare chest was exposed, his skin pale and gray beneath streaks of dried blood, and a clean dressing had been wrapped tightly around his throat.
For one suspended moment, I could do nothing but stare at him, the world narrowing to the small movement beneath his ribs. Rise. Fall. Rise. Fall. Each breath seemed too delicate to survive observation, like a moth trembling in cupped hands.
Agnes looked up when I moved.
Her face was drawn and terrible with exhaustion.
There was dried blood on her apron, blood along one cheek where she must have wiped at tears with the back of her wrist, and a smear of green sap darkening the cuff of her sleeve.
Her hand had trembled when she pressed it to my forehead, her fingers gently stroking the hair from my damp skin.
“Do not try to speak,” she said at once, her voice rough. “Do not move either or I will tie you to this table.”
I tried to ask what she had done, but my throat refused to form the words.
Agnes understood anyway.
“I did what I had to do,” she said.
There was no pride or triumph in the statement, only weariness, and beneath that, a grief too complicated to be named cleanly.
Nicholas had been dying. Hawthorne’s severed vine had already begun to blacken.
I had been failing too, though differently I suppose.
My incomplete graft had turned inward upon itself, consuming what little strength remained.
And Agnes had found herself alone among three impossible bodies and a room full of notes written by two brilliant fools who had never once considered that the woman they underestimated might be the only one capable of saving them.
So she had done what we would have done.
She had chosen the monstrous thing.
She grafted the vine and flower into Nicholas first, because his blood was leaving him too quickly and there was no other way to keep him.
Then she opened me across the scar my own hands had created, and placed the missing bloom inside the chamber my body had been starving for since the day I woke beneath the hospital ceiling with my memories gone and death still clinging to my skin.
Hawthorne had been more complicated.
“That is too complex for me,” Agnes confessed later, with more bitterness than I had ever heard in her voice. “You and Dr. Ambrose will have to fix what you’ve done when you are well enough.”
And so once Nicholas and I had healed enough to repair what I had nearly destroyed, we had reconstructed Hawthorne.
Together.
We had spread every note across the worktable, argued over each step, and pieced our child back together hour by exhausting hour.
When he opened his eyes again, Agnes dropped an entire tray of instruments.
The sound had been magnificent.
Now, weeks later, the manor held no evidence of that terrible night except what remained beneath our skin, and the horrible memories I wished we could all forget.
Agnes poured tea with the solemn concentration of a woman performing a sacred rite, though I knew her well enough to recognize the quiet surveillance beneath it.
Her gaze lingered on my hands, my normal complexion, the ribbon at my throat, the amount of sunlight touching my face, and the untouched sandwich waiting on the little plate beside me.
“I am eating,” I said before she could scold me.
“You are looking at it,” she replied. “That is not the same thing.”
I picked up the sandwich and took an obedient bite.
Agnes gave a terse nod, though her eyes softened as she watched me.
I knew she was remembering the same thing I was—the scalpel, the table, the blood, the stubborn miracle of lungs continuing to move when they had every right to stop.
Perhaps none of us would ever fully leave that room.
Perhaps some part of us would always remain there beneath the lantern light, opened and remade, held together by thread, root, and the desperate hands of a woman who had refused to lose us.
A shadow fell across the path.
I glanced up to find Nicholas standing beneath the arbor, framed by cascades of wisteria and summer light.
Breath left me with the same startling force it always did when I saw him unexpectedly, though now the ache that followed was no longer the hollow pain of missing what I did not remember.
My husband, alive and standing in the garden we had once planned together, the sun touching the dark waves of his hair and catching in the amber of his eyes.
He looked well, though not unchanged. None of us had escaped that.
The green ascot at his throat was tied perfectly neat, its velvet a darker shade than my ribbon but close enough to make Agnes sniffle every time she saw us standing beside one another.
Beneath it lived the scar I had given him, and beneath that, the graft Agnes had made to save him.
Sometimes, when the light struck just so, I could see the faintest pulse of green moving beneath his skin, a secret rhythm answering the one beneath my own.
He caught me staring and arched a brow. “Am I in trouble?”
“I was merely admiring your vanity.”
“My vanity?”
“You are looking quite dashing today.”
His mouth curved. “A man must have standards.”
“A man with a vine in his throat especially.”
“Naturally.”
Agnes made a faint sound of disapproval over her teacup. “I do wish the two of you would not discuss your throats at tea.”
Nicholas glanced at her. “Come now, Agnes. We are only admiring your skill.”
“And I regret nothing except allowing either of you to recover enough to be insolent.”
I laughed, and the sound surprised me with its ease.
Nicholas crossed the path toward me, moving with that familiar controlled grace that had once made him seem untouchable.
Now I knew better. I knew the vulnerable places beneath his restraint, the grief he had carried, the love he had held, the terrible tenderness that had made a monster of him long before any vine touched his flesh.
He stopped before me and extended his hand.
I placed my hand in his without hesitation.