Chapter 9
Chapter 9:
For a moment — one crystalline, weightless moment — the flowers were beautiful.
Golden pollen drifted through the morning light like dust in a cathedral. The roses were fat and crimson. The lilies leaned out of their vases with the careless elegance of women who know they’re being admired. The whole room smelled of summer, of fields, of the kind of reckless generosity that comes from someone who doesn’t know — or doesn’t care — that beauty can be a weapon.
Then Lara’s airway closed, and the beauty stopped mattering.
It started the way it always started: a tightness at the base of her throat, as though someone had wrapped a hand around the narrowest part of her windpipe and was squeezing — not hard, not yet, but with the promise of more. Her lungs, those temperamental, unreliable organs that had been trying to kill her since childhood, began their familiar rebellion. The air went thin. The room went thick.
Lara knew the drill. She’d been through this enough times to have a protocol, a sequence burned into her nervous system through years of repetition: stay calm, find the inhaler, two puffs, wait. Simple. Mechanical. The kind of thing you could do in your sleep, except that her body was doing the opposite of sleep — it was panicking, flooding her bloodstream with adrenaline she didn’t need and withholding the oxygen she desperately did.
The medicine cabinet. Hallway.
Fifteen steps.
She made it twelve before her vision began to blur.
The flowers were everywhere. She couldn’t avoid them — couldn’t hold her breath long enough to cross the room without inhaling, and every breath she drew was laced with pollen, the tiny invisible particles finding her bronchial tubes with the precision of a targeted strike. Her eyes streamed. Her chest heaved.
Each inhale produced a sound like a straw pulling at the bottom of an empty glass — thin, wet, urgent.
“The medicine p>
Her own voice sounded wrong.
Distant.
As though it were coming from the end of a long corridor that was getting longer.
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She reached the cabinet. Her hands were shaking — not the delicate, photogenic trembling of a woman in a film, but the full-body, adrenaline-soaked shaking of a person whose autonomic nervous system had decided, unilaterally, that it was time to be terrified. Her fingers fumbled with the latch. Missed. Tried again. The cabinet door swung open and her arm swept across the shelf, reaching for the inhaler, and in the process knocked two vases off the console table beside her.
The crash was spectacular.
Glass and water and stems and petals — an explosion of domesticated nature across the hardwood floor. Roses bled their petals. Lily water pooled and spread.
A vase rolled in a lazy half-circle before coming to rest against the baseboard, miraculously unbroken, as if to mock the others.
Callum and Declan came running.
They appeared from their respective wings of the house with the synchronized urgency of men responding to the sound of destruction — which, to be fair, was the sound they’d heard. Shattering glass, clattering vases, something hitting the floor. They hadn’t heard the wheezing. They hadn’t heard Lara’s lungs slowly surrendering to a cloud of pollen that should never have been in this house.
What they saw was the mess.
“What are you doing p>
Declan’s voice — sharp, reflexive, already angry before his brain had time to assess the scene. He looked at the flowers on the floor, at the spreading water, at the toppled vases, and something in him snapped. These were Bridget’s flowers.
Bridget had picked them herself, from a field somewhere, had probably spent hours selecting each stem, and now they were scattered across the floor like garbage.
He crossed the room in three strides, brushed past Lara — not gently, not with the awareness that she was standing there mid-asthma attack with one hand on the medicine cabinet and the other pressed against her sternum — and shoved her aside to reach the remaining flowers.
The push wasn’t hard.
Declan would later tell himself it wasn’t hard.
But Lara was weak — oxygen-deprived, shaking, ninety-eight pounds of a woman whose lungs were operating at maybe thirty percent capacity — and even a gentle push was enough to send her stumbling sideways into the edge of the hall table.
Her knee connected with the corner. The pain was immediate and bright, a white flash behind her eyes that almost, almost, distracted her from the fact that she couldn’t breathe.
Declan didn’t notice. He was already on his knees, gathering roses, cradling them like wounded birds.
Callum was beside him, collecting lilies with the careful focus of a man salvaging documents from a fire.
Neither of them was looking at Lara.
In the corner by the medicine cabinet, Lara’s fingers — numb now, clumsy, operating on nothing but muscle memory and the animal drive to survive — finally closed around the inhaler. She fumbled it free. Shook it. Pressed. Inhaled.
The medication hit her trachea like cold water on a burn. Not instant relief — never instant — but the promise of it. The beginning of a door opening, millimeter by millimeter, in a wall that had been trying to seal itself shut. She pressed again. Inhaled again. Held it.
Counted.
One. Two. Three.
Four.
Five.
The corridor of her windpipe widened, reluctantly, like a road being cleared after a storm.
Air — actual air, not the thin, whistling parody she’d been subsisting on — reached her lungs. The black spots at the edges of her vision began to retreat.
She slid down the wall and sat on the floor, back against the plaster, inhaler clutched in one fist, the other hand covering her nose and mouth to filter the pollen that was still, even now, floating gently through the sunlit air like something from a painting.
She had almost died. That was the fact of it, stripped of drama — she had almost died in her own living room, in a house she shared with two men who had once jumped fences and cut class to reach her during an attack, who had memorized the location of every inhaler in every room, who had known about her allergies since they were children.
And they were picking up flowers.
Callum’s voice came from somewhere in the wreckage, still focused on the floor, still not looking at her.
“Is this how you deal with Bridget? She brought these flowers for us and you broke them p>
Declan, cradling a handful of damp roses, his knees wet with flower water: “Lara, I’ve noticed you’ve become completely irrational lately. What’s happened to you p>
Lara pressed the inhaler against her forehead. The plastic was cool. Her pulse was still hammering — a hundred and forty beats per minute, maybe more, her heart doing the work her lungs had refused.
She closed her eyes.
She took one more breath — slow, deliberate, tasting the antiseptic tang of the medication and beneath it, faintly, the sweet rot of lilies — and she thought: twelve more days.