“What did you do?”
“Nothing. Just what Miss Ava asked. Warm pressure around the ankle, then the arch. I’ve seen my aunt do it for my grandmother.” Eli hesitated. “Except she said the water felt strange before I touched her.”
Daniel turned back to Ava. “Strange how?”
Ava swallowed. Her throat felt dry. “At first it was cold. Then it pulsed.”
“Pulsed?”
“Like something knocking from underneath.”
Daniel’s expression changed so quickly that Ava almost missed it. The hope vanished. Something else took its place.
Fear.
Eli slowly lifted his hands from the copper basin. Tiny silver flakes clung to his wet palms, catching the afternoon light.
“Sir,” he said, quieter now, “this wasn’t rainwater.”
Daniel looked down.
The water in the basin had turned faintly gray, almost metallic. Beneath it, the grass had changed color. Around the basin, the green blades were bruised blue-black in a perfect circle.
Ava looked from the grass to her father. “Dad?”
Daniel stood.
“Where did you fill this?” he asked.
His voice was too controlled. Ava knew that voice. He used it with lawyers, doctors, and board members who disappointed him.
Eli pointed beyond the greenhouse, toward the old stone pump house half-hidden behind ivy at the far edge of the garden.
“The side door was open,” he said. “The rain barrel by the cottage was empty. There was a tank inside.”
Ava stared at the pump house.
All her life, it had been locked. As a child, she had believed monsters lived there. Later, when she was old enough to ask, her father said the floor was unstable and the pipes were dangerous. After her accident, she stopped asking about anything that required crossing the garden.
Daniel’s jaw clenched.
“Inside,” he said.
Ava looked up at him. “What is in there?”
“Nothing you need to worry about.”
That was the wrong answer.
For four years, Ava had been fed careful answers. Recovery would be difficult. Pain might return, or it might not. The legal case over the bridge collapse was complicated. Her mother’s old research papers were private. Her father was only protecting her.
Protection had become another word for walls.
Eli shifted beside the basin. “There was a name on the tank.”
Daniel’s eyes snapped to him.
Ava noticed.
“What name?” she asked.
Eli wiped his wet hand against his trousers, as if the silver flakes made him uneasy. “Mercer Neurodyne.”
The garden went silent.
Even the wind seemed to stop.
Ava’s father had built the Mercer fortune on medical technology, then sold most of the company before Ava turned twenty. Mercer Neurodyne had once been everywhere: hospital wings, conference banners, glowing articles about nerve stimulation and spinal research. Then, after Ava’s mother died, the name disappeared. Daniel said the work had become too painful to continue.
Ava had believed him.
“Mercer Neurodyne shut down years ago,” she said.
Daniel didn’t answer.
“Dad.”
He looked toward the pump house, and his face had the gray pallor of a man seeing a ghost he had tried to bury.
“Eli,” he said, “go back to the cottage.”
The boy did not move.
Daniel’s voice hardened. “Now.”
Eli lowered his gaze, but only for a second. “Miss Ava asked me to help her in the garden. I’m still helping.”
Ava felt something loosen in
