I went back to the flower shop and pretended everything was normal.
It wasn't working.
"You're cutting those too short," Teresa said, watching me butcher a perfectly good set of daisies. "What's going on with you today?"
"Nothing. Just tired."
"You've been tired for three years." She took the shears from my hand. "Go reorganize the supply closet or something. You're wasting inventory."
The supply closet was cramped and dark and smelled like potting soil. It was also where I kept the plants that were too far gone for customers but not dead enough to throw away. A small collection of the dying and the damaged.
I sat down on an overturned bucket and pulled out my phone. Claire had already sent me the address. Robert Hendricks's house was in Blackwood Hills, the rich part of town where people had gates and security cameras and neighbors who minded their own business.
What was I doing? Breaking into a dead man's house to look for secrets that might get me arrested. Or worse.
The half-dead succulent on the shelf beside me whispered: Still time to back out. Still time to be safe.
Safe. I'd been safe for twelve years. Safe and quiet and pretending I couldn't hear the truth that plants kept telling me.
My phone buzzed.
Mom. Calling for our weekly check-in that I usually ignored until she called three more times.
I answered.
"Marcus, honey, I haven't heard from you in two weeks."
"I've been busy."
"Too busy for your mother?" She didn't sound hurt, just resigned. We'd been doing this dance for years. "How's the shop?"
"Fine. Same as always."
"Are you eating enough? You sound tired."
Everyone kept saying that. Maybe I was tired. Tired of arranging flowers and going home to an apartment full of plants that wouldn't shut up. Tired of listening to other people's grief absorbed by petals and stems. Tired of carrying around my own grief in a shoebox in my closet.
"I'm fine, Mom."
"You're not fine. You haven't been fine since—" She stopped herself. Since your mother died, she wanted to say. My real mother. The woman who'd raised me before she got sick. Before the hospital. Before the funeral with white carnations that still screamed the truth twelve years later.
This woman on the phone was my stepmother. My father had remarried two years after the funeral. I'd been seventeen and angry and I'd never forgiven him for moving on so fast.
"I have to go," I said. "Customer just walked in."
"Marcus, wait—"
I hung up.
The succulent whispered: Liar, liar, no customer, just you and your guilt.
"Shut up," I told it.
It didn't.
At six PM, I left the shop and went home to change. Dark clothes, like I was some kind of burglar. I felt ridiculous.
The plants in my apartment were agitated. They could sense my mood, my nervousness. The fiddle-leaf fig kept repeating: Bad idea, bad idea, danger, danger.
"I know," I said out loud. "But I'm doing it anyway."
I grabbed my keys and headed for the door, then stopped.
The shoebox was still on my kitchen counter from last night. I'd taken it out of the closet and hadn't put it back. The white carnations were visible through the tissue paper, brown and brittle and twelve years dead.
Find out the truth, they whispered. Promise me.
"I'm trying," I said quietly. "I'm finally trying."
I left before they could say anything else.
---
Blackwood Hills looked exactly like I'd expected. Big houses set back from the road, perfect lawns, three-car garages. Robert Hendricks's place was at the end of a cul-de-sac, a massive two-story with dark windows and a For Sale sign already planted in the yard.
Claire's car was parked on the street. She got out when she saw me pull up.
"You came," she said. She sounded surprised.
"Did you think I wouldn't?"
"Honestly? Yeah." She looked at the house. "I wouldn't blame you. This is crazy."
"Probably."
She pulled out a key. "The police finished their search yesterday. Took his computer, some files from his office. But there's more. He kept things. Documents, notebooks, USB drives. Stuff going back decades."
We walked up the driveway. The grass on the lawn whispered about footsteps and police boots and someone crying three days ago. Probably Claire, when she'd found out her father was dead.
"I haven't been here in five years," Claire said as she unlocked the front door. "We weren't close. I didn't even have a key until the lawyer gave me one yesterday."
The door swung open. Inside was dark.
Claire flipped a light switch. Nothing happened.
"Power's off," she muttered. "Great."
She pulled out her phone and turned on the flashlight. I did the same. Our lights cut through the darkness, illuminating a grand entryway with marble floors and expensive furniture covered in a thin layer of dust.
And plants. Lots of plants.
A massive fern in the corner. Potted orchids on the side table. A whole row of succulents along the windowsill.
They all started whispering at once.
Angry man, always angry, shouting, phone calls, threats, someone watching, someone always watching, fear, paranoia, secrets, too many secrets, he knew too much, too much, danger danger danger—
I stumbled backward.
"What's wrong?" Claire asked, her flashlight swinging toward me.
"Nothing. Just—" I couldn't breathe. The plants were too loud, too many voices, too much information all at once. "Where's his office?"
"Upstairs. Follow me."
She headed for the staircase. I followed, trying to block out the whispers. But they followed me, carried through the house by the plants that Robert Hendricks had kept in every room.
A man who surrounded himself with living things that absorbed every word, every secret, every truth.
And now they were all talking to me.
Claire pushed open a door at the end of the hallway. "This is it."
I stepped inside and froze.
Robert Hendricks's office was full of papers. Stacks of documents on the desk, boxes on the floor, filing cabinets with drawers half-open. The police had clearly searched through everything and left it in chaos.
But that wasn't what made me freeze.
It was the plant on the windowsill.
A small pothos in a ceramic pot. Its leaves were brown at the edges, dying from lack of water. It had been sitting there for three days, slowly withering.
And it was whispering the last thing Robert Hendricks had said before he died.
Help me. Please. Someone help me.