Chapter 273: Chapter 275: The Greenhouse
ARIA’S POV
She’d been avoiding it.
Not obviously. Not in a way she’d admitted out loud to anyone, including Dr Morrison, which probably meant it was something she should have been talking about in those sessions. But every morning when she walked the grounds with her coffee and the path curved toward the east side of the estate, she found reasons to turn before she got there.
The garden needed more time. She was tired. The light was better on the west side in the mornings.
All of it true enough. None of it the real reason.
Damien hadn’t pushed. He’d noticed....she knew he’d noticed because he noticed everything....but he hadn’t said anything. Until last night when he’d told her about the foundation, about Morrison’s harvesting schedule, about everything he’d quietly built around that plant while she’d been recovering. And then at the end of it he’d said, simply: I want to show you something tomorrow.
She’d known what he meant.
She’d said okay.
Now it was tomorrow and they were walking across the grounds in the early morning and she had her coffee and he had his and neither of them had said much since they left the house. The glass panels of the greenhouse caught the light ahead of them.
She kept walking.
He held the door open.
She stepped inside.
The warmth and the smell hit her at the same time.....that dense green living smell, damp soil and growing things....and her body responded before her brain caught up. Her chest tightened. Her hands around the coffee mug went slightly rigid.
She knew this smell.
She knew it from one specific night, in the dark, with a torch she’d stolen from the supply cupboard and shaking hands and a bag she’d packed three times to make sure she had everything she needed. She knew it from the sound of his voice behind her that had stopped her heart completely.
Aria.
She walked slowly down the centre row.
Everything looked different with the lights on. Bigger somehow. More ordinary. She’d only ever seen it in the dark, moving carefully, trying not to make noise, her whole body wired with the specific terror of someone who knew they were doing something that couldn’t be undone.
She’d been so certain she was alone.
She stopped in front of the Vitalis Radix.
Stood there and looked at it.
It was smaller than she remembered. Or maybe she’d built it into something enormous in the months of planning and wanting it.....the mythological cure, the impossible thing, the only option. Standing in front of it now it was just a plant. Alive and carefully tended and extraordinary in its own right, but still just a plant.
She thought about the floor.
She’d sat on this floor. Right here. Collapsed against the cultivation table with her legs gone and her world collapsed and the roots she’d been holding still in her hands because she hadn’t known what to do with them. She thought about his face when he’d crouched down in front of her. The devastation in it. That was what had broken her completely....not the anger, not the cold voice. The devastation.
I would have given you everything. All you had to do was ask.
"You’re thinking about it," Damien said from beside her.
"Yes."
"The night I caught you."
"Yes."
He didn’t say anything else. Just stood there with his coffee and let her think.
She looked at the spot on the floor. Then she looked at the plant. Then she turned and looked at the door....the door she’d been three feet from when he’d said her name. Her real name. Not Sarah. Aria. The first time she’d heard it from his mouth and it had felt like the end of everything.
"I had the bag open," she said. "I’d already identified which roots I could take without damaging the plant. I’d researched the cultivation for weeks. I knew exactly what I was doing." She paused. "I was good at it."
"I know," he said. "The team said whoever harvested them knew what they were doing. That was part of how I knew it was you."
She looked at him. "Part of how?"
"You were the only person on this estate who would have had a reason to." He met her eyes. "And I’d already had the background check for three weeks by then."
She turned back to the plant.
Three weeks. He’d known for three weeks before he caught her. Had walked past her in corridors and eaten breakfast in the same room and looked at her across tables knowing everything, and she’d been so consumed with maintaining the lie that she’d missed whatever he’d been doing underneath it.
"Were you angry?" she said. "When you first found out. The real anger, not the greenhouse night."
He was quiet for a moment. "Yes."
"And then."
"And then I watched you." He moved to stand beside her, looking at the plant. "You were terrified. Every day, underneath all of it, you were terrified. Not just of being caught." He paused. "Of your mother dying while you were standing in someone else’s house pretending to be someone else. That kind of fear doesn’t leave a person’s face if you know how to look."
She swallowed.
"I knew how to look," he said.
She thought about all the times she’d felt his eyes on her in those early weeks. Had put it down to suspicion, to a powerful man keeping tabs on his staff. Had not let herself consider the alternative because the alternative was too dangerous to think about when she had a mission and a dying mother and a false name and no room for anything complicated.
She’d been so focused on what she was doing she hadn’t seen what was happening to her.
"I sat on this floor," she said quietly.
"I know."
"I had everything I came for and I was sitting on the floor and I couldn’t stop crying." She paused. "I wasn’t crying because you caught me. I mean I was, but that wasn’t all of it." She looked at the floor. "I was crying because I’d known for weeks that I didn’t want to leave and I’d been trying to pretend I didn’t know that, and then you said everything you said and I understood that I’d destroyed something I hadn’t even admitted I wanted."
The greenhouse was very quiet.
Damien took the coffee mug out of her hands and set it on the potting bench with his.
Then he turned her toward him with a hand on her jaw, tilting her face up.
"You didn’t destroy it," he said.
"I tried to."
"You tried." His thumb moved along her cheekbone. "It didn’t work."
She looked at him.
This man who had known her real name before she’d introduced herself. Who had watched her panic and plan and lie and fall apart and hadn’t walked away from any of it. Who had crouched down on this floor in front of her and been devastated not because she’d stolen from him but because she hadn’t trusted him enough to ask.
"I would have asked," she said. "If I could have done it again. I would have asked."
"I know that now."
"I didn’t know how to trust anyone with something that big." She held his gaze. "I’d been handling everything alone for so long. My mother, the money, all of it. The idea of handing something that important to someone else and hoping they didn’t...." She stopped.
"Drop it," he said.
"Yes."
He looked at her for a moment. "I understand that better than you think."
She believed him.
He pressed his lips to her forehead. Held them there.
"It’s done," he said against her hair. "All of it. It’s done and she’s well and you’re here." He pulled back to look at her face. "That’s where we are."
She nodded once.
Then she picked her coffee back up from the potting bench and looked at the Vitalis Radix one more time.
She thought about the girl who had stood here in the dark with shaking hands and a plan that had already started falling apart without her knowing it. She thought about everything that plant had cost and everything it had given her and the strange impossible distance between those two things.
She turned toward the door.
"The foundation," she said as they walked out. "What are you calling it."
"I haven’t decided."
"Don’t name it after me."
"I wasn’t going to name it after you."
"You were considering it."
He said nothing, which meant she was right.
"Don’t," she said.
"Then help me find something better."
She thought about it as they walked back across the grounds toward the house, the morning properly arrived now, the estate going about its day around them.
"Something that means second chance," she said finally. "In any language. Something that means you got another one."
He was quiet for a moment.
"I’ll find something," he said.
She nodded.
They walked back to the house.
She didn’t look back at the greenhouse.
