He gave Grace a senior role in the new center’s community outreach work, with a salary that stunned her into silence. He deeded a proper house on the property to Grace and Marcus. Not the cramped cottage. A real home. He set up a full scholarship fund for Marcus’s education. And privately, he arranged something Marcus wanted more than almost anything else: an apprenticeship with leading botanical researchers so he could continue the work his grandmother had begun in him.
“I don’t want to lose what she taught me,” Marcus said.
“Then we’ll build on it,” Arthur replied.
A year later, Marcus stood in front of the finished wellness center, dressed in a suit Eleanor had insisted on buying him, staring at a building with his grandmother’s name carved in stone.
The gardens around it were full of medicinal plants Marcus had helped select himself—lavender, chamomile, echinacea, and, in a locked greenhouse used for training, carefully controlled toxic specimens that would teach future doctors not to overlook what sat right in front of them.