The Mourning Tea

The kettle screamed, and so did the voice in the steam.

Iris Blackwood pressed her palms against the kitchen counter, watching vapor rise in ghostly spirals. Three months since David's funeral, and she still heard whispers in every sound. The kettle held secrets.

She reached for the mason jar on the highest shelf, her movements deliberate and reverent. Inside, dried petals caught the afternoon light like fragments of bone. Corpse-Blooms. The name felt sharp on her tongue, a word that belonged in old books and darker times. Yet here they were, real as the grief that had hollowed out her chest.

The first time she'd seen them, she'd thought they were mushrooms. Pale, luminescent things growing in clusters around the weathered headstones of Millbrook Cemetery. It was Mrs. Henley from the flower shop who'd explained their true nature, voice dropped to a whisper as if the dead themselves might overhear.

"They only grow where the soil is rich with memory," the old woman had said, her eyes sharp as broken glass. "And they only bloom for those who need to know."

The next morning, Iris found herself at the cemetery with garden shears, kneeling beside Eleanor Watts' grave.

The first cup had nearly killed her.

She'd followed Mrs. Henley's instructions exactly. The tea tasted like earth and endings. Then Eleanor's death crashed through her—the stroke, the panic, the phone she couldn't remember how to use. Iris spent the rest of the day on her bathroom floor, retching and sobbing.

Now, six practice runs later, she'd learned to brace herself. Each death was different—the drowning victim whose lungs had burned with phantom water, the accident victim whose bones had screamed their fractures, the cancer patient whose cells had felt like tiny fires consuming her from within. But she'd endured them all, each one a step closer to the truth she craved.

David's grave remained stubbornly bare. The soil was too fresh, Mrs. Henley had explained. Corpse-Blooms needed time to root in memory, to absorb the final echoes of a life. Three months, maybe four. Iris had been waiting, practicing, preparing herself for the moment when she could finally know.

The kettle's scream faded to a whisper. Iris measured the water carefully, her movements ritualistic. The bloom in her cup was from Thomas Brennan, dead six years from a heart attack while mowing his lawn. She'd chosen him because heart attacks were common. Because she needed to understand what David might have felt when his own heart had stopped.

Steam rose from the cup, carrying the scent of damp earth and forgotten dreams. Iris closed her eyes and lifted the tea to her lips. The liquid was bitter, metallic, tasting of copper pennies and last words.

Thomas Brennan's death hit her like a physical blow. The crushing weight in her chest, the sensation of her heart stuttering like a broken clock. She felt his confusion, his desperate reach for the mower's handle as his legs gave out. The way the summer sky had seemed to brighten impossibly just before everything went dark.

When it ended, Iris sat gasping in her kitchen chair, her shirt soaked with sweat. Her chest ached with phantom pain, but her resolve had only grown stronger. Soon, she would know. Soon, she would understand what David had experienced in his final moments, alone in his office after another late night at the firm.

She needed to know if he'd been afraid. If he'd thought of her. If he'd tried to call her name.

The empty teacup sat before her like an accusation, its porcelain surface stained with the residue of someone else's ending. Outside, the cemetery waited with its secrets buried in soil and stone. And somewhere among those graves, David's Corpse-Bloom was beginning to grow.

***

After weeks of avoidance, she'd finally begun packing his office. His wallet sat on the desk, unopened for three months.

The receipt fell from David's wallet like a dying leaf, landing face-up on his desk. Iris stared at it, the leather billfold trembling in her hands. The Riverside Hotel Bar. October 15th. 11:47 PM.

The date burned itself into her vision. October 15th—the night David died.

She picked up the slip of paper with trembling fingers, studying the faded ink. Two drinks. Premium bourbon, neat. House wine, white. The kind of detail that meant nothing and everything at once. David had been dead by midnight, found slumped over his desk by the cleaning crew. Heart attack, the doctors had said. Stress and genetics, a ticking bomb in his chest that finally exploded.

But this receipt placed him somewhere else entirely. The Riverside Hotel was downtown, twenty minutes from his office. Why would he have been there? Who had he been with?

Iris sank into David's leather chair, the same chair where she'd imagined him taking his final breath. The office still smelled like him—coffee and aftershave and the faint mustiness of legal briefs. She'd been avoiding this room for weeks, but today she'd finally found the courage to start boxing up his things. The partners at the firm had been patient, but they needed the space.

Now she understood why David's secretary, Janet, had looked away when she'd mentioned coming here. Why the cleaning crew had seemed nervous around her. They'd known something was wrong with the official story, but none of them had wanted to be the one to tell the grieving widow.

The journal lay open before her, filled with David's careful handwriting. Case notes, client meetings, billing hours. All of it ending abruptly on October 14th. Nothing about the Riverside Hotel. Nothing about why he'd deviated from his usual routine of working late and coming home to her around one AM.

Iris opened the desk drawers systematically, her movements sharp and purposeful. More receipts scattered through papers like confessions. Lunch at Romano's—a restaurant she'd never heard him mention. Coffee at The Daily Grind on Fifth Street, nowhere near his usual haunts. Small deceptions that painted a picture she didn't recognize.

Her phone buzzed. Sarah's name lit up the screen.

"Iris? How are you holding up?"

Her best friend since college, the one person who'd understood her grief better than anyone.

"I'm cleaning out his office," Iris said, her voice steady despite the storm in her chest. "Finding things."

A pause. "What kind of things?"

Iris looked at the receipt again, at the careful notation of two drinks. "Just... things. Paperwork. You know how he was about keeping everything."

"Do you want me to come over? I could help. We could order Chinese food like we used to."

"No." The word came out sharper than intended. "I need to do this alone."

After Sarah hung up, Iris sat in the growing darkness of David's office. She didn't turn on the lights. The shadows felt appropriate somehow, fitting for the questions that were multiplying like cancer cells in her mind.

Twenty minutes later, she was walking through Millbrook Cemetery with a flashlight, her footsteps muffled by weeks of fallen leaves. David's grave was in the newer section, where the headstones were still clean and the grass grew thick. She'd visited every day for the first month, then every few days, then weekly. But tonight felt different. Tonight felt like an ending.

The beam of her flashlight caught something pale near the base of his headstone. Her breath caught. There, pushing through the dark soil like a ghostly finger, was the first Corpse-Bloom. It was smaller than the others she'd harvested, no bigger than a child's thumb, but it pulsed with that familiar bioluminescent glow.

Iris knelt beside the grave, her knees pressing into the damp earth. "I'm sorry, David," she whispered to the carved letters of his name. "I'm sorry I need to know."

The bloom came free easily, as if it had been waiting for her touch. It felt warm in her palm, almost alive. She tucked it carefully into the small jar she'd brought, then sat back on her heels.

The receipt crinkled in her pocket as she stood. Tomorrow, she would brew the tea that would show her David's final moments. Tomorrow, she would learn whether her husband had died alone and afraid, or whether something else entirely had happened in that hotel bar.

The wind picked up, scattering leaves across the graveyard like scattered secrets. Iris walked home through the darkness, carrying her small jar of truth and her growing certainty that some questions were more dangerous than the answers they revealed.

***

The Corpse-Bloom glowed softly in its jar. Iris had been staring at it for an hour, working up courage.

This wasn't practice. Her hands shook as she filled the kettle, her mind cycling through possibilities. The receipt. The hotel bar. The two drinks.

The water heated slowly, each bubble that rose to the surface like a small revelation. Iris found herself counting them, a nervous habit left over from childhood. One, two, three. Her mother had taught her that counting could calm any fear, but some fears were too large for numbers.

The kettle's whistle was sharper, more insistent. Steam rose in spirals that looked like David's face—strong jaw, kind eyes, mouth contorting with pain. "Just steam," she whispered, but her hands shook violently.

The Corpse-Bloom went into the cup with ceremony. It was smaller than the others, more delicate, but its glow intensified when it touched the water. The liquid turned a deep amber color—not the murky gray of the practice cups, but something rich and golden. The color of David's eyes when he laughed.

Iris sat at the kitchen table, the cup before her like a chalice. The smell rising from it was different too. Not the earthy, decaying scent of the other brews, but something warmer. Something that reminded her of the cologne David wore on special occasions.

She thought about the receipt in her pocket. About Sarah's voice on the phone, the slight hesitation when she'd asked what kind of things Iris had found. About the way Janet had avoided her eyes at the funeral, as if she carried secrets too heavy to share.

"Whatever happened," she said aloud, "I need to know."

The first sip burned her tongue. The second sent fire through her veins. By the third, reality was dissolving around her like sugar in rain.

The vision hit her with the force of a physical blow.

She was David. She could feel his heartbeat, strong and steady at first, then increasingly erratic. She was in the Riverside Hotel bar, the lighting dim and intimate. Across from her—from him—sat Sarah, her dark hair catching the amber glow of the overhead fixtures.

Sarah was laughing at something David had said, her face animated in a way Iris had never seen before. There was an intimacy between them, a shared secret that made the air thick with possibility. David's hand reached across the table, covering Sarah's, and she didn't pull away.

"Iris doesn't have to know," Sarah was saying, her voice soft but certain. "Not yet. Not until we figure out what this means."

David's chest tightened, but not with the coming heart attack. With guilt. With desire. With the terrible weight of betrayal. "She's my wife, Sarah. She's your best friend."

"I know what she is." Sarah's fingers intertwined with his. "But that doesn't change what we are."

The office building was nearly empty, only security lights illuminating the marble lobby. Iris experienced every step through David's nervous system as they rode the elevator to the seventh floor, felt his pulse accelerate with each floor they ascended. His office key trembled in his hand as he unlocked the door, as if his body already knew what his mind refused to accept.

Inside, Sarah turned to face him among the shadows of his desk and filing cabinets, her expression vulnerable and determined. "We can stop," she said. "Right now. We can pretend this never happened."

But David was already crossing the office to her, already pulling her into his arms with a desperation that made Iris's phantom heart ache. Through his eyes, she watched her husband kiss her best friend with a passion she thought had been reserved for her alone.

Then came the first stab of pain. David jerked away from Sarah, his hand flying to his chest. The office tilted sideways as his heart began to stutter, missing beats like a clock winding down.

"David?" Sarah's voice was sharp with panic. "David, what's wrong?"

He couldn't speak. The pain was expanding, a crushing weight that made every breath a battle. He reached for Sarah, his eyes pleading, but she stepped back, her face white with terror.

"Oh God," she whispered. "Oh God, not now. Not here."

David collapsed, his knees hitting the office carpet with a sound like breaking bones. Through the crushing agony in his chest, he watched Sarah grab her phone, then hesitate. Her finger hovered over the emergency number while precious seconds ticked away.

"If I call now," she said, more to herself than to him, "they'll ask questions. They'll want to know why we were here together. Iris will find out."

David tried to speak, to beg her to make the call, but only a wheeze emerged. His vision was darkening at the edges, his heartbeat becoming irregular and weak.

Sarah set the phone down. She paced the office while David died on the floor, her face a mask of selfish panic. Only when his chest stopped moving, when his eyes went glassy and still, did she spring into action. She helped him into his desk chair, arranged papers around him as if he'd been working late, then called 911 with manufactured hysteria.

"I found him at his office," she sobbed into the phone. "I came to check on him when he didn't answer my calls. Please hurry, I think he's having a heart attack."

The vision shattered like glass, leaving Iris gasping in her kitchen chair. The phantom pain in her chest wasn't from David's heart attack anymore—it was from her own heart breaking into a thousand irreparable pieces.

***

The teacup lay in fragments, porcelain scattered like broken promises. Amber liquid stained the white tiles the color of deceit.

Three months of mourning a man who'd never existed. The David she'd loved—faithful, devoted—was fiction. A performance so carefully crafted that even his wife believed it.

The real David had been having an affair with her best friend. Had died in Sarah's arms while she calculated the cost of calling for help. Had been moved, arranged, positioned like a prop in someone else's story so that his widow would never have to know the truth.

Iris laughed, a sound like breaking glass. Sarah's concern. Her constant phone calls. The way she'd held Iris at the funeral, whispering comfort while David's body lay in the casket she'd helped choose. Every gesture of friendship had been a lie built on the foundation of a larger lie.

Sunrise painted the kitchen gold. Light illuminated photographs of their life together—wedding day promises, anniversary dinners, vacation snapshots.

All of it false.

Her phone rang. Sarah's name on the screen, as if summoned by Iris's revelation. For a moment, Iris considered answering, wondered what her friend's voice would sound like now that she knew the truth. Would she hear the guilt hidden beneath the concern? Would Sarah's carefully crafted sympathy sound different when filtered through knowledge of her betrayal?

The call went to voicemail. Then another. Then another.

Iris swept up the broken cup methodically, each shard carefully collected and discarded. The amber stain on the floor proved more stubborn. She scrubbed it with bleach and hot water until her knuckles were raw, but traces remained, like the ghost of a terrible memory.

When the floor was as clean as she could make it, she went to the cabinet where she kept the mason jar of Corpse-Blooms. Six blooms remained, each one glowing softly in its glass prison. Six more deaths she could experience, six more truths she could uncover. But she'd had enough truth for one lifetime.

The jar went into the trash with the broken porcelain. She tied the bag shut with deliberate care, sealing away the magic that had destroyed her carefully constructed world. Some doors, once opened, could never be closed again. But they could be walked away from.

She found ordinary tea in the cabinet. English Breakfast, David's favorite. The kettle heated with normal sounds—no voices, no faces, just physics and heat. She made it exactly as David had taught her, with milk and two sugars.

It tasted like breakfast. Like normalcy. Like the life she'd thought she was living until this morning.

Her phone buzzed with another call from Sarah, but Iris ignored it. There would be time for confrontation later, time for the reckoning that was gathering like storm clouds on her horizon. But not now. Now, she wanted to sit in her kitchen and drink ordinary tea while she decided what kind of person she was going to become.

The woman who had brewed Corpse-Blooms in pursuit of closure was gone, dissolved like sugar in bitter water. The woman who remained was someone new, someone who had swallowed terrible knowledge and found it tasted of freedom as much as betrayal.

Outside, the world continued its ordinary business. Cars passed on the street. Birds sang in the trees David had planted in their first spring together. The mailman delivered letters to the house where a marriage had died quietly in the night, leaving no body to bury.

Iris finished her tea and set the empty cup in the sink. Her mourning was over. Her real life was about to begin.