Legacy of the Divine Healer

CHAPTER 8: Greenleaf Hall

Ryan Ashton dropped to one knee.

Right there in the plaza, on the stone, among the roses, with the morning sun catching the chrome of the Porsche behind him and the crowd pressing closer to see.

He looked up at Charlotte with an expression that had been carefully constructed to resemble sincerity and said, in the practiced voice of a man who had rehearsed this:

"Charlotte. From the first moment I saw you, I knew. You're the only woman I've ever felt this way about. I haven't looked at another woman since we met. I'm asking you give me a chance. Be with me."

The crowd, primed and waiting, released a wave of sighs and murmurs.

"Get together! get together" The chant started from the gray jacket in the third row, right on cue.

A few genuine bystanders joined in. Because that's what crowds do.

Charlotte looked at Ryan.

Then she looked at Ethan.

Ethan cleared his throat softly. "Since you're being so sincere about it."

He reached out casually, unhurried, as though he were simply straightening a jacket lapel and his hand dipped inside Ryan's breast pocket.

What came out was small, lacy, and entirely unmistakably a woman's undergarment. He held it up between two fingers, in full view of everyone in the plaza.

The crowd went silent.

Ryan's face did something complicated.

"Young Master Ashton," Ethan said pleasantly, "you mentioned not looking at another woman. Would you like to explain where this came from? Or are we going with the 'a friend borrowed the jacket' explanation?"

"I… that's my friend"

"Right." Ethan let it fall to the stone. "And this?"

His hand found Ryan's right trouser pocket.

A small foil packet appeared between his fingers. He held it up with the same pleasant, unhurried expression.

The crowd found its voice again louder this time, and considerably less romantic in tone.

"He was just confessing his undying love"

"With THAT in his pocket?!"

"Scumbag"

Ryan's jaw was tight. His eyes had gone from embarrassed to something harder. "You have no idea what you're"

"And these," Ethan said, producing two small white tablets from Ryan's left pocket, holding them flat on his palm so anyone nearby could see them clearly, "are something I'd strongly recommend explaining to the people around you, given the company you came here hoping to keep."

The silence that followed was a different kind entirely.

Charlotte looked at the tablets on Ethan's palm. Her expression went very still.

Ryan stood up from his knee.

The performance was over. Whatever was underneath the performance the actual Ryan Ashton, the one who carried these things in his pockets on the morning of a public confession, looked at Ethan with the cold, flat eyes of a man who has just decided something.

"You," he said quietly. "You are going to regret this."

"I doubt it," Ethan said.

"Get out of my sight," Charlotte said.

She didn't shout. She didn't need to. Her voice had the particular quality of someone whose family name was on the building behind her and who had decided this conversation was finished.

Ryan looked at her for one more moment.

Then he swung.

He was fast, for someone who spent most of his time in boardrooms. The punch was aimed at Ethan's face, and it was angry enough to have some real intention behind it.

Ethan stepped inside it.

One movement, compact, economical, almost boring in its efficiency and Ryan Ashton's own momentum carried him forward into empty air and then into Ethan's foot, which had found his lower abdomen at the precise moment he needed to stop moving.

Ryan left the ground.

He traveled a short, involuntary distance.

He landed in the heart of nine hundred and ninety-nine red roses.

The crowd made a sound that was half gasp and half something considerably less sympathetic.

"Ah"

Ryan thrashed in the floral arrangement. The roses were decorative but they were also, it turned out, extremely thorny. By the time he got upright he had acquired approximately forty small punctures across his arms and neck and was holding himself with the specific dignity of a man who has lost all of his dignity and is acutely aware of it.

"You" He pointed at Ethan, voice shaking. "You have no idea who you just made an enemy of. I will.."

He took two steps toward the exit.

The manhole cover directly in his path chose that precise moment to shift.

It was one of those older Manhattan covers, slightly unseated, the kind that the city never quite gets around to fixing. Ryan's expensive shoe found the gap at exactly the wrong angle and the cover tipped and he went in with a sound like a man falling into a very undignified future.

A beat of perfect silence.

Then the sound of someone climbing, with difficulty and considerable splashing, back out.

Ryan Ashton emerged from the manhole in what had been a three-thousand-dollar suit. He was covered in things that don't need to be described in detail. The smell arrived before he was fully upright.

His planted man in the gray jacket had already melted into the crowd. His driver materialized from the curb, assessed the situation, and made the professional decision not to open the back door.

Ryan walked to the car.

No one said anything.

The crowd watched him go.

And then, collectively, magnificently, they lost it.

Charlotte pressed her fingers to her lips.

She was trying very hard not to laugh.

She was not succeeding.

"The manhole," she managed. "That was, you didn't…"

"I had nothing to do with the manhole," Ethan said.

"The timing was"

"Entirely coincidental."

She gave up and laughed, the same real, startled laugh from earlier, except longer this time, and she had to turn slightly away from the remaining crowd to do it with any composure.

Around them, the bystanders were in various states of delight.

"Young man, I don't admire many people"

"The girl made the right choice"

"Did you see his face when.."

Charlotte collected herself, smoothed her blazer, and looked at Ethan with an expression that had shed quite a few of its layers.

"How," she said, "did you know what was in his pockets?"

"He had the look of someone who couldn't afford to have his pockets checked," Ethan said.

She studied him. "That's not actually an answer."

"No," he agreed. "It's not."

She held his gaze for a moment longer than she needed to, clearly deciding whether to push further.

She decided not to. For now.

"I owe you lunch," she said. "After work. I'll text you."

"You have my number from the hospital paperwork," Ethan said.

"I do." She shouldered her bag. "Don't get hit by any more cars today."

"Do my best."

She walked back into the Hargrove Building.

Ethan watched the door close.

Then he turned south and kept walking.

---

He found Greenleaf Hall forty minutes later, on a quiet block near Canal Street where the buildings still had the old character of the neighborhood, the kind of street that Manhattan kept threatening to renovate and never quite got around to.

The building was three stories of dark timber and pale stone, entirely out of step with the glass towers on either side of it, which somehow made it feel more permanent than both of them combined. The signage was minimal and elegant. Two vertical banners hung at the entrance, black calligraphy on cream silk:

No one sees the compounding of medicine.

Heaven knows the heart behind it.

Ethan read it twice.

That's the right philosophy, he thought. Too bad about what's inside.

The interior was everything the exterior promised dark wood shelves floor to ceiling, hundreds of labeled drawers in the classical pharmacy style, the layered smell of dried herbs and aged wood that Ethan's new knowledge immediately started cataloging: astragalus, goji, codonopsis, fritillaria, white peony

He stopped at the counter.

Behind it, a young man in his mid-twenties was leaning on the glass case with his phone held at the angle of someone deeply invested in whatever was on the screen. He had the manner of someone who had been placed in this job by a family connection and felt only mild resentment about it.

He glanced up at Ethan. Glanced back down.

"One moment," he said, in the tone of someone for whom one moment could mean anything up to forty-five minutes.

Ethan looked at the counter, looked at the man, looked at the wall of herb drawers behind him.

"I need a dispensing list," Ethan said.

"I said one moment."

"It's fairly specific. Some of the ingredients aren't common stock."

"Sir." The clerk didn't look up. "One. Moment."

Ethan waited.