Chapter 6 - Healing Shadows
Three days later, Claire was officially discharged. Her doctors had adjusted her immunosuppressant therapy, and her heart function had returned to its strong, baseline rhythm.
I brought her home to the mansion. But this time, she didn't enter through the service entrance.
I carried her bags up the grand staircase to the guest suite next to the children's rooms—the brightest, warmest room in the house, overlooking the rose gardens Evelyn had loved so much.
"Julian, this is too much," Claire said, looking around the beautifully decorated room. "I'm just an employee. I can't stay here like this."
"You're not an employee anymore, Claire," I said, placing her bags on the luggage rack. "Your contract with the agency is terminated. I've hired you as a private family consultant, with a salary that will easily cover your medical expenses and your own health insurance plan. But more than that, you are a guest in this house. You are the link to the woman we lost."
She sat on the edge of the plush bed, looking out the window. "It's beautiful here. Evelyn used to talk about this garden in her journal. She wrote about wanting to plant yellow roses because they symbolize friendship and new beginnings."
"I didn't know that," I admitted softly, sitting in the armchair across from her. "I... I stopped looking at the garden after she died. I let the gardeners handle everything. I couldn't bear to see it."
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"You were hurting, Julian," Claire said, her voice gentle. "Grief makes us close our eyes to the beauty around us because it hurts too much to see it without the person we love. But your boys... they need to see you open your eyes again."
I looked at her, and for the first time in five years, the heavy, suffocating grayness in my chest began to lift.
