“Of course he did,” she replied, her brows drawing together. “She was everything to him. She was the heart of this house.”
The words carved themselves into my chest letter by letter, raising feelings I could neither name nor dismiss. I stared down at my plate, my vision blurring as I tried to reconcile what Agnes had just said with everything I had witnessed from the ghost.
If he had loved her, then how could he have done something so terrible to her? How could he have experimented on her and left her to die alone?
Perhaps he had not.
The thought arrived quietly, without fanfare, but landed with considerable weight. Perhaps I had assembled the evidence in the wrong order, had drawn the wrong conclusion from the same facts. What if he had not killed her? What if he had tried, and failed, to save her?
What if he intended to try again?
I thought back to the night I had accused him of placing the vine inside her. He had insisted he had not killed her, but he had said nothing to refute the vine itself. When I confronted him in the cemetery about continuing his research on the plant that had killed his wife, he had gone silent rather than correcting me. Silence that had felt, at the time, like admission.
Perhaps it had been grief instead. The grief of a man who knew what the vine had done and could not stop working with it because the alternative was accepting that she was gone and staying gone.
Had M. been ill? Had Dr. Ambrose’s broken heart refused to release her, and had he reached for the only tool he believed might return what he had lost? Had he grafted Verdant Vespera into her body when she was already dying, trying to reverse what he could not by ordinary means?
The image of the journal’s anatomical diagram floated to the surface of my thoughts—the woman’s throat opened, the vine threaded through her exposed structures.
“Do you know that he is still researching the vine that was used to create Hawthorne?” I asked, omitting the fact that I believed he used it on his wife as well.
Agnes went very still, refusing to meet my gaze. Then she nodded once. “Yes, I know.”
Searing heat rose in my chest, burning as the words I had not meant to say forced themselves out anyway. “How can you be so careless about this, Agnes? You know what he did to his wife… you know what the vine did to her, do you not?”
She said nothing. Her lips thinned as she pressed them together so hard the corners of her mouth turned white.
“Answer me,” I demanded, but she still said nothing.
I set down my fork, the metal clinking and bouncing off the fine china.
I had to go back to the greenhouse.
I stood abruptly, my chair scraping against the floor hard enough to nearly topple it. “Keep your secrets.”
I fled, slipping down the corridor toward the garden exit and glancing over my shoulder to be sure she had not followed. The night air hit me like cold water when I pushedthrough the door—sharp and clarifying after the stuffed warmth of the dining room, carrying the scent of moss on stone and the green, living smell of the garden in darkness.
The moon hung full overhead, flooding the overgrown paths with silver light. The greenhouse structures gleamed at the far end of the garden, their glass panes fracturing the moonlight into fragments, a dozen broken reflections of the same pale face.
I walked toward the third one without slowing.
The door swung open with a protesting creak, and I stepped across the threshold. The greenhouse was as I remembered. Overgrown and wild, plants sprawling across every surface in untended profusion, vines that had escaped their containers climbing the walls in thick curtains. The air was dense with humidity and the deep green smell of unchecked growth, underlaid with something sweeter and more cloying that clung to the back of my throat like a memory of incense.
The worktable at the center stood empty.
The Verdant Vespera vines were gone, leaving only the ghost of their presence—faint marks in the dust where they had lain, a fading green luminescence absorbed into the wood itself.
I crossed to it and trailed my fingers over the surface, tracing those absent shapes. Perhaps Dr. Ambrose had completed his research while I was confined to bed. Perhaps he had moved the cuttings elsewhere, finished whatever extractions required them, and set his attention to whatever came next.
Or perhaps he was ready to repeat his experiment.
The thought settled in my chest with the weight of something dropped from a great height, the impact reverberating outward through my ribs.
That’s why he hired you,the voice murmured with the satisfaction of someone who was thoroughly enjoying my plight.You look just like his dead wife.
I pushed the thought away and moved to the desk.
The journal lay open exactly where I had left it, the page exactly as I remembered—the anatomical diagram of a woman’s body with her throat exposed and labeled, skin peeled back to reveal the structures beneath, Verdant Vespera threaded through it all.
