Salt & Flowers: Chapter Two

The Landscaper

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

Samantha slept surprisingly well, in spite of the unfamiliar place. She’d decided on the guest room she’d slept in during her visits as a child, preferring the familiar. The big brass bed with its frilly canopy had always made her feel like a real-life version of her namesake American Girl doll.

It was a little dusty, but she’d at least planned ahead here, bringing her own bedding. She’d have to prioritize getting the original linens refreshed. She wished she could just sell the place as is, leaving Ida’s antiques in place and simply cleaning it up for the listing photos.

Ida had an impeccable eye for putting rooms together. Samantha felt a pang at the idea that it might not be easy to find a buyer with that same sensibility. The eclectic style of the antiques was more particular than modern buyers tended to gravitate toward, and it was likely that changes would have to be made — staging, at minimum, or worse, painting.

As she descended the stairs, she ran her hand along the dark chestnut banister, wincing as she imagined it painted white. She loved a good paint makeover, but this wasn’t some 1970s special that had been swathed in orange stain. Someone had likely carved this wood by hand well over a century ago. It was just a little dusty, and with a good polish it could look exactly as it once had. Or better, really, considering the patina that clearly held stories — and a history that now she’d never fully know.

She was lost in these thoughts as she made her way downstairs. Before she reached the bottom step, the cat came out of nowhere and wound between her legs, nearly sending her tumbling the rest of the way. She barely—barely—caught herself on the newel post and cursed.

“Seriously?” She shot it a glare, which it received with unblinking and profound indifference.

She’d have to add a humane society trip to her list. She did not need a homicidal cat.

It became quickly apparent what the cat was looking for as she made her way into the kitchen. It stationed itself in front of a lower cabinet with the focused energy of an angry older woman who’d been waiting for management to arrive. Samantha opened the cabinet and found, predictably, a tidy stack of cat food tins. She opened one without ceremony and emptied it into the antique china plate sitting on a little mat, clearly intended for the purpose. The cat ignored her entirely from that point forward.

Desperately wishing for a coffee, she put the kettle on and reached for the mug she’d left on the counter the night before. Then she froze.

It wasn’t there.

She remained still for a moment, certain she was misremembering. When she’d come back in from the garden, after the sun had officially gone down, she’d been tired. Deciding to deal with it later, she’d set the mug down and left.

She looked toward the drying rack by the sink, and there it was. Upside down, rinsed clean.

She hadn’t done that. Had she? Maybe she’d been even more tired than she’d thought.

She looked at the cat, who was eating messily and with single-minded focus. Not the cat, obviously. She walked to the back door and checked the lock. Still turned. She stood there with the peculiar feeling of having misplaced something, then decided the most sensible explanation was that she’d indeed been more tired than she realized, had cleaned up without remembering, and that was that. She made her tea and chose not to think about it.

After breakfast of a protein bar she found in her purse (She’d have to go out into civilization eventually.), she pushed open the back door and walked out into the yard.

The morning was cool and salt-threaded, the kind of New Hampshire morning that couldn’t quite decide whether it was still spring, or if summer had finally arrived. The lawn — if it could still be called that with its grass higher than her knees — rolled out unevenly toward the water. What might once have been a formal garden path was now only a suggestion of fieldstone beneath the green. Rose canes arched unchecked from a bed along the fence line. A lilac near the corner of the house was just barely past its peak, the blossoms browning at the edges, and the smell of it drifted through the cool air in a way that made Samantha feel briefly, unexpectedly sad.

She didn’t know much about yard work, but she knew neglect when she saw it. This wasn’t severe neglect, but it had the look of a garden that had definitely lost its keeper.

She found the garden shed at the back of the property, nearly swallowed by another climbing rose that had made significant territorial advances. The planked door stuck, then gave with a shove, some of the soft and rotting wood breaking off the bottom corner with the force. She stepped into the earthy smell of soil and old wood. Everything was in a jumble — the trowels, shears, a hori hori knife gone rusty at the tip, and a hand fork that had clearly been used hard.

She had no idea what she was doing, really. She decided to start with the loppers, which seemed familiar enough. Perhaps she could prune some things, neaten up a bit. Make a dent.

After an hour, she had not, in fact, made a dent.

She’d tried to tackle some of the vines climbing the fieldstone wall with little success. She was working up a sweat in spite of the cool air, and the promising early sunshine had clouded over into a misty drizzle that was doing her wavy hair no favors and her motivation fewer.

She was seriously considering going back inside when a truck pulled up along the road. It was a well-kept gray pickup with a logo on the door she couldn’t quite read from here.

The man who stepped out was tall, easy in the way he moved, with the kind of sun-weathered face that suggested he spent most of his life outdoors. He was around her age, maybe a little older. Good-looking in an unself-conscious way, and as he got closer, she clocked the dimples framing his smile that probably got him out of trouble regularly.

“Need a hand?” He had a Southern accent, which she had not been expecting.

“I’m good, thanks.” She kept her voice pleasant but noncommittal. After all, she was a woman alone.

“Fair enough.” He stopped a decent distance away. He looked past her at the yard, seemingly taking in the general state of things. “How’d you convince the old lady to change her mind?”

Samantha paused, loppers hanging from her hand. “Excuse me?”

“The woman who lived here. I’ve offered to help with this yard a handful of times. She always said no.” He gave a small smile. “How’d you get her to reconsider?”

“She passed away. She was my great-aunt.”

The words came out more flatly than she’d intended, and she felt immediately guilty at the look that crossed his face.

“I’m so sorry. I didn’t realize.” He seemed genuinely stricken. “She seemed like a really nice woman. Stubborn,” he added, with a rueful grin, “but nice. She said she could manage it herself. I think she knew she probably couldn’t, but she wasn’t the kind of person who liked to be helped.”

Samantha felt the accuracy of this land somewhere in her chest. “No,” she said. “She wasn’t.”

A small silence. Then she noticed it — a compact camera at his lapel, clearly a sort of “on-the-go” recording device.

“Are you recording me?”

He pulled up his phone and tapped with the speed of someone who had made this particular mistake before. “I’ll delete it. Promise. It just runs automatically so I have footage for the intro, in case someone says yes.” He read her expression correctly this time and kept going before she could object. “I make videos for social media. I offer to help people with their yards, free of charge, in exchange for letting me post. No judgment. I just — I really love doing it. It’s what I do.”

He gestured at the yard behind her, and the grin came back full force. He had clearly learned to deploy it strategically. “You can probably see why this place caught my attention. Old golf course property, all this fieldstone, that kitchen garden in the back… I’d be willing to bet there’s a water view in there somewhere if you cleared the overgrown side yard. My followers would lose their minds.”

In spite of herself, she was curious. “People watch this kind of thing? How many followers do you have?”

He looked skyward toward the drizzle, as if calculating, and landed on: “A few million, depending on how you count it.”

She was in marketing. She knew how it worked. A few million, across platforms, with a consistent niche and presumably a decent engagement rate. That could absolutely pay the bills. She looked down at her forearms, which were cross-hatched with thin red scratches from the vines. She looked at the yard. All of that, and the wall barely looked any better, and now she had a giant pile she didn’t know how to get rid of.

“Would I have to be in the videos?”

He gave her a sideways look, clearly sensing the shift.

“Not necessarily. I blur people out sometimes. But,” he paused, seeming to choose his words with some care, “it does better when people are willing to tell their stories. And you — respectfully — would be really good for this.”

The compliment landed cleanly, and she appreciated that his eyes stayed on her face when he said it, and didn’t drift toward her scratched legs.

“I’ll think about it,” she said. “What’s your handle?”

“@Murphy_GrowsOnYou.” He said it with the ease of someone who’d repeated it ten thousand times. “Give it a gander.”

---

---

That afternoon, it was raining for real. After she’d hunted and gathered some food at the small local market, Samantha found the cleaning supplies in a closet off the kitchen. There were bottles of wood polish and oil soap and white vinegar, all of them older than she was.

Someone must be coming in for just the kitchen, she thought. Someone with a key, someone Ida had trusted. The rinsed teacup, the orderly kitchen. She didn’t love the idea of an unknown person letting themselves in, but she also wasn’t ready to deal with it today. She added it to her mental to-do list. A problem for Tomorrow-Samantha.

She started her cleaning with the sitting room, thinking it would be the right place to spend the evening. The retro vacuum cleaner — avocado green, probably 1974 — worked, to her genuine surprise, though she had serious doubts about its HEPA filtration capacity given the dust she was stirring up.

Still, there was something satisfying about the work. Every pass of the dust cloth along the bookshelves felt like forward motion, like she was digging herself out from under the mess Bradley had made of the last two years of her life. Every window she polished was one step closer to a listing for this place, hopefully a sale, and then a clean start.

She tried to ignore the pang each time her mind drifted toward the topic.

By the time she looked up again, the rain had stopped. The light through the picture window had gone pink and then deep lavender. The sitting room was genuinely lovely, and smelled of lemons and oil soap. She stood in the middle of it for a moment just to take it in.

To celebrate, she decided to splurge on delivery. In a fit of coastal nostalgia, she selected the lobster roll from the famous local lobster shack

After one bite she remembered that she had never actually liked lobster. She ate the chips instead and sat on the sofa feeling like a fraud of a New Englander and also guiltily thinking of the little lobsters she’d murdered.

Eventually, as it became truly dark, she switched on the lamp. The cat curled up semi-close to her, but kept its head determinedly away from her. As she ignored it right back, she scrolled her phone. Finally, she gave in and searched @Murphy_GrowsOnYou.

The first video pinned in his feed had four million views.

Blowing out a breath, she pressed play.

It opened on a street somewhere in the South, Murphy’s voiceover explaining that he’d noticed a yard on his route every day for a week and wanted to stop. Cut to: a small ranch house, the lawn brown and uneven, boxwoods and other front beds overgrown, a single sad rosebush nearly unrecognizable since it was so strangled by weeds.

A man in his seventies or eighties came to the door looking suspicious. The conversation unfolded with the camera on Murphy’s lapel, likely the same one he’d had earlier. Murphy explaining what he did, the man saying no twice before something shifted in his face.

Cut to: the two of them working side by side across two days. The man insulted Murphy’s landscaping skills, told him how to do things, and Murphy played along good-naturedly. No reveal music, no before-and-after whipcut. Just the yard, slowly becoming itself again. The man becoming more familiar with Murphy, their rapport easier.

At the end, the man stood looking at the nearly unrecognizable yard. Just one part was left.

The rosebush, it turned out, had been his wife’s. He hadn’t been able to touch it — or do much of anything, he admitted — since she’d died. Murphy asked permission gently before he pruned it, and worked quietly while the man sat on the porch and watched.

Afterwards, the man couldn’t find his voice.

As he finally hugged Murphy and wept, Samantha found she had to set her phone down for a moment.

As she wiped her own eyes, she thought about Ida. The shed with its jumbled tools, the rose canes arching wild over the wall.

She thought about the fact that a yard could hold a person as faithfully as the inside of a house could. A woman who had kept everything pristine for decades inside and out, then simply, quietly, couldn’t anymore.

Homes and gardens, she thought. They kept score whether you wanted them to or not.

She picked her phone back up, tapped the follow button.

Then she debated, blew out a sigh. She began drafting a direct message to @Murphy_GrowsOnYou.

---

---

If something in this chapter spoke to you — a detail, a moment, a feeling you recognized — please tap the ♡ or leave a note below. I'd love to hear it!