Chapter Three: The Rain That Took Her Eyes
1529 Words
The storm arrived like punishment.
By morning the sky was the color of bruised steel, wind whipping the manicured hedges into frantic bows. The city’s weather alert pinged on every phone except Alara’s; Claudia had confiscated it last month for “overuse of data.”
Alara woke to the sound of Linnea shrieking that her outdoor photoshoot was ruined. She pulled on her mother’s old navy trench (the one Linnea swore made her look like a drowned librarian) and slipped out the service door before anyone could invent new chores.
The pharmacy was only twelve blocks away. She could be there and back before Claudia noticed she was gone.
Rain came in sheets, sideways and vicious. Her umbrella flipped inside-out within thirty seconds; she abandoned it in a trash can and kept walking, prescription list clenched in her fist. Water soaked her shoes, her hair, her skin. She tasted metal on the air.
The streets were nearly empty. Only delivery vans and the occasional suicidal pedestrian braved the downpour. Alara kept her head down, counting crosswalks by memory. Eight more blocks. Six. Four.
She was waiting at the light on Crestwood and 9th when she saw the old woman.
White hair plastered to a delicate skull, silk scarf turned transparent, tiny frame bent under grocery bags that were rapidly turning to pulp. She stepped off the curb without looking, confused, maybe, or just too proud to admit she couldn’t see through the rain.
A black taxi took the corner too fast, hydroplaning on the flooded intersection.
There was no time to think.
Alara ran.
She dropped the prescription, dropped her bag, dropped every ounce of caution she had left. Her hands found the old woman’s shoulders and shoved with all the strength built from years of carrying trays, scrubbing floors, surviving.
The old woman flew sideways, landing hard but alive on the opposite sidewalk.
Alara did not.
The impact was soundless at first, just a sudden absence of gravity.
Then the world exploded: hood against hip, windshield against skull, asphalt against spine. She felt her body fold like paper. Felt something inside her head snap with a wet, final click.
The rain kept falling, warm now. No, that was blood.
She tried to breathe and tasted iron.
Above her, car doors slammed. A man’s voice shouting in panic. Someone screaming for an ambulance. The old woman’s trembling hands found Alara’s face.
“Child… child, can you hear me?”
Alara wanted to say yes. Wanted to say it didn’t hurt as much as living in that house had. But her tongue was too heavy.
The last thing she felt before darkness swallowed her was the old woman pressing something small and cold into her palm (an embroidered handkerchief, soaked through, smelling faintly of white roses).
Then nothing.
She woke up to machines and morphine and her father’s voice cracking on the other side of a curtain.
“She’s stable, Mr. Tyrell, but the optic nerves… I’m sorry. The damage is complete. She may never regain sight.”
Her father made a sound like a man who’d been shot and hadn’t realized it yet.
Claudia’s voice floated in next, syrupy with rehearsed grief. “Oh, my poor stepdaughter. So brave. So very… reckless.”
Linnea’s whisper, meant only for her mother but loud enough: “Now she’ll really be the ghost. How tragic for Instagram.”
Alara turned her face toward the window she couldn’t see and waited for the painkillers to pull her under again.
Days blurred. Doctors came and went. Needles, scans, soft voices saying impossible things.
No light perception.
Legally blind.
She learned to tell time by the shift changes, by the way the nurses’ perfume changed from rose to citrus to nothing at all. She learned the shape of her new world by the ache in her ribs and the weight of bandages over eyes that would never open again.
Her father visited twice.
The first time he held her hand and cried without sound. He promised the best specialists money could buy. He promised he would be there. He left after twenty minutes because Claudia texted that Linnea needed him for a magazine interview.
The second time he came with flowers that smelled like grocery-store guilt. He talked about insurance and liability and how grateful they all were that the other party had offered generous compensation.
Alara asked, voice raw, “Who was she?”
Her father hesitated. “Madam Ismena Drexler.”
The name landed like a second car crash.
Even Alara, who avoided gossip the way other people avoided Claudia, knew Ismena Drexler. Widow of the steel magnate, mother of the late senator, grandmother to the man they called the Ice Emperor: Zavian Drexler. The Drexlers didn’t just own half the city; they owned the weather in it.
Alara laughed until the monitors screamed and a nurse threatened sedation.
They let her go home on the tenth day.
Her father sent the car, but not himself. Claudia and Linnea were “too distraught” to visit the hospital again.
The driver helped her into the backseat as if she were made of cracked porcelain. She sat in the middle so she wouldn’t have to guess which side the door was on. The ride was silent except for the rhythmic click of the indicator and the rain that had not stopped in days.
She expected the mansion to feel different now that she couldn’t see it. It didn’t. It still smelled of Claudia’s signature tuberose candles and cold marble. It still echoed with Linnea’s laughter from the upper landing.
Claudia met her in the foyer wearing mourning black that somehow looked expensive.
“Welcome home, darling,” she said, kissing the air beside Alara’s cheek. “We’ve turned the old sewing room into your new bedroom. Ground floor. Much safer for… your condition.”
Alara’s cane (borrowed from the hospital, ugly beige plastic) tapped across the floor. She counted steps the way the occupational therapist had taught her. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Left turn. Three more steps. Door.
The sewing room smelled of dust and old lavender sachets. A single bed, a dresser, a window she would never look out of.
Linnea’s voice drifted in from the hallway. “I helped pick the curtains. They’re blackout. You’re welcome.”
That night Alara lay in the dark that was now her permanent address and listened to the house breathe around her. Somewhere upstairs, her father was already packing for Shanghai. Somewhere closer, Claudia was on the phone discussing how to spin “our family tragedy” for the society pages.
Alara pressed the embroidered handkerchief to her face. It still carried the faint trace of white roses and something metallic (her own blood, maybe). She had asked the nurses to keep it. They had looked at her strangely but obeyed.
She fell asleep with it clutched in her fist like a promise or a threat.
Three days later, Ismena Drexler arrived unannounced.
The entire household froze mid-motion. Maids curtsied so low their foreheads nearly touched the floor.
Claudia’s voice climbed two octaves trying to sound gracious.
Alara was in the ground-floor sitting room, learning how to pour tea without spilling again, when the scent of white roses reached her first.
“Leave us,” Ismena said quietly.
Footsteps scattered like startled birds.
A soft rustle of silk, the tap of a cane far more elegant than Alara’s, then the cushion beside her dipped.
Small, cool fingers found hers and held on.
“My name is Ismena Drexler,” the old woman said. “And you, my brave girl, are going to marry my grandson.”
Alara’s laugh was bitter and broken. “I’m blind, madam. Not desperate.”
Eleanor’s grip tightened. “Desperation is a luxury I don’t allow the people I owe debts to. Zavian will marry you. You might hate him, But you will never want for anything again, and one day, God willing, you will see my great-grandchildren’s faces.”
Alara tried to pull away and said softly. “I don’t want your pity.”
“This isn’t pity,” Ismena said, voice suddenly steel. “This is payment. And the Drexlers always pay.”
In the silence that followed, Alara heard her own heartbeat.
She thought of the house upstairs waiting to swallow her whole.
She thought of her father’s guilty kisses and Linnea’s blackout curtains.
She thought of white roses and blood and a debt written in darkness.
“Fine,” she said at last. “ I accept.”
Ismena Drexler pressed the handkerchief back into Alara’s palm and closed her fingers over it.
“Good girl,” she whispered.
- Writer
