[STORY] What she buried destroyed her.
What she buried destroyed her.
What the Garden Kept
Chapter One: The Promotion She Didn’t Get
There is a particular kind of hunger that grows in people who have worked hard for a long time and watched, again and again, as the reward for that work goes to someone else. Delphine Auvray had felt that hunger for six years at Meridian Consulting, watching junior colleagues rise past her, watching credit for her own careful, unglamorous labor accrue quietly to other names on other people’s promotion letters, until the hunger stopped feeling like ambition and started feeling like something closer to desperation.
The senior partner position had been hers to lose, by every reasonable measure of merit — six years of consistent results, the largest client portfolio in her division, a reputation among the firm’s actual clients, if not always among its internal politics, as the most reliable person in the building. And then, in the space of a single afternoon meeting she wasn’t even invited to attend, the position had gone instead to Solange Fontenay, a woman four years Delphine’s junior whose primary qualification, as far as Delphine could determine, was an effortless social ease with the firm’s senior leadership that Delphine herself had never quite managed to cultivate.
Delphine had smiled through the announcement, had shaken Solange’s hand at the small celebration the firm organized that Friday, had said all the appropriate, gracious things a good colleague says in exactly this situation. She had gone home that evening and sat alone in her kitchen for three hours, staring at nothing, feeling something in her chest curdle into a shape she didn’t fully recognize and didn’t, in that moment, particularly want to examine.
It was her aunt Marceline, visiting from the countryside two weeks later, who first mentioned, almost in passing during an otherwise ordinary family dinner, that there were older ways of correcting an unfair situation — practices Marceline had learned from her own grandmother, practices most people in the family considered superstition better left in the past, but that Marceline herself still, quietly, believed carried real weight when performed correctly. Delphine had laughed it off at the time. She would not laugh it off two weeks later.
Chapter Two: What Marceline Explained
Delphine called her aunt back within the week, unable to fully release the memory of that dinner conversation from her mind, the specific, unsettling confidence with which Marceline had described practices Delphine had always assumed belonged entirely to folklore rather than anything approaching real, actionable method.
“I wasn’t entirely serious, that night at dinner,” Marceline said, though something in her tone suggested this wasn’t quite the full truth. “But since you’re asking directly, I’ll tell you honestly what I know, and you can decide for yourself what to do with it. There are old practices, passed down through the women in our family for generations, involving the burial of a rival’s personal belongings — something they’ve worn against their skin, ideally, or handled frequently enough to carry something of their essence. Buried properly, with the right words spoken over the earth, it’s meant to draw misfortune toward the person the item belonged to, weakening their position enough that whatever they’ve taken unfairly might eventually return to its rightful owner.”
“Have you ever actually done this?” Delphine asked, feeling simultaneously foolish for asking and unable to stop herself from wanting a genuine answer.
Marceline was quiet for a long moment. “Once,” she admitted. “Many years ago, when I was younger than you are now, over a man I believed had been unfairly taken from me by another woman. I won’t tell you the full story, because it isn’t a story I’m proud of, and because the outcome wasn’t what I expected or wanted. I’ll only tell you this — these practices are never as clean or as contained as they seem when someone explains them to you casually over dinner. If you’re genuinely considering this, Delphine, I want you to think very carefully about what you’re actually asking to set in motion, and whether the promotion you’ve lost is worth whatever price these old methods tend to demand in return.”
Delphine thanked her aunt for the warning and told her, with more conviction than she actually felt, that she had no real intention of pursuing anything so extreme over a workplace disappointment. She was lying, even as she said it, to both her aunt and herself.
Chapter Three: The Theft
Delphine spent the following two weeks watching Solange Fontenay with an attention that felt, even to Delphine herself, uncomfortably close to obsession — noting her habits, her schedule, the small, personal details of her daily routine that Delphine had never previously had cause to observe so closely.
She noticed, during a shared lunch break in the office kitchen, that Solange always removed a delicate gold bracelet before washing her hands, setting it briefly on the counter before sliding it back onto her wrist — a bracelet, Delphine had learned from overheard office conversation, that had belonged to Solange’s grandmother, worn daily for years, rarely if ever removed except for exactly this small, habitual moment of handwashing.
The opportunity, when it finally arrived, came almost too easily to feel like the product of careful planning rather than simple, uncomfortable coincidence. Delphine entered the kitchen just as Solange was leaving, the bracelet still sitting on the counter beside the sink, Solange having been called away suddenly by an urgent phone call before she could complete her usual routine of sliding it back onto her wrist.
Delphine stood alone in that kitchen for a long moment, the bracelet within easy reach, feeling her heart pound with an intensity that made the moment stretch out considerably longer than its actual few seconds of duration. She told herself, even as her hand moved toward the bracelet, that she was simply going to return it to Solange directly, a small act of colleague-ly helpfulness that would go unremarked in the ordinary flow of office life.
She did not return it to Solange. She slipped it into her own pocket and left the kitchen with a composure that surprised her, given the magnitude of what she had just done, and carried it home that evening with a growing, uncomfortable awareness that she had just crossed a threshold considerably more significant than simple office pettiness.
Chapter Four: The Burial
Delphine performed the ritual her aunt had described three nights later, in the small garden behind her townhouse, beneath the rose bed she had cultivated carefully over the preceding several years — a location chosen, she told herself, for its privacy and its established soil, though some part of her recognized, even in the moment, that burying something beneath the very plants she tended with such visible care carried its own uncomfortable symbolism she wasn’t yet prepared to examine.
She had called Marceline once more before proceeding, extracting from her aunt, despite considerable reluctance, the specific words that were meant to accompany the burial — an old phrase in a dialect Delphine barely understood, which Marceline transcribed for her phonetically over the phone, along with a final, serious warning that Delphine, in her determination, chose not to fully absorb.
“Once you speak these words and complete the burial,” Marceline said, “you cannot simply change your mind and undo it easily. What you’re setting in motion will move on its own timeline, toward its own conclusion, and I want you to understand that clearly before you proceed. Are you certain, Delphine? Truly certain this is worth what you’re about to do?”
Delphine, standing in her dark garden with Solange’s bracelet cold in her palm, told her aunt yes, she was certain, and ended the call before Marceline could offer any further hesitation that might weaken her resolve. She dug a shallow hole beneath the largest rose bush, the one that had, for three consecutive years, produced the most vibrant blooms in her entire garden, and placed the bracelet carefully into the earth, speaking the unfamiliar words Marceline had provided as precisely as she could manage, feeling, as she finished, a strange, cold pressure settle briefly against her chest before dissipating into the ordinary night air around her.
She covered the bracelet with soil, patted the earth back into its familiar shape, and went inside to sleep, telling herself the whole endeavor had likely accomplished nothing beyond satisfying some private, irrational need to feel she had taken action against an injustice she otherwise had no power to correct.
Chapter Five: The First Changes
The first sign that something had actually shifted arrived within the week, though Delphine, in the early days, attributed it entirely to ordinary office politics rather than anything connected to her garden’s new occupant. Solange, previously effortless and confident in every leadership meeting Delphine observed, began, gradually, to show small signs of strain — a hesitation in her usual smooth presentations, a series of minor errors in client communications that seemed entirely uncharacteristic for a woman whose primary professional strength had always been her polished, careful precision.
Delphine watched these developments with a complicated mixture of satisfaction and something closer to unease, a feeling she found herself unable to fully name or examine, given how carefully she had trained herself, over the preceding two weeks, not to think too directly about what she had actually done in that garden.
The changes accelerated over the following month. Solange, once universally regarded as the office’s rising star, found herself, increasingly, at the center of small but accumulating professional missteps — a major client account nearly lost due to a scheduling error that seemed, by every account, entirely out of character for someone previously known for meticulous attention to detail; a presentation to the firm’s board that went uncharacteristically poorly, Solange stumbling over material she would ordinarily have delivered with complete confidence; a growing, visible exhaustion that colleagues began, quietly, to comment on among themselves, wondering aloud whether the pressure of her new senior position had simply proven more than she could actually handle.
Delphine, watching all of this unfold from her own steady, unaffected position within the firm, felt the satisfaction of watching her rival struggle gradually curdle into something considerably more complicated as the weeks continued — a growing awareness that whatever she had actually set in motion beneath her rose bed carried a momentum entirely beyond her own control, moving toward some conclusion she had never fully considered when she’d knelt in her dark garden, speaking words she barely understood.
Chapter Six: What Grew
It was in the garden itself, roughly six weeks after the burial, that Delphine first noticed something genuinely unsettling rather than simply professionally satisfying. The rose bush beneath which she had buried Solange’s bracelet, previously the most reliably vibrant plant in her entire garden, began, inexplicably, to wither — not the gradual, seasonal decline any gardener might expect as autumn approached, but something faster and more troubling, leaves curling and blackening within days despite Delphine’s careful, increasingly anxious attention to watering and soil quality.
She consulted a gardening forum online, describing the symptoms as best she could, receiving suggestions about root rot or fungal infection that didn’t quite match what she was actually observing — the specific, localized nature of the decline, contained entirely to that single bush while every other plant in her garden continued thriving without incident.
She found herself, increasingly, avoiding that particular corner of her garden altogether, a reluctance she recognized, with growing discomfort, as something closer to genuine fear than simple gardening frustration. She began experiencing, around this same period, a persistent, low anxiety that followed her through her days at the office — not guilt exactly, or not only guilt, but something that felt, increasingly, like the sensation of being watched, observed by something she couldn’t identify or locate, a discomfort that intensified specifically whenever she found herself near that particular section of her own backyard.
She called Marceline again, describing these developments with a directness she hadn’t managed during their earlier conversations, and her aunt’s response, once Delphine had finished explaining, carried a gravity that made Delphine’s growing unease considerably worse rather than better.
“You need to dig it back up,” Marceline said. “Immediately, Delphine. What you’re describing isn’t simply your imagination working overtime from guilt. It sounds like whatever you set in motion has begun drawing something back toward you, rather than remaining contained to its intended target. This happens sometimes, when the ritual isn’t performed with complete precision, or when the person performing it carries too much conflicted emotion during the burial itself. The intention becomes muddled, and the consequence doesn’t always flow in the single direction you originally intended.”
Chapter Seven: The Excavation
Delphine dug up the rose bed that same evening, working by flashlight in her dark garden with a growing desperation that made her previously careful gardening instincts entirely irrelevant, tearing at the withered bush’s roots with bare hands until she finally located the bracelet, buried exactly where she had left it six weeks earlier, though something about its appearance now struck her as subtly, unsettlingly different from what she remembered burying.
The gold had darkened, not with the ordinary tarnish six weeks underground might reasonably produce, but with something closer to a deep, uneven discoloration that seemed to shift slightly under her flashlight’s beam, an effect Delphine told herself was simply a trick of the poor lighting even as some deeper, more honest part of her recognized this explanation as inadequate to what she was actually observing.
She held the bracelet in her palm, uncertain what to do with it next, feeling the same cold pressure against her chest she’d experienced during the original burial, considerably stronger now, accompanied by a wave of nausea that made her briefly worry she might actually be sick right there in her torn-up garden bed.
She called Marceline again, this time in a state of genuine panic that made her aunt’s own voice, on the other end of the line, sharpen with visible alarm. “I have it,” Delphine said. “I dug it up. What do I do now?”
“You cannot simply return it to her,” Marceline said. “Not directly, not with any acknowledgment of what you’ve done. That would only compound the damage, connecting you even more directly to whatever’s already been set in motion. You need to find a way to return it anonymously, and you need someone with genuine experience in these older practices to help you properly release whatever’s currently attached to both the item and, I suspect, to you as well, given what you’re describing about feeling watched. This isn’t something I know how to safely undo myself, Delphine. I only ever performed the initial ritual, many years ago. I never had to manage what happened when something like this went wrong.”
Chapter Eight: Grandmother Solange
Marceline, drawing on her own family’s older connections, eventually located a woman named Perpétue Dagenais, elderly and largely retired from active practice but still, occasionally, willing to help with situations exactly like the one Delphine now found herself facing. Perpétue agreed to see Delphine, though her tone over the phone carried a wariness that made clear she understood the seriousness of what she was being asked to address.
Perpétue’s small apartment, when Delphine finally arrived for their consultation, felt considerably more ordinary than Delphine had somehow expected, given the gravity of the situation bringing her there — comfortable, cluttered with the accumulated belongings of a long life, nothing about the space suggesting the kind of dramatic, theatrical mysticism Delphine had, without quite realizing it, been bracing herself to encounter.
Perpétue examined the darkened bracelet carefully, her expression growing increasingly serious as she turned it over in her weathered hands. “This was not performed carefully,” she said finally, looking up at Delphine with an directness that made Delphine want to look away from the older woman’s careful, assessing gaze. “You spoke the words without truly understanding what you were invoking, and you carried, I suspect, considerable guilt and conflict alongside your desire for revenge, even as you performed the ritual. That combination — genuine harmful intent, mixed with unresolved guilt — creates exactly the kind of muddled outcome you’re now experiencing. The influence you attempted to direct toward this other woman has, instead, begun attaching itself more strongly to you, the person who actually carried out the act, rather than remaining focused entirely on your intended target.”
“What does that mean for Solange? Is she going to be all right?”
“She may recover on her own, now that the item has been removed from continued burial,” Perpétue said. “The damage already done to her professional circumstances likely won’t simply reverse itself, but I don’t believe her situation will continue actively deteriorating the way it has been. You, however, are a different matter entirely.”
Chapter Nine: What Perpétue Saw
“I need you to understand something clearly,” Perpétue continued, setting the bracelet down carefully on the small table between them. “When these older practices go wrong — and they go wrong more often than the people casually recommending them to their nieces over dinner tend to acknowledge — the consequence doesn’t simply disappear. It has to go somewhere. In your case, because the ritual was performed with such conflicted, imprecise intention, I believe a significant portion of what you were attempting to direct at your colleague has instead attached itself to you directly, and will continue manifesting in your own life until it’s properly addressed.”
Delphine felt something cold settle deep in her stomach, listening to this assessment. “What kind of manifestation? What am I actually facing?”
“It’s difficult to predict with complete precision,” Perpétue said. “But based on what you’ve described — the persistent anxiety, the sensation of being watched, the way the plant itself began withering in a manner inconsistent with ordinary decay — I believe you’re already experiencing the early stages of what will, if left unaddressed, continue accumulating into more significant misfortune across various areas of your life. Career setbacks, similar to what you attempted to inflict on your colleague. Health difficulties, potentially, given how deeply that cold sensation you’re describing seems to have already settled into your body. Relationship strain, as the people around you begin, without fully understanding why, finding your presence increasingly difficult or draining to be around.”
Delphine sat with this assessment in a silence that stretched long enough for Perpétue to eventually continue, unprompted. “I want to be honest with you, Delphine, because I think false comfort would serve you poorly here. I can help you address this — there are practices that can properly release what’s become attached, and reduce the ongoing consequence you’re likely to otherwise face. But I cannot promise you a complete, clean resolution, particularly given how much time has already passed since the original ritual, and how deeply whatever you set in motion appears to have already taken hold.”
Chapter Ten: The Release
The process Perpétue outlined, over the following weeks, required a level of sustained commitment that Delphine found genuinely difficult to maintain alongside her ordinary professional and personal obligations — regular visits to Perpétue’s apartment for guided rituals meant to gradually release whatever had attached itself to Delphine during the original, poorly performed burial; careful attention to specific practices around her own home and garden meant to prevent any further accumulation of the same kind of muddled, harmful energy; a difficult, ongoing process of genuine self-examination that Perpétue insisted was every bit as important as the ritual elements themselves.
“You cannot simply perform the correct actions while still carrying the same unresolved anger and desperation that led you to this point in the first place,” Perpétue told her, during one of their sessions. “The ritual itself is only ever a reflection and amplification of what the person performing it actually carries inside them. If you genuinely want to release what’s attached to you now, you need to honestly examine why you felt so desperate to harm someone else in the first place, rather than simply focusing on undoing the specific technical mistakes in how you performed the ritual.”
This particular guidance proved, over the following months, considerably more difficult for Delphine to fully implement than the more straightforward ritual practices Perpétue also prescribed. It required Delphine to sit, honestly, with the full scope of her own professional frustration and jealousy — not simply the surface-level unfairness of watching a promotion go to someone else, but the deeper, more uncomfortable questions about why that particular disappointment had proven capable of pushing her toward something as extreme as theft and dark ritual, rather than toward more ordinary, constructive responses to career disappointment.
She found herself, during this period, seeking out a therapist for the first time in her adult life, a decision that felt, in some ways, considerably more difficult to make than her initial visit to Perpétue, requiring her to confront the psychological reality underlying her actions rather than simply the mystical or spiritual dimensions Perpétue’s practice addressed.
Chapter Eleven: Solange’s Recovery
Solange Fontenay’s professional difficulties, Delphine observed with careful, guilty attention over the following months, gradually began resolving on their own, roughly in the timeframe Perpétue had suggested following the bracelet’s removal from its burial site. The client account she had nearly lost stabilized. Her presentations regained their previous polish and confidence. The visible exhaustion that colleagues had been quietly commenting on began, gradually, to lift, replaced by something closer to her original, effortless competence.
Delphine found herself, during this period, developing a complicated, private guilt toward Solange that she had no clear way of resolving, given that any direct acknowledgment of what she had actually done would only compound the harm rather than provide any genuine path toward repair. She began, instead, finding smaller, indirect ways to support her colleague’s continued professional success — advocating for Solange’s ideas in meetings where Delphine’s own established credibility carried weight, offering genuine, substantive help on projects where her expertise could meaningfully assist Solange’s transition into her new senior role, treating her, in every practical, observable way, as a colleague genuinely deserving of support rather than as a rival to be undermined.
Solange, for her part, noticed this shift in Delphine’s behavior without understanding its actual origin, and began, gradually, treating Delphine with a warmth and genuine collegial respect that Delphine found herself accepting with a complicated mixture of gratitude and continued, private guilt.
“I don’t know if I ever properly thanked you for your help on the Rousseau account presentation,” Solange told her, several months after the original ritual, during a rare quiet moment in the office kitchen — the same kitchen, Delphine noted with an uncomfortable internal flinch, where she had originally stolen the bracelet. “I was genuinely struggling with that client relationship for a while there, and your input made a real difference in getting things back on track.”
“I’m glad I could help,” Delphine said, meaning it more genuinely than Solange could have possibly understood, given everything underlying that simple, ordinary workplace exchange.
Chapter Twelve: What Remained of the Garden
Delphine’s rose bed never fully recovered, despite her continued, careful attention to the soil in the months following the bracelet’s removal — the specific bush beneath which she had performed the burial remained stunted and sparse, never regaining the vibrant blooms that had once made it the centerpiece of her entire garden, a permanent, visible reminder of what she had once, in a moment of desperate ambition, chosen to plant there instead of the ordinary rose it had been meant to nurture.
She eventually removed the stunted bush entirely, replacing it with a new planting in the same spot — not out of any belief that the physical replacement itself carried special significance, but simply because she found she could no longer look at that particular corner of her garden without the accompanying weight of memory, and needed, for her own ongoing recovery, some visible marker that something had genuinely changed in that space since the difficult months following the original ritual.
Perpétue, during their final formal session together, offered Delphine a piece of guidance that stayed with her considerably longer than the specific technical instructions for the various release practices they had worked through together. “What you buried in that garden,” Perpétue said, “was never really Solange’s bracelet, not in the sense that actually mattered most. What you buried was your own desperation, your own willingness to cause genuine harm to another person rather than sit with the difficult, ordinary disappointment of a promotion you didn’t receive. The bracelet was simply the vehicle. The actual thing you planted, and the thing that nearly destroyed you in return, was the choice itself — the moment you decided harming someone else felt more bearable than simply feeling your own hurt honestly.”
Chapter Thirteen: What Delphine Learned
Delphine remained at Meridian Consulting for two more years following the entire ordeal, eventually leaving not out of any continued professional dissatisfaction, but to pursue an opportunity at a smaller firm that offered her, for the first time in her career, the kind of leadership role she had once believed only a senior partnership at Meridian could provide — an opportunity she pursued and earned through entirely ordinary, honest professional effort, without any further recourse to the kind of desperate, harmful shortcut that had so nearly cost her everything two years earlier.
She maintained, throughout the remainder of her time at Meridian, a genuine and increasingly warm friendship with Solange, one built on the accumulated foundation of Delphine’s quiet, sustained support during Solange’s early, difficult months in her new position — a friendship that Delphine understood, privately, carried a complicated weight of guilt she would likely never fully resolve, but that had, nonetheless, become genuinely meaningful and important to her in its own right, entirely separate from its complicated origins.
She thought, often, in the years that followed, about her aunt Marceline’s original warning — that these older practices were never as clean or contained as they seemed when explained casually over dinner, that the price they demanded rarely flowed only in the single direction the person performing them originally intended. She had learned, at considerable personal cost, exactly how true that warning had been, and she carried that lesson forward not as superstition to be dismissed, but as a genuine, hard-won understanding of something she had once been arrogant enough to believe she could control entirely on her own terms.
What she had buried beneath her rose bed had never really been Solange Fontenay’s bracelet. It had been her own capacity for genuine cruelty, given form and set into motion, and it had returned to her, in the end, considerably more consequence than she had ever intended to inflict on anyone else. She had survived it, eventually, through the difficult, sustained work of genuine repair rather than any quick or easy fix. But she never again allowed herself to forget exactly what it had cost her to learn that lesson, or how close she had come, in her desperation and her hunger for a promotion that had never actually been worth what she’d nearly sacrificed to obtain it, to being genuinely, permanently destroyed by what she had chosen, in a moment of weakness, to plant.
— End —
