I swallow. “I’m so sorry.”
Another long silence falls and I feel something in her shift. She turns to face me. “Augustus was sick,” she says at last. “Really sick. Leukemia. He probably only had three months left and it would have been brutal and long and you would have suffered, too. All of us would have.”
The knowledge of what she is implying moves like an electric eel through my body, stunning me. “What are you talking about? You killed Augustus?”
She takes a breath. “It wasn’t like that.”
Chapter Forty-One
Meadow
Oleander is a flowering plant that used to grow in wild profusion all over California. At our house in Thunder Bluff, the entire backyard was framed by hedges of it, red and pink, that bloomed in careless abandon for decades. They’re beautiful, but also deadly—touching the leaves can cause dermatitis, and eating a flower will kill you. People dismissed them as a nuisance plant, and ranchers railed over the periodic poisonings. Now the plants are dying, thanks to a parasite, leaving gaping holes wherever they were, and people mourn them.
A hearty crop of oleander still lives at the back of the old bunkhouse at the farm, protected by some unknown confluence of things—they’ve never been attacked, so the flowers provide a splash of color against the old wood, so picturesque I’ve seen dozens of workers and visitors stop to snap a photo.
When I was young, my mother taught me to make a tincture of almost anything. In my sixteen-year-old desperation, I made a tincture of oleander from brandy steeped and refreshed for two months. I wore rubber gloves, and threw the used plants away carefully in a dumpster where nothing would eat it by mistake, not that many creatures can bear the bitter taste. I wasn’t sure how much it would take, but in the end, my tincture proved to be quick and deadly.
This season, I worked stealthily, cutting leaves and flowers only under cover of night, like an old folk witch. Augustus watched as I pressed the plants into a dark blue mason jar and covered it with vodka, his dark eyes taking in the process at every step. The fresh cuttings, the vodka, the shaking and stirring of the material.
In the end, I extracted a small bottle’s worth with an eyedropper, taking care to dispose of the rest like the toxin it was, as if it were turpentine or gasoline. I wrapped the small bottle in a length of linen and tucked it in my pocket for the trip down the hill.
We’d agreed on a Friday night, after everyone had gone home. He opened the side door of the restaurant to me so the cameras wouldn’t pick up my arrival, and when I came in, we embraced for a long time without speaking. “Are you sure?” I whispered.
“Yes.”
We ate the meal he’d prepared, all his favorites and mine—pork chops with caramelized peaches, fresh peas, and bread I’d made the night before for this very celebration, spread with herbed butter. We drank wine, and ate a decadent upside-down cake that had been one of the first things he’d ever made. He took off my blouse and kissed my breasts reverently, and I touched his body, every inch, kissing him gratefully. Touching his hair.
I left him in the kitchen, well into his cups already. “Another bottle of wine,” I said, swallowing my tears. “Then in the last bit, drink the whole thing.”
“Will you stay?”
I closed my eyes. “I can’t.”
And so he called a young thing, all aflutter to be summoned, I’m sure, so he wouldn’t be alone when he died. I don’t even mind.
He did what he had to do. As we all must.
Chapter Forty-Two
Norah
I listen to her story, and as I hear it, the pieces fall into place. Augustus’s exhaustion and weakness those last couple of months. His inability to make love, his soul-deep weariness. “I have to go,” I say to Meadow.
“Are you going to tell the others?”
I pause. “No. It’s what he wanted.”
She nods. Exhausted by the day and my emotions, I call an Uber to go up the hill to Belle l’été.
No one is home. I walk in and turn on the lights in the kitchen. An empty bottle of bourbon is turned over in the sink, Jack Daniel’s, and with a sudden clutch of fear, I rush into the office, where I saw a bottle in his desk. It’s gone.
Did Maya drink it? Why didn’t I think about taking it out of here when I first saw it?
I text her. Are you ok? I saw the bottle.
At a meeting. All is well.
I send a happy emoji and sink back down in Augustus’s chair. He had cancer. It makes sense. He was so exhausted all the time, and it was getting worse. And if he’d lived, I am sure I would have ended up caring for him.