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They lived in the apartment by the sea, the one with the curtains that never quite closed, because everyone agreed the horizon had a right to be seen. Monstera was the broad-shouldered one. He took up space without apology, sleeves rolled, veins like rail lines under his skin. He had come north after the war with a taste for silence and strong light. People said he looked intimidating until you noticed the holes in him—windows left by things he had already survived. Lucky Bamboo, who insisted on being called Sander, worked the angles. He had learned early how to bend without breaking, how to spiral upward in tight rooms. He believed in small fortunes, daily rituals, the quiet power of repetition. He tied his own knots and never spoke about where he learned to do so. Chamaedorea arrived softly, as if entering a room already in progress. She wore gloves even in summer and laughed behind her hand. Everyone underestimated her. She knew how to listen, how to fan a conversation open just enough to let air move through it. When things grew tense, she leaned back and made it seem natural. Zantedeschia dressed in white and red and refused to explain herself. She stood straight, scandalously elegant, and spoke only when it mattered. Men mistook her restraint for coldness. Women recognized it as precision. She believed beauty was an argument that did not need words. Phalaenopsis came last, drifting in from somewhere warmer, trailing stories like silk. She hung near the windows and talked about long afternoons, about patience mistaken for idleness. She bloomed on her own schedule. If pressed, she simply stopped speaking and waited until the room adjusted. At night they listened to the ocean and pretended it was jazz drifting up from the street. Monstera worried about the future. Sander counted nodes and days. Chamaedorea kept them all from colliding. Zantedeschia stood guard. Phalaenopsis bloomed anyway. The decade would end badly, everyone knew that. But for a while, in that room of light and salt, they were upright, breathing, alive—each holding their shape against the slow insistence of time.
The case came in on a salt breeze, the kind that rusts hinges and memories at the same time.
I was staying in a borrowed bungalow with curtains too white to be trusted. Outside, the ocean kept rehearsing the same line—come closer, come closer—like it always does. Inside, the orchids leaned in from the window frame, pale and watchful, pretending to be decorative while listening to everything.
Her name was Calla. Everyone called her White Lily, but nobody knew where she came from. She stood by the bamboo poles like she owned the place, spotless, precise, impossible to ignore. Three nights earlier a man had disappeared from the beach. No footprints going out, no footprints coming back. Just a hat, a rumor, and a bar tab that hadn’t been paid.
The bamboo didn’t talk. It never does. Tall, jointed, disciplined—military types, the lot of them. But the palm behind them whispered constantly, fronds rattling like loose files. I caught fragments: gambling debt, boat at dawn, wrong tide.
The monstera sat low and broad, blocking half the view, pretending it wasn’t the muscle in the room. Leaves split like old scars. It had seen things. It always had. I lit a cigarette and waited. You don’t rush the truth in the tropics. The heat brings it up eventually.
The orchids bloomed right on cue. They always do. Beautiful, patient, deadly calm. One of them dropped a petal into my glass. That’s when I knew.
The man hadn’t drowned. He’d been carried—quietly—wrapped in courtesy and shade. Helped into a boat by someone who smiled too easily. Calla didn’t deny it when I asked. She never wasted words.
By morning the tide erased the last questions. I packed my bag, left the curtains open, and walked out. The plants stayed. They always do.
The tropics keep their secrets alive. They just let you think you solved them.
