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Rooted SecretsShadow Bay had a silence to it.Not the kind born of peace, but of knowing. A hush that clung to the trees and hung low over rooftops like fog that forgot how to lift. In spring, the town smelled of wet evergreens, thawed regret, and secrets too stubborn to rot.People came to Shadow Bay to disappear. What they didn't realize was that ghosts traveled light.Sydney Collins stood barefoot in her kitchen, tea steaming in one hand, her eyes fixed on the shadowed trail vanishing behind her home. Pine needles slick with rain stitched a path into the woods. Somewhere down that trail lay choices she could never take back.Behind her, a malpractice complaint from the Oregon Medical Review Board sat on the kitchen table, white and thin, accusing. She hadn't touched it since yesterday.Instead, her gaze slid once again to the corner of the living room, where the old secretary desk sat like a courtroom witness too loyal to break. The bottom drawer, still slightly crooked from the move, never closed right. Ryan and Spencer had nicked it, hauling it in, and patched it with glue and marker, but it never fully held. Neither did the truth.Inside that drawer was the journal. The one she began after John's funeral. The one she never reread. It held entries written in her own hand, precise, measured, and damning. Mentions of the oleander tea with regrets dressed as rationale.She used to believe in rules. Boundaries. Ethics. But ethics didn't raise a son. And some marriages don't end in death; they end in decisions.Bill had only suggested the oleander plant. It was Sydney who made the cocktail for John.Ryan would be home soon, just a few weeks away from finishing Stanford Medical School, with his hematology residency lined up, and a bright future ahead. He was the kind of son people dreamed about, and the kind Sydney had nearly destroyed herself to protect.And now, letters from a Texas law firm hinted that Dalton's estate had unfinished business. Dalton, the man who knew Ryan's DNA better than any living soul.Then there was David. Brilliant. Helpful. Too helpful. His questions about the clinic's AI implementation, the finances, and the expansion, along with his polished curiosity, left her uneasy.Secrets have a half-life. And Sydney was beginning to feel the radiation burn.She walked to the secretary desk, knelt beside the drawer, and pressed her palm against it, not to open it, just to feel its refusal.It held.For now.Rising, she took her tea to the back porch and left the malpractice complaint on the table.Outside, the fog thickened around the trees like breath on a mirror. Somewhere beneath Raincrest Cellars' vineyard soil and grape vine roots, things were beginning to stir.In Shadow Bay, some secrets are buried. Others are pruned. But all of them bloom eventually.
