My apartment felt too small with another person in it.
Claire stood in the middle of my living room, looking at the plants everywhere. On the shelves, hanging from the ceiling, covering the windowsills. Dozens of them, maybe a hundred. All alive, all healthy, all whispering things only I could hear.
"You really like plants," she said.
"Yeah."
"Like, really, really like them."
I didn't answer. I went to the kitchen and grabbed two glasses of water. My hands were shaking. I'd never told anyone about this before. Not since the therapist when I was fifteen, and that had gone badly.
Claire took the water but didn't drink it. "You said you'd explain."
"I know."
"So explain. What did you mean about the plant telling you something?"
I set down my glass. Looked at all the plants around us. They were quiet now, waiting. Like they knew this moment mattered.
"You're going to think I'm crazy," I said.
"After what just happened, crazy is relative. Try me."
I took a breath. "I can hear plants talk."
She blinked. "What?"
"Not talk, exactly. They don't use words. But they absorb things. Emotions. Sounds. Conversations happening near them. And I can... I can hear what they absorbed. Like a recording."
Claire stared at me. I watched her face, waiting for the disbelief. The laugh. The slow backing toward the door.
Instead, she said, "The plant you watered. In my father's office."
"Yeah."
"What did it tell you?"
Not the question I expected. "Your father's last words. Before he died. He was asking for help. He said someone was in the house."
Claire's grip tightened on her water glass. "What else?"
"The other plants in the office, they remember things too. Conversations. Arguments. Your father was scared in the last few weeks. Paranoid. He thought someone was watching him."
"The man who broke in tonight."
"Maybe. The plants recognized his smell. He'd been there before."
Claire walked to the window. Stood there for a long moment, looking out at the street below. I waited for her to call me a liar. To leave.
"When my mother was dying," she said quietly, "she had flowers in her hospital room. Tulips. Yellow ones. I brought them to her myself." She turned to face me. "The day before she died, I found her talking to them. Just sitting there, telling those flowers things she never told me. About being scared. About not wanting to leave us."
Her eyes were wet. "I thought it was the medication. Making her confused. But what if she knew? What if some part of her knew the flowers would remember?"
I didn't know what to say.
"Can you hear them?" Claire asked. "The tulips from my mother's room? If I brought you dead flowers from twenty years ago, could you hear what she said?"
"I don't know. I've never tried with flowers that old." That was a lie. I had the carnations from my own mother's funeral, twelve years old and still whispering. But I didn't want to talk about that.
Claire crossed the room and sat down on my couch. She put her face in her hands. "This is insane. I'm sitting here believing that a florist can talk to plants."
"You don't have to believe me."
"But I do. Because it makes sense." She looked up. "The pothos you watered. You knew it had information before you even touched it, didn't you? That's why you freaked out."
"Yeah."
"And all those plants at my father's house. What else did they tell you?"
I sat down in the chair across from her. "Your father was having arguments with someone. Phone calls, mostly. Someone was asking him for money. Threatening him."
"The man from tonight?"
"I don't know. Maybe." I thought about what the pothos had said. "One of the plants mentioned a brown envelope. Something hidden. The man was looking for it, but it's not in the office or the bedroom."
"Where is it?"
"The plant didn't know. Just that it was somewhere else in the house."
Claire leaned back against the couch. "We need to get back in there. Find that envelope before he does."
"Are you serious? He threatened to kill you."
"He threatened me because I'm getting close to something. My father paid people to experiment on my mother. She died because of it. Then twenty years later, someone kills him right before he can tell me the truth." Her voice was hard. "I'm not walking away from this."
"Claire—"
"You don't have to help me. I get it. This is dangerous and weird and you barely know me." She stood up. "But you can hear things nobody else can. You can find answers that are impossible for anyone else to find. So I'm asking. Will you help me?"
The plants in my apartment all started whispering at once.
The fern on the shelf: Help her, help her, she needs you.
The succulent on the windowsill: Dangerous, so dangerous, you'll get hurt.
The pothos hanging above the TV: Her mother's voice is still out there, preserved somewhere, waiting to be heard.
And from my bedroom, faint but clear, the white carnations in the shoebox: Promise. You promised to find the truth.
I looked at Claire. She was waiting for my answer, her eyes red from crying but her jaw set with determination.
I thought about my mother. About twelve years of wondering what really happened. About the hospital plants that screamed something was wrong, and the doctors who said everything was fine until suddenly it wasn't.
"I'll help you," I said. "But we do this carefully. No more breaking into houses in the dark."
"Agreed. We need a plan."
"And you need to understand something. These people, whoever they are, they've already killed twice. Your mother, your father. Maybe more. They won't hesitate to kill us too."
"I know." Claire pulled out her phone. "Which is why we need insurance. I'm going to write down everything we know so far. Names, dates, photos. I'll send copies to my sister, to my lawyer, to people I trust. If something happens to us, at least the information gets out."
It was a good idea. Smart.
"There's something else," I said. "The medical building in the photo. Riverside Medical Research Facility. We need to find out what kind of research they were doing in 1998."
"How? It's been twenty years. The records are probably gone."
"Maybe. But buildings are full of plants. If that facility is still standing, there might be old plants there. Plants that remember."
Claire looked at me. "Can plants really remember things for twenty years?"
I thought about my mother's carnations. Twelve years and still whispering.
"Yeah," I said. "They can."
She nodded slowly. "Okay. Tomorrow we find that building. We see what the plants remember."
"Tomorrow I have to work. Teresa will fire me if I don't show up again."
"Then tomorrow night. After dark."
We sat in silence for a moment. The weight of what we were planning settled over us like a heavy blanket.
"Thank you," Claire said quietly. "For believing me. For helping me."
"Thank you for not thinking I'm crazy."
"Oh, I definitely think you're crazy." She smiled, but it was sad. "I just think I might be crazy too."
She left a few minutes later. I locked the door behind her and stood in my apartment full of whispering plants.
The fiddle-leaf fig in the corner spoke up: You're going to get killed. You know that, right?
"Probably," I said out loud.
But at least I'd finally be keeping my promise.