1. The Golden Facade

In the heart of Louisiana’s bayou country, where ancient oaks stood like judges and the river whispered to anyone reckless enough to listen, Beaumont Plantation rose in whitewashed confidence. Its columns were designed to look like permanence. Its chandeliers were designed to look like refinement. Its long dining table was designed to look like civilization.

The truth lived behind the house.

The truth lived in the cabins, in the fields, in the cut of the overseer’s eyes when a hand slowed, in the way mothers taught children to cry silently so their tears wouldn’t invite punishment.

It was 1823. Cotton was king. Sugar was an even crueler prince. Human beings were counted in ledgers and discussed like tools. Theodore Bowmont had inherited land from his father, a French immigrant who arrived with clever hands and left behind a dynasty fueled by stolen labor.

Eleanor had arrived with a trunk of dresses and a spine full of well-trained politeness. She was twenty-five now, young enough to still remember what laughter felt like before it became something measured and careful. She moved through the big house like a ghost in silk, smiling at neighbors during Sunday visits, supervising the kitchen, approving table settings, sipping tea that tasted faintly of bitterness.

When she looked in the mirror, she saw grace because the world demanded she wear it.

But inside her, restlessness simmered. She had not married for love. She’d married into an arrangement that looked respectable from the road and felt suffocating from inside the bedroom.

Theodore was twice her age. He spoke of crops the way a preacher spoke of salvation, with certainty and entitlement. He touched her with the obligation of a man checking a task off a list. He laughed rarely. He forgave never.

Eleanor learned quickly that on a plantation, even the mistress could be trapped, just in a different kind of cage.

It was on an evening like any other, the sky bruising purple as the heat finally loosened, that Eleanor wandered to the edge of the fields. She told herself she needed air. She told herself she wanted to check on the sick, as if concern could excuse curiosity.

That’s when she noticed him.

Josiah.

He wasn’t like the others who moved in a bowed rhythm, careful not to draw attention. He walked as if his body remembered dignity, even if the world tried to beat it out of him. He was in his late twenties, broad-shouldered, with arms marked by labor and eyes that held something deeper than compliance.

He was a carpenter. Skilled. Quiet. The kind of man plantations depended on and still refused to see as fully human.

When his gaze met Eleanor’s for a single second, it wasn’t flirtation. It wasn’t even an invitation.

It was recognition.

A jolt, like lightning beneath skin.

Eleanor turned away first, her pulse suddenly loud.

She told herself that was the end of it.

It wasn’t.

2. First Glances, Then the Dangerous Hunger

Eleanor’s walks became deliberate. A lady could wander her property without suspicion, after all. She made her face calm, her steps measured, her questions polite. She visited the quarters with small baskets of leftover bread, a few apples from the pantry, bits of cloth she claimed were “for mending.”

The enslaved people accepted with eyes lowered, because gratitude could be dangerous, too. Theodore’s world didn’t allow them to be too human in front of the wrong audience.

Josiah’s cabin stood at the far end, where the treeline pressed close and the light seemed thinner. The first time Eleanor stepped inside, she felt the air change. Pine resin. Smoke. The faint sweetness of molasses hidden like a sin. Dirt floor. Thin walls.

And yet, there was order.

Tools hung neatly. A small carving knife. A piece of cedar being shaped into something that might become beautiful if given time. The sight unsettled her more than any dirt could.

Because beauty meant intention. Intention meant a mind. A mind meant personhood. And personhood was the one thing the system tried hardest to erase.

Their conversations began in the safest place they could, which wasn’t safe at all: words.

They spoke about the stars. The river’s moods. The way heat pressed down like a hand on the back of your neck. Eleanor admitted, cautiously, that the big house felt like a tomb some days. Josiah, equally cautious, offered nothing that could be mistaken for complaint until one night, when the air was so thick it felt like breathing through cloth.

He spoke of a village he barely remembered, of women pounding yams, of children laughing under a moon that belonged to them. His voice didn’t beg. It didn’t perform for her comfort. It simply existed.

Eleanor listened like someone starving.

It would be easy, in stories, to call what happened next “love” and let the word soften everything. But life on a plantation didn’t allow softness without consequences.

Josiah could not truly consent in a world where he could be whipped, sold, or killed for displeasing the wrong man. Eleanor knew that. She knew it the way a person knows a storm is coming because the air tastes different.

And still, she returned.

Because loneliness does strange things to people who have never been told “no” by anything except their own conscience.

The first touch was accidental, she told herself. Fingers brushing when she handed him a tin cup of well water.

Accidents don’t repeat.

By the third week, the cabin door closed behind her at midnight, the latch clicking like a heartbeat.

A single candle burned low. They spoke in murmurs, afraid even the crickets might betray them. Josiah’s hands, calloused from years of labor, were gentle when they touched her wrist, then her cheek, as if he hated the idea of breaking anything, even something as fragile as hope.

Their first kiss tasted of salt and fear.

Afterward, Eleanor lay awake in the dark, listening to frogs and distant hounds, and realized she had crossed a line that was designed to be fatal.

The law called it miscegenation. Society called it depravity. Theodore would call it theft.

But in that small cabin, for brief stolen hours, Eleanor felt the terrifying thing she’d been denied her whole life.

To be seen.

To be wanted as a person, not a possession.

And Josiah, for a moment, could pretend he was human in a way the plantation refused to acknowledge.

By dawn, she would smooth her dress, pin her hair, and slip back to the big house before the sky turned gray. Josiah would watch the door close on the only hour of the day when he didn’t feel like a tool.

Then the world would reset its mask.

But secrets don’t stay private on plantations. Too many eyes. Too many people trained to survive by noticing everything.

Aunt Dela, the elderly cook who had raised Bowmont children and buried Bowmont mistakes, began to look at Eleanor differently. Not accusing. Not approving. Just aware.

Young Silas, the boy who carried messages between house and quarters, nearly collided with Eleanor one morning as she returned through the kitchen garden. His eyes widened, then dropped.

He said nothing.

But Eleanor felt her stomach twist.

Children saw. Children talked.

And overseers listened.

3. The Overseer’s Shadow

Harlon was Theodore’s eyes and ears. A wiry man with a scar across his cheek, boots always clean as if he enjoyed the contrast between his polish and everyone else’s mud. He wore cruelty like a uniform and carried a bullwhip coiled at his belt as casually as a man might carry a watch.

At first, Harlon dismissed Eleanor’s visits as a bored lady’s whim. Plantation mistresses had moods. They liked to play at charity. They liked to feel merciful because it made their meals taste better.

But then he noticed patterns.

A too-long pause near Josiah’s cabin. A low whistle from someone near the wash line. A distraction created at exactly the right moment. The enslaved people weren’t just watching Eleanor.

They were protecting her.

That made Harlon suspicious in a way that turned his curiosity into hunger.

One night, he lingered near the far cabins, hiding behind a pecan tree. The moon was thin. The air was still. Harlon didn’t need to see everything.

He only needed to hear enough.

Inside Josiah’s cabin, Eleanor dabbed a foolish little vial of perfume on his wrist, a risk that made him smile briefly. They spoke, quietly, about escape, the kind of dream that felt like a rope thrown across a canyon.

“We could follow the river,” Josiah murmured. “Hide in the cypress groves till dawn. There are trails in the swamp. People disappear in them.”

Eleanor’s heart raced at the thought. Fear anchored her, but desperation pulled.

Then a floorboard creaked outside.

They froze.

Josiah blew out the candle. Darkness swallowed the cabin.

Footsteps paused. Shifted. Moved on.

But the damage was already done.

By morning, Harlon stood in Theodore’s study with a face like stone.

“Something ain’t right with the missus and that carpenter,” he said.

Theodore didn’t explode. Not yet.

Rage in men like Theodore didn’t flare. It simmered, controlled, because control was the point.

He stared at the ledger on his desk, then at Harlon.

“You’re sure.”

“I heard voices. Fabric. Close. Too close for prayer.”

Theodore’s jaw tightened. His pride had always been brittle under the veneer of authority. He had built Beaumont on the idea that he owned everything within its borders.

Including his wife.

Including the bodies in the quarters.

The idea that Eleanor had chosen an enslaved man, that she had stepped out of Theodore’s claim and into someone else’s arms, struck deeper than any financial threat.

It wasn’t just betrayal.

It was humiliation.

And humiliation, in that world, demanded blood.

Theodore ordered Josiah removed from carpentry duty and sent to the fields under the blistering sun. Eleanor protested just enough to seem concerned about “repairs,” not enough to reveal panic.

Theodore waved her off.

“Plenty of hands,” he growled.

The separation was torture.

Eleanor scanned the cotton rows from the veranda, searching for Josiah’s shape among the bent backs. Josiah worked with his head down, but every so often he’d lift his eyes just long enough to remind her he was still alive.

Still here.

But the plantation’s air had changed. It tasted of storm.

4. The Midpoint Twist: The Ledger That Told the Truth

Three days after Harlon reported his suspicions, Eleanor did something she had never done in her marriage.

She went into Theodore’s study alone.

The room smelled of bourbon, ink, and power. Maps of river routes hung on the wall. Letters from New Orleans lay stacked like little threats. Theodore kept his business there, away from the parlor’s polite lies.

Eleanor’s hands trembled as she opened the top drawer.

Inside were ledgers. Names. Numbers. Transactions.

And something else: letters she wasn’t meant to see.

One was from a sugar planter near Baton Rouge offering a “premium price” for a strong carpenter. Another was from a merchant in New Orleans discussing “quiet shipments” that should not be recorded under the usual customs.

Eleanor’s throat tightened. Theodore wasn’t just wealthy. He was greedy, and greed always wanted more.

Then she found a list.

A list of people marked for sale after harvest. Families separated on paper with a simple slash of ink. Children labeled with ages as if they were livestock.

Eleanor recognized names.

Aunt Dela’s grandson. Ruth, the young maid who brought Eleanor cold meals during her confinement. Two brothers from the gin house.

And, at the bottom, written as casually as a weather note:

Josiah.

A cold clarity slid through Eleanor’s body.

The affair was not just going to ruin her.

It was going to destroy them, and it would not stop at them. Theodore’s solution to scandal was the same solution he used for broken tools.

Remove. Replace. Forget.

Eleanor sat down hard in Theodore’s chair, the leather cool against her back. She stared at the names until the ink blurred.

In that moment, something in her shifted.

Not into heroism. Not into purity. She could never wash her hands clean of the life she’d lived in comfort while others suffered.

But into decision.

If Theodore was going to treat human beings like entries on a list, Eleanor would learn to use the language of lists against him.

Because she finally understood the only thing Theodore truly loved.

Not God. Not marriage. Not honor.

His reputation.

And the money that depended on it.

5. The Night the Web Snapped

The storm returned on a night when the sky looked bruised and the wind tasted of rain.

Eleanor slipped from the big house, shawl clutched tight, heart pounding as she made her way to the old oak at the swamp’s edge. Josiah waited there, a bundle of provisions slung over his shoulder. His silhouette blended with shadow like he belonged to the night more than the day.

“Harland knows,” he whispered.

“Harlon,” Eleanor corrected automatically, then hated herself for clinging to small details when their lives were about to be ripped apart.

“We go now,” Josiah urged. “Or we never will.”

Eleanor had stolen a map from Theodore’s study. Gold coins from the safe. A copied key to the back gate. Her hands shook with the madness of it, the way people shake when they finally step off a cliff and hope the fall becomes flight.

They turned toward the swamp trail.

Lanterns flickered.

Harlon emerged from the underbrush with two armed patrolmen, rifles catching moonlight.

“Stop right there!” he barked, his scar twisting like a grin.

Josiah shoved Eleanor behind him. It didn’t matter. Rope lashed his wrists in seconds, rough and fast.

Eleanor lunged toward Harlon, nails clawing at his sleeve.

He backhanded her, lightly, not to bruise, just to remind her she was still a woman he could control without leaving marks.

Theodore arrived on horseback moments later, summoned by a runner. His face was tight with fury, veins bulging.

“You treacherous whore,” he spat at Eleanor, dismounting with deliberate slowness.

Josiah struggled, eyes locked on Eleanor with a silent plea.

Run.

She couldn’t move. Horror rooted her to the mud.

They dragged them back to Beaumont as thunder rolled overhead. The quarters woke in whispers. Cabin doors cracked open. Faces appeared in slivers of candlelight, fear drawn tight across cheekbones.

Theodore ordered Josiah chained to the whipping post in the central yard.

Eleanor fell to her knees in the mud.

“It was nothing,” she sobbed. “A mistake. Please, Theodore.”

Theodore’s voice was cold as iron.

“You’ll watch and learn.”

The whip cracked through the first raindrops.

One lash. Two. Three.

Josiah didn’t scream. He grunted, body jerking, pride refusing to give Theodore the sound of victory.

Eleanor’s world blurred, tears mixing with rain.

Harlon counted to twenty before Theodore lifted a hand.

Enough to hurt. Enough to scar. Enough to remind everyone that the master’s humiliation would always be paid for in someone else’s skin.

They hauled Josiah to the isolation shed, a dark hole reserved for defiance.

By dawn, the rain had washed blood into the earth.

But Beaumont Plantation would never be clean again.

6. Aftermath: The Quiet Language of Solidarity

Josiah lay in the shed, back a lattice of raw welts, fever making the world shimmer. His breath came shallow. Pain blurred into memory, and memory blurred into dreams of a mother’s face he hadn’t seen since the ship stole him away.

In the big house, Eleanor became a prisoner in her own room. Shutters nailed closed. Door locked from the outside. Ruth, barely sixteen, brought trays of cold food with eyes downcast.

Eleanor refused to eat. She paced until her feet blistered, replaying the whip’s crack, the rain, Josiah’s silence.

Guilt and rage warred inside her.

She had brought this upon him.

And yet she also knew that if she had never stepped into his cabin, he would still be alive in the only way slavery allowed.

Alive, but not free.

Theodore, publicly outraged, privately obsessed with control, summoned Harlon.

“Word must not spread,” Theodore said. “No one in town hears a whisper.”

Harlon gathered the enslaved in the yard and delivered the threat like scripture.

“Anyone speaks of last night,” he said, “joins him in the shed till the next season’s planted.”

Heads lowered. Eyes fixed on dirt. Aunt Dela’s hands clenched hard around her apron, but she said nothing.

Silence, though, is never absolute.

In the quarters, stories passed in the softest voices. Mothers warned daughters. Husbands warned wives. Children were pulled close.

The tale of the mistress and the carpenter became a quiet legend, not romantic, not clean, but powerful in one way.

It proved the master’s house could crack.

It proved even the mistress could rebel, if only for selfish reasons at first.

It proved that fear could be met with something else.

Defiance.

Ten days later, Josiah was released. Not out of mercy. Out of necessity.

He was put on light duty, sweeping the gin house, stacking baskets, moving slowly, every breath tugging at healing scars. The other enslaved people made space for him without being asked. They passed him water. They shielded him from Harlon’s eye when they could.

A quiet language of solidarity.

In the big house, Theodore loosened Eleanor’s confinement just enough to avoid neighbors’ questions. Shutters opened. Door unlocked. Supervised walks in the garden, Ruth trailing behind like a shadow.

Eleanor moved through flowers without feeling them.

But she watched everything.

The bell schedule. The patrol routes. The moments Harlon rode to the far acres. The weak points in the fence near the swamp.

Escape, she realized, wasn’t just running.

It was planning.

It was learning the machinery of oppression well enough to jam it.

And Eleanor had finally learned.

7. The Sale Notice

Autumn crept in with a slow bleed of color. Cotton bolls burst white against browning stalks. The air cooled, but tension thickened.

One morning, Aunt Dela approached Eleanor in the buttery as if discussing eggs.

“He carved you something,” Dela murmured without looking up. “Wrapped in oil cloth under the third step of the back porch.”

Eleanor’s breath caught.

Later, when the house was quiet, she slipped outside, lifted the worn board, and found the bundle. The wooden rose. And a scrap of paper torn from an old ledger.

In careful script: Still blooming.

Eleanor pressed the carving to her lips, tears falling onto smooth cedar.

That night, she slept with it hidden beneath her pillow like a relic.

Two days later, Theodore announced at supper, casually as if discussing weather, “I’ve decided to sell the carpenter. The money will buy two new hands and a breeding mule.”

Eleanor’s fork clattered.

She stared at him. “You would destroy a man because of your pride?”

Theodore’s eyes narrowed. “I would destroy whatever threatens my house. You forget your place.”

That sentence, more than any slap, reminded Eleanor exactly what she was in Theodore’s world.

Not a partner. Not a person.

A symbol.

A possession with manners.

Eleanor lay awake that night listening to the shutters rattle, knowing time had become a blade at their throats.

She began to speak to Ruth in fragments. Little questions. Little tests.

Ruth was frightened, but not cruel. She had watched Eleanor locked away. She had watched Josiah bleed. Fear lived in her like a second heartbeat.

But so did something else.

A conscience that hadn’t been fully trained out of her yet.

When Eleanor finally slid Ruth a folded note and said, “Give this to Aunt Dela. Tell no one,” Ruth hesitated only a moment before nodding once.

The chain of trust formed link by fragile link.

In the quarters, Josiah sharpened a small knife against a wet stone and hid it in his shoe sole. Not for violence.

For cutting rope.

For cutting free.

8. The Last Night at Beaumont

The last wagon of cotton rolled down the river road under a sky the color of bruised iron. Beaumont Plantation sat in the hush after harvest, stripped and waiting.

Theodore drank alone in his study, bourbon disappearing as the night deepened. Papers sat on his desk.

Sale documents.

Two weeks, the buyer had said. New Orleans market.

Eleanor waited until the house slept. She dressed in her plain gray traveling cloak, tucked the wooden rose into her bodice, and filled a small sack with cornbread, dried meat, and a tin of water. She took the copied back gate key, its metal cold and heavy in her palm.

She moved through the dark like a shadow, heart hammering, toward the quarters.

Josiah waited near the old oak, the same tree that had once promised escape. His wrists were bare.

He had cut his chains.

Broken links lay in the dirt like shed skin.

They didn’t speak at first. They simply held each other, the world shrinking to the warmth of bodies that refused to become only what the plantation demanded.

Then a sound cut through the night.

A horse snorted.

Lantern light flickered behind the trees.

Harlon.

Too early. Too close.

Eleanor’s stomach dropped.

Josiah’s hand tightened around hers. “Run,” he whispered.

She shook her head. “Not without you.”

They turned toward the swamp trail anyway, moving fast, feet sinking into wet earth. Cypress knees rose like silent sentinels.

Behind them, a shout.

“THERE!”

Lanterns bobbed. Boots crashed through brush.

The swamp was cruel, but it was also honest. It did not pretend to be civilized. It swallowed what it could, and it let the rest fight.

Josiah knew the trails. Eleanor stumbled, breath tearing at her throat. Twice she nearly fell, and twice Josiah caught her arm, steady as stone.

They reached the riverbank where a thicket hid them from the road. A flatboat was rumored to pass, a boat that carried legitimate cargo by day and fugitives by night if the right hands were paid.

Eleanor leaned against Josiah’s shoulder, exhausted, terrified, alive in a way she had never been inside white columns.

Lanterns appeared on the ridge.

Harlon’s voice, closer now, sharp with certainty. “They ain’t far!”

Josiah’s jaw clenched. He reached into his boot and slid out the small knife.

Not to attack.

To be ready.

Eleanor’s fingers dug into the wooden rose beneath her cloak. She thought of the ledger. The names. The children marked for sale.

She thought of Aunt Dela’s hands clenched around her apron.

She thought of what it meant to choose love in a world built to crush it.

And she realized something that landed like a stone in her chest.

If they were caught, Theodore wouldn’t just punish them.

He would punish everyone who had helped.

Ruth. Dela. Silas. The people whose lives were already on the edge.

Eleanor’s breath came in broken pieces.

Then, in the dark, she made a decision that felt like stepping into fire.

She stood.

She stepped out of the thicket.

And she called into the night, loud enough for the ridge to hear.

“HARLON!”

Boots stopped.

Lanterns swung toward her, surprised.

Eleanor lifted her chin, cloak dripping with river mist, hair coming loose, the perfect image of a plantation mistress gone wrong.

“Take me,” she said, voice shaking but clear. “I’m here.”

Josiah’s hand shot out, trying to pull her back.

She didn’t let him.

Because this wasn’t just about escaping anymore.

It was about what her choice would cost other people.

Harlon approached, lantern high, eyes narrowing like he couldn’t decide if he wanted to laugh or spit.

“Where’s the boy?” he hissed.

Eleanor swallowed. “Gone.”

A lie, but the kind of lie that could buy seconds, maybe minutes.

Harlon’s hand grabbed her arm.

She didn’t resist.

Not because she was brave, but because she finally understood that courage sometimes looks like surrender when the alternative is letting others burn.

Josiah watched from the thicket, eyes wide with fury and grief.

Eleanor met his gaze once, long enough to press a final truth into the air between them.

Still blooming.

Then Harlon dragged her toward the ridge.

9. Climax: The Price of a Secret

Theodore’s study reeked of bourbon and triumph when Eleanor was shoved inside, mud on her hem, wrists raw from Harlon’s grip. Theodore stood behind his desk, the sale papers laid out like a final sentence. He expected tears. Begging. A return to obedience. Instead, Eleanor reached into her cloak and dropped a bundle of letters onto the desk, pages she’d stolen from his drawer, proof of illegal shipments, unpaid debts, transactions that would ruin him if they reached the wrong hands in New Orleans.

Theodore’s face shifted, just slightly, the first crack in marble. “What have you done?” he demanded. Eleanor’s voice didn’t rise, but it cut deeper than shouting. She said, “You built this house on chains and called it order. But order held together by cruelty is only a lie with good manners.” Then she leaned forward, eyes bright with something that wasn’t fear anymore.

“You cannot own a human being and still call yourself a man.”

The room went still.

Even Harlon hesitated at the door, as if the sentence itself had weight.

Theodore’s hands trembled, not from love or conscience, but from the terror of exposure. Reputation was his real religion, and Eleanor had found the altar.

“You’ll destroy yourself,” Theodore hissed.

Eleanor nodded once. “I already did. The day I watched you bleed him.”

Theodore stared at the letters as if they were snakes. He knew what they meant. A whisper in the wrong ear could bring creditors, rivals, maybe even legal trouble, not because slavery was illegal, but because Theodore’s greed had gotten sloppy. Smuggling. Bribes. Debts hidden under polite dinners.

He swallowed hard.

“What do you want?”

Eleanor’s throat tightened. She thought of Josiah’s back. Ruth’s frightened eyes. Dela’s clenched hands. The names in the ledger.

“I want him gone,” she said. “Not sold. Not whipped. Gone. Tonight.”

Theodore’s jaw flexed. “I own him.”

Eleanor’s gaze didn’t flicker. “Then prove it. Sign what I put in front of you. Or you can explain to New Orleans why your money smells like stolen ink.”

It wasn’t justice. It wasn’t pure.

But it was leverage.

And leverage was the only language Theodore respected.

After a long moment, Theodore snatched up a pen, scribbled his signature on a document Eleanor slid across the desk, a crude manumission paper she’d had Ruth copy from an old example in the household records. It might not hold forever.

But it could hold long enough.

Eleanor took the paper, hands shaking.

“Where is he?” Theodore demanded, voice thick with venom.

Eleanor didn’t answer. She turned and walked out of the study with the document pressed to her chest like a beating heart.

Behind her, Theodore’s roar shook the hallway.

But it was too late.

Because the swamp already knew their footprints.

And the river already carried what the big house tried to bury.

10. Resolution: What the River Did With Them

Eleanor found Ruth first. The girl was pale, trembling, but she didn’t run.

Eleanor pressed the manumission paper into her hands. “Take this to Aunt Dela. Now. Tell her to get it to Josiah. Tell her… tell her to move like smoke.”

Ruth nodded, tears spilling silently, then vanished into the dark.

What happened after that became the kind of story plantations hate most.

Not because it was clean.

Because it couldn’t be controlled.

Some say Josiah reached the flatboat by dawn, paper hidden beneath his shirt, paid for passage by coin Eleanor had stolen from her own house. Some say Aunt Dela’s people created distractions, sent Harlon chasing ghosts into the wrong part of the swamp until the real trail went cold.

Some say Eleanor never left Beaumont again, that Theodore kept her under watch, not daring to punish her openly because the letters still existed somewhere beyond his reach.

Some say she was sent to New Orleans under the excuse of “nerves,” and from there disappeared into the quieter corners of the world where women with ruined reputations went to become invisible.

Some say the river swallowed both of them, because rivers don’t care about love, only weight.

But in the quarters, long after Beaumont Plantation changed hands, the story lived.

Not as a romance.

As a warning, and a spark.

A reminder that even the most polished house can hide rot beneath its floorboards. A reminder that a single choice can crack a system that pretends it is eternal. A reminder that love, in a world designed to kill it, becomes something else entirely.

Not a comfort.

A rebellion.

And somewhere, maybe in a trunk tucked beneath another floorboard, maybe in a pocket carried north, maybe buried near a riverbank where moss still drips like time, a wooden rose waits.

Still blooming.

THE END