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And I’d spent years trying to extract the scientifically important parts from everything else, as though everything else were clutter.

My throat tightened. “Oh, Grandma.”

I turned toward the later pages. The entries became less frequent. Her handwriting changed. Some observations were only a few words, written in the shaky hand I remembered.

Then came the plant. No pressed specimen. No coordinates. No instructions for collection. Just the drawing and her observations about what it might do.

I’d always assumed illness had prevented her from finishing the work. Now I wasn’t sure.

Grandma had known enough to find that cavern. Somehow, she’d passed through a boundary Barrett hadn’t even known existed. She’d seen the flowers and drawn their roots… and then she’d left them there.

She hadn’t failed to finish her research. She’d made a decision.

I sat with that for a long time. Then I got out of bed.

Barrett wasn’t in the cabin. There was coffee in the pot. Beside it sat a plate covered with a clean cloth. Bread, sliced thickly, with honey and butter. He’d left breakfast before disappearing to wherever Barrett went when he was trying very hard not to be in the same room as me.

I poured coffee, grabbed my laptop from my field bag, and carried it to the kitchen table. Opening it, I waited for the screen to wake, and opened my research files.

Three years of work. Grant applications. Rejections. Revised proposals. Literature reviews. Correspondence with people who’d used phrases like insufficient evidence and unlikely botanical claims and personal connection may be affecting objectivity.

I hated that last one most. They thought my connection to Grandma made me biased—that I wanted her to have been right so badly I couldn’t objectively assess the evidence.

Now I knew better.

The plant existed.

I had photographs. I had measurements, water samples, and enough preliminary evidence to make every person who’d dismissed my proposal sit up and pay attention.

If I published it, my career changed. The thought landed with considerably less force than it should have.

I imagined the paper. My name, the department announcement, conference invitations, and funding.

Then I imagined strangers standing beside that underground pool, their hands reaching toward blue flowers, sample bags, root sections, and soil cores. I imagined pharmaceutical researchers requesting access, and some stranger deciding that the easiest way to understand the root network was to remove part of it.

And Barrett. A man standing at a wall that wasn’t a wall while his skin shimmered like diamonds. A man who could feel roots through stone, and who had spent years believing he was simply good with plants.

I closed the research folder. The decision wasn’t difficult. That surprised me. I’d expected pain, some great wrenching sacrifice after everything I’d done to get here.

Instead, I felt relief.

I opened a new document, and my fingers rested on the keyboard for a moment before I began typing.

The northern Screaming Woods survey had produced several findings worthy of continued study. I could document those: the fungus, the drainage changes, species distributions, and the white flowers in the caves, provided further investigation showed the colony could tolerate observation.

But Grandma’s plant? No. I would record it privately. Protect the data, the location, the ecosystem.

Protect Barrett.

My name didn’t need to be attached to the discovery for the discovery to matter. That thought would have terrified me three weeks ago. Now it felt obvious.

My phone lay beside the laptop. One decision left.

I picked it up. The email was still there. The position was everything I’d been working toward—permanent and respected. A proper academic path with institutional backing and resources I’d spent years trying to access.

I read the offer again.

Then I looked around Barrett’s kitchen.