Chapter Five

 

Gannon followed Willow out of the house and down a path of paving stones toward the greenhouse. He looked down at the stones as he walked across them and noticed that every few stones were embellished with pieces of vibrantly colored glass or the outlines of leaves and other plants. He wondered if she had crafted them herself and suddenly thought of the banana bread that she had brought to the house a few days before. It had been one of the most delicious things that he had ever put in his mouth, but what had impacted him the most about it was that he knew that she had made it with her own hands. Knowing that she had baked that bread, carefully selecting each ingredient, stirring them together, and pulling it out of the oven at the perfect moment before bringing it to Nana’s house and giving him a bite filled him with a sense of fulfillment unlike anything that he could describe. Even the delicate pink plastic lovingly wrapped around the loaf of bread was like a glimpse into her and another bit of the personality that he wanted so much to learn.

They walked into a greenhouse that was much smaller than the one at Nana’s house and he glanced around it, taking in the sight of the plants that she had chosen. They were another hint of who she was, telling him about her preferences and many of her characteristics without her ever having to say a word. His love of plants had been something that he had gotten to indulge only a small amount in his life. When he was younger he had been assigned to the farm that produced food for those who lived within Ryan’s facilities. Even when he was going through his training, he would spend hours each day caring for the fields and harvesting crops. The plants seemed to respond to his care and he was always able to nurture larger, more bountiful harvests for the crops to which he was assigned than the other hybrid farmers. Despite his success in the fields, however, as he got older Ryan saw more in his physical size and strength than he did in his ability to farm and chose to remove him from the fields so that he could focus fully on training for warfare.

Being taken away from the farm had been one of the hardest things that Gannon had ever been through. It had been his only refuge, the only element of his life that he found even the semblance of enjoyment in, and the only time when he didn’t think about the bitterness and pain that characterized the rest of his existence. Now that he was back in an environment where he could care for plants, he never wanted to lose that again. Whatever he needed to do, he knew that he had to find a way that he could keep this as a part of his life moving forward.

Willow had walked away from him and was standing at the far end of the greenhouse in front of a long counter. He walked up beside her and noticed that she was staring intently at small pots in front of her. Gannon could tell that she was hurting and the thought of it brought a pang to his chest. He wanted to know more about what happened to her, but she had cut off her explanation so quickly. Seeming to notice that he was standing there, Willow looked up at him and gestured toward the plants in front of her.

“See?” she said. “They are so weak. They’ve barely grown in the last two weeks and there are no runners. I should have ripe fruit soon and there are barely even buds. I don’t know what I should do.”

She reached down and grabbed a scoop of blue powder from a bucket on a shelf beneath the counter. She started to sprinkle the powder on one of the plants, but Gannon pulled the small black pot out from beneath it. Willow looked at him sharply.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“What is that stuff?” he asked.

“It’s food,” she said. “Specially formulated. It’s supposed to help the plants grow stronger and the fruit get bigger.”

“How often have you been putting this on them?” he asked.

“Every day or so,” she said. “It says to apply until you see results.”

“That is part of your problem,” Gannon told her.

He carefully grasped the plant with his fingers and turned the pot over to release the dirt into his palm.

“What do you mean?” Willow asked. “What are you doing?”

“Have you ever used this type of food on your plants before?” he asked.

Willow shook her head.

“No,” she admitted. “I told you, I got a late start this year. I thought that this would help to compensate for that.”

“It hasn’t been working out very well, has it?”

She looked at him as if stung by his words.

“You can see that it’s not,” she said. “What are you doing?”

Gannon shook the roots of the plant to remove as much of the dirt as he could and then settled it carefully into a new pot, scooping fresh dirt around it.

“You can’t rush things,” he said. “You have overfed them. They have too much of the food in them and not enough of what should naturally be there, so they don’t know what they are supposed to do. You need to give them the time and the space that they need to grow and develop into what they can be.”

“So, we need to re-pot all of them,” she said, resigned to the mistake that she had made.

“It would be best,” Gannon said. “We have to be careful to make sure that they have what they need, but not too much. Not too much or too little food, not too much or too little water. These are good plants, they just need to some time to remember that.”

Willow nodded and reached for another of the plants. They worked in silence for a few moments and as they did, Gannon occasionally slid glances at her from the corner of his eye. There was still pain in her eyes, but she seemed to be concentrating enough on transferring the strawberries that it was starting to slip away. Then she spoke.

“Gavin was always very serious. You know what I mean? The kind of person who doesn’t seem to be able to see the fun in anything but things that are supposed to be fun?”

Gannon looked at her and shook his head slightly, unsure of what she meant. Willow sighed.

“Yeah. He said that that didn’t make sense, either. It was just…he compartmentalized everything. If he was doing something, he was only doing that thing. All of his attention and energy went into that, and he could only allow himself to react to it in the way that he thought he was supposed to. He didn’t have any whimsy or sense of humor, unless it was a situation when it was actually dictated to do that. It was like if we were out doing something, he could have fun, but if there was any sense of rules, regulations, or order, he had to absolutely follow that. Even if we were playing a game at home, there could be absolutely no deviation from the rules. But I was used to that. It was the way that he had always been.”

She stopped and fell silent again. Gannon wanted her to continue, to tell him more about what happened in her past.

“And then he changed?” he encouraged, hoping to ease her forward in the conversation.

Willow glanced up at him briefly and then nodded as she looked down at the plant in her hands again.

“He started talking about all of these crazy ideas. Things I’ve never heard him say before. He would come home from work raving about strange things that didn’t make any sense, and thoughts that he was having. It bothered me, but I didn’t know what to say about it. I figured that he had heard something at work and that he had gotten fixated on it like he tended to do, but that it would pass and he would go back to normal. Within a few months he started getting worse and it was really scaring me. He barely slept. I would go to bed at night and wake up in the middle of the night to find him pacing around the room with his tablet, researching something that he would never fully explain to me. If I asked him what it was all about, he would just go into another one of his rants and it would get more and more extreme until he exhausted himself and finally fell asleep. I tried so hard to stop him. I did everything that I could to distract him and to keep him focused on something else, but it never worked. He just got worse and worse. Then finally that morning he just walked out of the house and never came back.”

Gannon felt sadness wash over him at the thought of her going through that. Though he hated the idea of her with any other man, he didn’t want to think about her being hurt.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

Willow shook her head and gave him a weak smile.

“It’s alright,” she said. “By that point, I had been struggling with even trying to remember why I was still with him. I was having a really difficult time in the relationship and had been thinking about ending it with him, I just didn’t know how.”

“Do you think that it’s possible that Gavin knew that you were thinking about that, and maybe that’s why he left that day? He wanted to get away from you before you were able to end the relationship?”

“No,” Willow said. “I don’t think that he thought of anything but whatever it was that was in his mind that was causing him to change. I don’t even think that he thought of me at all before he left, and definitely not again after he did.”

“And you never heard from him again?”

“No. Not even once. It was like he walked out of the house and just disappeared. He never showed up for work that day even though his car was in the parking lot, and no one ever heard from him afterwards. There’s been no activity on his phone or his financial accounts. His family hasn’t heard from him. There was an investigation and I think for a while some people thought that I had something to do with it, that I knew where he was and just wasn’t saying. But then no one was able to find anything and the search faded and eventually stopped.”

“Are you worried about him?” Gannon asked.

He wasn’t sure what he wanted her to say. He felt a sharp pang of jealousy just thinking that this man who had already claimed so much of her and that had caused her so much pain was still taking up her thoughts and her emotions. At the same time, he couldn’t imagine that she would be so heartless that she would be able to just push him out of her mind all together when he walked away.

“I don’t know,” she answered. “I definitely have questions, but I don’t really know if I’m worried about him or if I just wonder what could have happened. It was all just so strange.”

Gannon reached for the final strawberry plant at the same moment that she did and their hands brushed against each other. Neither withdrew quickly, but instead looked at each other. Gannon felt his skin tingle where it touched hers and the air around them seemed to get thicker as they stared at each other for the span of a few heartbeats before turning back to their work.