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.
