The spoon struck the pine floor and spun beneath the bed.
For one sharp second, everyone in the small upstairs room froze.
The widowed rancher stared at the young woman as though she had lost her mind.
His ten-year-old son tightened both hands around the back of the wooden chair.
His five-year-old daughter stood barefoot near the doorway, her faded dress hanging crookedly from one shoulder.
And beneath three handmade quilts, four-year-old Weston Hale burned with a fever so violent that his tiny chest rose and fell in shallow, hurried breaths.
Nola Vance barely noticed any of them.
She was staring at the brown medicine bottle in her hand.
A stream of late-afternoon sunlight entered through the dusty window and passed through the amber glass. Inside the bottle, the cloudy liquid separated slowly, revealing a thin residue clinging to the bottom.
Nola tilted it.
The residue moved.
Not like ordinary sediment.
Too heavy.
Too oily.
She uncorked the bottle again and held it beneath her nose.
The smell was faint.
Bitter herbs.
Alcohol.
Something mineral underneath.
Something she remembered.
Not from a doctor’s office.
From an apothecary storeroom in St. Joseph nearly seven years earlier, when she had spent eighteen months grinding powders, boiling syrups, and cleaning instruments for an old pharmacist who believed knowing what killed a person was nearly as important as knowing what cured them.
Nola looked at Garrick.
“Don’t give him another drop.”
Garrick’s exhaustion vanished behind sudden anger.
“What?”
“I said don’t give him any more.”
“That medicine is the only thing the doctor left us.”
Nola held the bottle toward the light again.
“Then your doctor either doesn’t know what he’s giving children…”
She turned slowly toward him.
“…or he knows exactly what this does.”
Garrick stepped forward.
His face had gone hard.
“Be careful.”
Nola did not move.
“I am being careful.”
“That man treated my wife.”
“And how did that end?”
The words left her before she could stop them.
Garrick’s face changed.
The room changed with it.
Eli looked toward the floor.
Little Clara pressed both hands against her mouth.
Nola regretted the cruelty immediately, but not enough to withdraw the question.
Garrick’s voice dropped.
“My wife died.”
“I know.”
“You’ve been in this house less than one hour.”
“And your son is lying here with a fever high enough to cook sense out of him while you’re about to pour something down his throat that I would not give to a dying rat.”
His jaw tightened.
Nola took a breath.
She softened her voice.
“Where did this come from?”
Garrick looked at the bottle.