Salt & Flowers: Chapter Five

Going Viral

Salt & Flowers is a serialized fiction novella releasing weekly to subscribers of By Nina Hendrick all through the summer of 2026. If you’re just beginning the story, you can begin with Chapter One here:

Salt & Flowers

Her morning had started without Murphy, which felt strange. They’d fallen into a rhythm over the past several days.

Samantha had already grown used to the sound of his truck in the driveway before she was even out of bed, the country music he played while he set up and the clatter of his equipment becoming the de facto soundtrack of her summer mornings. The absence of it was oddly conspicuous. She checked her phone, saw there was no message, and shrugged.

Since the response had been enthusiastic to the few short clips of their first project, they’d agreed to keep going. They’d moved to the back garden, where Samantha had spent her first evening enjoying the salt air. It was feeling a bit less ethereal now that she knew poison ivy was threaded through the flowers she’d so admired. But below those dangerous tentacles that they’d painstakingly removed, there were treasures. More fieldstone steppingstones. An old fountain they planned to restore. So many peonies that had been nearly choked out.

After her breakfast, she changed into her work clothes, laced up the boots she’d bought at the big box store the next town over in town after destroying her sneakers on day three, and went out.

The morning was cooler than it had been, an overcast sky keeping the temperature in a reasonable range. She found the loppers where she’d left them, pulled on her gloves — also new purchases, the first pair having been sacrificed to the poison ivy situation — and got to work.

She noticed that their rescued peonies were starting to pop open. She admired the frilly, pink Sarah Bernhardt blooms and resolved to take some inside later. Hopefully without the ants.

She was, she noted with some private satisfaction, getting better at this whole garden thing. She knew what was worth keeping, knew to trim a shrub back to a natural fork rather than just hacking. Murphy had patiently showed her how, and she’d been practicing ever since. Speaking of which, where was he?

She made a few good cuts along the overgrown lavender that had swallowed the edge of the path, cut back some more overzealous catmint (and wondered if it was responsible for the cat’s quirks), and felt unreasonably pleased with herself.

She was still admiring her handiwork when she became aware of a car moving very slowly along the road at the front of the property.

She glanced up. Rather than Murphy’s truck, a dark sedan crept along well below the already-low speed limit of the neighborhood, the driver turned toward the house. She couldn’t see the face clearly. Maybe the kitchen cleaner, finally? But after a moment, it moved on.

She watched the road for a beat after it had gone.

Probably nothing. A tourist who took a wrong turn, maybe, or someone who’d gotten turned around looking for a house number. Maybe rumors of the house going onto the market were already getting out? She went back to work, though the uncanny feeling took a few more minutes to fully dissolve.

Murphy pulled in twenty minutes later, which for him was practically noon. They had lost the best part of the day.

“Lazy bones,” she said, when he rounded the corner of the house.

“I know, I know. Sorry.” He was carrying his usual equipment, his expression doing something she now recognized. Sheepish, but not quite guilty. More like: I’m going to tell you something you won’t like.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

“How’s the back garden?”

“Murphy.”

He set down the equipment and exhaled. “I’ll show you in a bit. I wanted to look at those beds first.” He nodded toward the far wall. “I think we still have to clear out a bit before we’ll know if we need to add anything back. It’ll make more sense if we just keep working.”

She gave him a long look, and he met it blandly, and she decided to let it go for now. They moved to the back garden, Murphy setting up the camera on its tripod, Samantha clipping the mic to her collar and then promptly doing her best to ignore it.

Another car went by, which felt like an unusual amount of traffic.

“There was a car going by earlier that acted funny,” she said, as she went back to the lavender. “Driving really slowly. I’m wondering if locals are starting to piece together that I’m looking to sell.”

Murphy looked up from the tripod. “Could you see who was driving?”

“No, it was too far away to see any details. It was a dark sedan, I don’t know car brands. It was probably nothing. But it was slow.” She shrugged. “I mean, there are a lot of older people in this neighborhood, and they don’t exactly drive fast. But it had a different feeling. I thought I might finally catch the cleaner before they go inside.”

He was quiet for a moment, seeming to consider it. “You know, for what it’s worth, you should probably think about changing the locks.” He said it simply, without drama. “You don’t know the person who has a key.”

Samantha snipped a lavender stem cleanly and let the silence sit for a moment. “I’ve thought of that,” she said. “But whoever has a key is doing my dishes. It doesn’t feel threatening. That’s not exactly the behavior of someone with bad intentions. I hate doing the dishes.”

“Sam.”

“I’m not kidding. Every time I leave something in the kitchen, it’s been cleaned when I come back.” She saw his expression. “It’s clearly someone who knew Ida. Someone she trusted. I’m not worried about it.”

“You’re a woman alone in a house. It’s worth thinking about.” He was uncharacteristically somber today, none of his typical charm or willingness to banter on display.

“Well, now a lot of strangers know I’m here alone because someone is posting it on the internet,” she said pleasantly.

“Yes,” he said, still watching her carefully. “You’re proving my point.”

She pulled off one glove and gestured toward the house. “I actually want to go in and look for my phone.”

He nodded slowly. “Go for it. I’ll start on the far bed.”

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The kitchen was quiet and bright, the overcast morning having burned off into a tentative sun. The breakfast plates she’d left to soak from her eggs (she was going to actually make one of the recipes she’d saved from a video one of these days) were in the drying rack, clean. The cast iron pan was on the stove, dried and lightly oiled, returned to exactly the spot it had come from.

She stood in the doorway for a moment.

She’d been extra alert today, as she waited for Murphy. She hadn’t seen anyone, and there was no sound of movement anywhere in the house.

She looked at the pan for another beat, then went to find her phone.

She found it on the hall table where she’d left it, face-down. Through the open doorway, she spotted the cat in the sitting room, laying on the sofa in the broad stripe of sun that fell through the east-facing window in the late morning.

She was still watching him and reaching for the phone on the side table when she froze.

He was awake. Eyes half-open, blinking slowly. And he was doing something odd.

He arched — a slow, incremental rise of his spine, the kind of arch that happened when he wanted his back scratched. The arch of a cat leaning into a hand. His chin lifted slightly. His eyes closed.

There was no hand, but he acted as if he was being petted.

Samantha stood very still.

His head turned, just slightly, in the way cats did when they were tracking something. Following something along the arm of the sofa. Then back toward the center of the sunbeam. Something that…wasn’t there at all

The arching again.

He gave the tiny chirrup he made when he was pleased.

She watched for a long moment, her hand still outstretched, fingers just touching the edge of her phone case.

Just weird cat behavior. He had been strange in the most benign and consistent ways since she arrived. She decided it was just more of the same.

She unlocked her phone.

Forty-seven text notifications. Then, as she watched, forty-eight, forty-nine, fifty.

Missed calls. Voicemails.

Heart racing, immediately worried for her family, she went to voicemails. And listened.

Not an emergency. But her heart still didn’t slow.

She went to Murphy’s profile, not fully comprehending what she was hearing.

The clip he’d posted last night had 8.1 million views. He’d finally posted the full reveal, including her reaction. Everyone had seen it, somehow it had even made its way onto her parents’ radar.

The photo Murphy posted alongside it from the beach, the house from below, with the cleared side yard and the old stone wall and the mansard roofline, had been shared tens of thousands of times. Skimming, she read the kind of breathless commentary that people usually reserved for natural disasters and celebrity engagements.

the HISTORY of this property

the stone wall is giving me actual physical pain

Ida sounds like the most incredible woman I’ve ever heard of and I’m genuinely grieving her

I will never stop thinking about this house

And then the ones about the video. Including the seven-second clip she’d given him permission to post, her back to the camera, the ocean, the oh, the turn.

I’ve watched this 14 times. FOURTEEN.

she doesn’t even know how much she needed that

the way her whole face just—

I’m not okay. Nobody text me.

Her thumb scrolled without her quite directing it.

SAM AND MURPHY

She seems so ungrateful. Imagine inheriting a house near the ocean and not being happy about it…

@Murphy_GrowsOnYou we need more of this project RIGHT NOW

She had also been found. Her follow requests were in the thousands, and she was endlessly grateful she didn’t have a public profile.

The DMs were, she could see at a glance, comprehensively unmanageable. A number she didn’t recognize had called twice while her phone was face-down.

Her phone buzzed in her hand. Another unknown number.

She stared at it.

It buzzed again. Then, a beat later, a text appeared below the missed call notification. Not from the unknown number. From a contact she hadn’t deleted, because deleting it had felt too final and she hadn’t been ready but now here it was.

Bradley.

Hey. I think I just saw you on Instagram? Can we talk?

Samantha lowered the phone slowly. Mostly to stop herself from throwing it.

The cat had rearranged himself in the sunbeam and appeared to be asleep, one white paw over his flattened nose.

She made her way back to the kitchen.

Through the window, she could see Murphy in the far bed, his back to the house, lifting a piece of the old fountain.

She pressed the phone face-down against her thigh.

The sun came in through the window and lit the clean pan on the stove, the folded linen napkin, the single mug upturned on the drying rack.

She stood there for a long moment before she went back outside.

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Murphy hadn’t pushed at first. She’d been working beside him for the last half hour without speaking, which she supposed was unusual for him.

“Okay,” he said, setting down his trowel. “Break time.”

“I’m good. I want to keep going.”

“I know. Break time anyway.”

She looked at him, at the yard, at the fresh progress they’d made. “We just started back up.”

“It’ll keep.” He stripped off his gloves. “Come on.”

She followed him without further argument. She didn’t have the energy for it.

The path down was more path now than it had been. The first time they’d walked it, they’d been picking through overgrowth. Now you could actually see where you were going, the opening at the bottom clean and clear. It was a door they’d made themselves, she thought.

The tide was halfway out and the small crescent of beach was quiet, the light flat and clean on the water. She lowered herself onto one of the flat rocks near the tideline, put her elbows on her knees, and looked at the horizon.

“Eight million views,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“As of when I went in for my phone. It’s probably more now.”

“Probably.”

She exhaled. “I’ve been found. My profile. There are thousands of follow requests, and my DMs are — “ She shook her head. “I have a work presence online, but… I’m usually the person behind the scenes. That’s the whole point.”

“I know.” He was quiet for a moment. “I’m sorry.”

She looked at him sideways. “Isn’t this…what you do? So are you?”

“About how it’s making you feel — yes. I knew in my gut it would do well. I’m not going to pretend otherwise. Always hope for it.” He turned a small stone over in his hands. “And I’ve had videos go viral before. But not like this.”

“What does that mean? Like what?”

He took a moment. “There are a bunch of media requests. We’re going to have to make a plan.” He blew out a breath, “It got away from me.”

She held onto that, turned it over. It was the most honest thing to say, and she appreciated it more than an apology would have landed just then.

They sat with the water for a while. A gull was working the shallows a little ways down the beach. The wave came in longer than the others, the foam running almost to their rocks before it receded.

“The house is going to sell for more now,” Murphy said eventually. “You know that, right? With all of this.”

She stared at the water. She hadn’t thought about that. And she should have, that was the whole point, that was what any of this had ever been for — and the fact that the thought hadn’t crossed her mind in the last hour felt suddenly diagnostic.

“Good,” she said, with slightly less conviction than she would have liked.

She could feel him looking at her.

“Don’t,” she said.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You were about to.”

He turned back to the ocean. Fair enough, she supposed.

“The car this morning,” he said, after a moment. “Can you describe it at all?”

She frowned. “No more than I already did. Dark blue, maybe? Sedan, four doors. That was all I could see from the yard.” She looked at him. “Why?”

“Probably nothing.” He said it in a tone that she was beginning to understand meant something.

“Murphy.”

“The video has been up for eighteen hours. You’d be surprised what that kind of attention can do. People find addresses. It’s usually just curious and not malicious. But…” He shrugged uncomfortably. “Maybe change the locks.”

She was quiet.

“Okay,” she finally said. “I will.”

He nodded, clearly relieved.

The gull landed on a nearby rock and looked at them with a tilted head.

“I have to respond to my parents,” she said. “And delete the ability for people to send me DMs. Lock down my social media.” She paused. “And change my actual locks.”

“I’ll take care of that last one. We’ll just take it one thing at a time.”

“Is that how you handle it? When things blow up?”

He considered. “When there are millions of people regularly in my business — yeah, mostly. Otherwise, it just gets loud.”

She understood loud. She’d been hearing it all morning, and sitting here was the first moment it had gone quiet.

She didn’t want to go back up yet.

She sat with that for a moment, the wanting. The specific smallness of the crescent beach, the rocks and the cold water and the path they’d cut themselves going back up toward the house. She loved this. Wanted it, suddenly, keenly. She hadn’t let herself want things in a while. It had felt safer.

Murphy stood, brushing sand off his shorts. “Come on. Let’s start checking things off. The day’s a-wasting.”

“You were the one who was late.”

“Yeah, well. I was working out details with Today. ” He gave a grin as he reached down a hand.

She took it and let him pull her up, and they stood close for a beat longer than was strictly necessary. She felt him press the stone he’d been playing with into her hand. Then what he said registered.

“Wait. As in The Today Show?”

She let go in shock and looked up at him.

“The very one. That’s what I’m saying. We’ve got stuff to do.” He strolled ahead,

Still reeling from that, with various unformed questions, she began to follow him back toward the house and the noise, and all of it.

But she glanced back one more time, over her shoulder, at the water.

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