The telegram from Mr. Davies felt like a hot coal in Alistair’s hand. The crisp, staccato message, relayed by a boy from the next town over, was a jarring intrusion of Philadelphia into the muted world of Whisper Creek.
FINCH. STORY LANGUISHING. NEED ANGLE. WHERE IS THE FRAUD. WHERE IS THE HOOK. SALACIOUS DETAILS SELL PAPERS NOT BOTANY LESSONS. DEADLINE APPROACHES. DAVIES.
Each word was a hammer blow against the fragile, unexamined shift in his perspective. He’d been here for weeks, and what did he have to show for it?
Notes on community spirit, a grudging admiration for Sera’s practical leadership after the dam sabotage, and a portfolio of interviews where she neatly sidestepped every intellectual trap he laid. He had texture.
He had local color. He had, as Davies so pointedly noted, botany lessons.
What he didn’t have was the exposé that would cement his career.
He crumpled the telegram, the sharp edges of the paper digging into his palm. The pressure was a familiar, almost welcome, sensation.
It sharpened his focus, reminding him of his purpose. He was Alistair Finch, the debunker, the purveyor of truth in a world rife with comforting lies.
He had a job to do.
He saw her from the window of the small room he rented above the general store. Seraphina Mayhew, a basket hooked over her arm, was heading toward the treeline where the forest rose like a great, green wave to swallow the sky.
She moved with a familiar, unhurried grace, her feet seeming to know the path before she took it.
An opportunity.
This was his chance. Away from the watchful eyes of the town, away from the prying ears of her protective grandmother.
In the woods, her supposed sanctuary, perhaps he could catch her in an unguarded moment. See the “miracle woman” for what she was when no one was looking.
He grabbed his notebook and pencil, a fresh wave of journalistic ambition washing away the unease Davies’s telegram had stirred.
Following her was harder than he’d anticipated. The forest floor was a treacherous tapestry of roots and slick, damp leaves.
Twigs snapped under his city-worn leather shoes with reports as loud as gunshots in the profound quiet. He felt clumsy, a discordant note in a symphony of rustling leaves and distant birdsong.
Sera, meanwhile, drifted through the undergrowth as if she were part of it, her movements economical and silent.
He was so focused on keeping his footing that he nearly collided with her when she stopped. She didn’t turn around.
“You walk heavy for a man trying to be quiet, Mr. Finch,” she said, her voice calm and clear in the still air.
He felt a hot flush of embarrassment creep up his neck. So much for the stealthy observer.
“I… I was hoping to see where you source your remedies,” he managed, the excuse sounding thin and rehearsed even to his own ears.
She finally turned, her expression unreadable. There was no anger, no suspicion, just a quiet appraisal.
“There’s no secret to it. The source is the mountain itself.”
She gestured for him to walk beside her, an invitation that felt more like a summons. “God puts the cure near the affliction, if you have the eyes to see it.”
“A convenient philosophy,” Alistair said, recovering his professional footing. He fell into step beside her.
“If it works, God provided it. If it fails, I suppose it was God’s will.”
Sera didn’t take the bait. “Something like that,” she said, her attention on the plants at her feet.
She bent down, her fingers deftly plucking the broad, ribbed leaves of a plantain weed.
“For stings and drawing out splinters,” she explained, placing it in her basket. “Simple things for simple troubles.”
He watched her, notebook in hand, ready to document the brewing of some mystical potion. But there was no incantation, no ritual.
She spoke of the plants with the straightforward respect a carpenter might have for his wood. She pointed out jewelweed near a patch of poison ivy, explaining how one soothed the rash of the other.
She found a patch of comfrey, its fuzzy leaves drooping in the shade.
“Knitbone,” she called it. “For mending what’s broken.”
Her knowledge was extensive, practical, and utterly devoid of the hocus-pocus he was searching for. It was a science passed down through generations, an oral tradition of botanical medicine.
It was fascinating, but it wasn’t the stuff of a scandalous exposé. Davies would be furious.
“This is all very… pragmatic,” Alistair said, a note of frustration in his voice. “But the people in town… they speak of you as if you have a divine gift. They speak of miracles.”
Sera paused, her hand hovering over a spray of delicate white flowers.
“The miracle isn’t in my hands, Mr. Finch. It’s in the leaf. In the root. In the faith of the person who needs it.”
She looked at him then, her gaze direct.
“You see a weed. I see a purpose. You see a coincidence. They see a prayer answered. We are all looking at the same world, just through different windows.”
They walked deeper into the woods, the canopy thickening above them until the sunlight was a dappled, shifting thing on the forest floor. The air grew cooler, heavy with the scent of damp earth and decaying leaves.
The silence here was different—older, deeper. Alistair found his cynicism being muted by a sense of awe he was reluctant to admit.
This was her church, he realized, and he was an intruder.
She stopped by a gurgling creek, kneeling beside a patch of herbs with feathery leaves.
“Yarrow,” she said softly, almost to herself. “Good for staunching blood. And for breaking a stubborn fever.”
The word hung in the air between them. Fever.
It was as if she had turned a key in a lock he had kept rusted shut for a decade. The image flooded his mind, unbidden and sharp with the clarity of true trauma: his little sister, Lily, her small body burning with heat, her breath a shallow rasp in the gas-lit gloom of her bedroom.
He could still smell the cloying scent of medicinal tinctures, the vinegar-soaked cloths, the desperation.
He hadn’t meant to speak. The words were stones in his throat, forced out by a pressure that had been building for ten years.
“My sister,” he heard himself say, his voice a hoarse stranger’s. “She had a fever. It wouldn’t break.”
Sera stopped gathering the yarrow. She didn’t look at him, but he could feel the shift in her attention, the sudden, absolute focus on his words.
He swallowed hard, the forest around him seeming to recede.
“She was seven. The doctors… they came with their black bags and their modern science. They gave her tinctures. Poultices.” He let out a short, bitter laugh that held no humor. “They looked a lot like the things you have in your basket. They did nothing.”
He stared at the creek, at the water tumbling over smooth, grey stones, relentless and uncaring. He hadn’t spoken of this to anyone, not really.
He had buried it beneath layers of ambition, logic, and a carefully cultivated contempt for the very idea of a benevolent God.
“We prayed,” he continued, the word tasting like ash in his mouth.
“My mother, my father, me. We prayed until our knees ached and our voices were gone. We begged. We bargained. And the fever just kept burning.”
He fell silent. He had said too much.
He had handed this woman, the very subject of his cynical investigation, a piece of his own broken soul. He felt naked, exposed, and foolish.
He braced himself for her response: a pious platitude about God’s mysterious ways, an assurance that his sister was in a better place, or worse, a gentle chastisement for his lack of faith.
Any of those, he could fight. Any of those, he could dismiss.
Instead, Seraphina Mayhew simply rose to her feet, wiping the dirt from her hands onto her apron. She turned to face him, and the look in her eyes was not one of pity.
There was no judgment, no proselytizing glint. There was only a profound, heart-stopping compassion.
A quiet, steady acknowledgment of his pain, as if she were seeing not the sharp-suited journalist from the city, but the hollowed-out boy kneeling at his sister’s deathbed.
She didn’t speak for a long moment. The only sounds were the creek and the frantic beat of his own heart.
“I am sorry for your loss, Alistair,” she said, and the use of his first name was as startling as a shout. Her voice was low and soft, but it carried the weight of absolute sincerity.
That was all.
It was not what he had expected, and it was more devastating than any argument she could have made. Her simple, unadorned empathy bypassed all his defenses.
It didn’t try to explain his pain away or wrap it in a divine plan. It just saw it.
It honored it. He felt a crack spiderweb through the armor he had so carefully constructed around his heart.
He couldn’t speak. He could only nod, a jerky, inadequate motion.
The air in his lungs felt tight. He had come into these woods seeking a hook for his story, a lie to expose.
He had found a truth about himself instead.
The walk back to town was silent, but it was a different kind of silence than before. It was no longer the quiet of the forest, but a space filled with the unspoken weight of his confession.
He was acutely aware of her beside him, no longer just a subject, but a witness.
Back in his room, he sat before his scattered notes. He smoothed out the crumpled telegram from Davies. SALACIOUS DETAILS SELL PAPERS.
He picked up his pencil and stared at the blank page, trying to summon the cynical, detached prose that had made his name.
The so-called ‘Miracle Woman’ of Whisper Creek employs a clever combination of folk medicine and psychological manipulation…
The words felt like a betrayal. He saw not a charlatan, but a woman kneeling by a creek. He heard not a lie, but the devastatingly simple kindness in her voice.
He set the pencil down. The crack in his armor was real, and for the first time in a decade, Alistair Finch had no idea what to write.