Chapter 1 #2
Jo’s head swivels between us like she’s watching a tennis match in slow motion. “Wait. You two know each other?”
Neither of us answers. The shop feels smaller than it did thirty seconds ago.
The walls have crept in, the ceiling has lowered, and the scent of every flower in the cooler—roses, eucalyptus, gardenias, lilies—is suddenly thick enough to choke on.
My pulse is hammering in my throat. I press my fingertips into the counter to keep them steady.
Dean grunts.
“Dean.” Jo’s voice goes dangerously sweet. “Babe. Light of my life. Is there something you forgot to mention about your best man?”
“Nope.”
“Dean.”
“It wasn’t my story to tell.”
“Your brother has history with our florist and you didn’t think to warn me? Not even a heads up? A subtle hint? A carrier pigeon?”
“I don’t own pigeons, Jo.”
I’m barely listening. I’m too busy drowning in Levi’s eyes—darker than I remember, more tired—and trying to remember how my lungs work.
He’s older. Lines around his eyes that weren’t there before.
A weariness that fame put there, maybe, or heartbreak, or both.
His jaw is sharper, his shoulders broader, but his hands are the same—guitar-player hands, long-fingered, restless.
One thumb is rubbing absently against his other palm, and I recognize the habit instantly. He does that when he’s nervous.
He’s nervous.
Somehow that makes everything worse.
He’s wearing a plain gray T-shirt and jeans, like he dressed specifically to not be noticed. It’s not working. Not on me. Not when I’m looking right at him.
The boy I loved at seventeen was bright and hopeful.
The man I loved at twenty-seven was hungry and restless.
This version of him looks tired. Like fame gave him everything except what he actually needed.
“You’ve been here awhile,” he says. Not a question.
“How did you—” I stop. Of course. “My mother.”
“She mentioned it.” His mouth curves, just barely. “Several times. I believe the words ‘you should visit’ came up in every conversation.”
“She’s never been one for subtlety.”
“Never has been.”
Silence stretches between us. Years of things we never said. Goodbyes that never got explained. The weight of it fills the shop like the scent of too many gardenias—sweet and heavy and almost suffocating.
I realize my jaw is clenched so tight my teeth ache. I force it loose, exhale slow and careful, and the exhale shakes.
Jo clears her throat. “So. This is awkward.”
“Understatement,” Mads murmurs. She’s watching us with the quiet intensity of a woman who reads too many romance novels and is currently living inside one.
“We should go,” Jo says, grabbing her swatches with the speed of a woman who senses drama and is exercising Olympic-level restraint in walking away from it. “Let you two…catch up. Or whatever.” She points at Dean. “You and I are having a conversation later.”
“Looking forward to it.”
“That’s sarcasm.”
“Yes.”
“I love you, but you’re in so much trouble.”
“I know.”
Jo hustles Dean toward the door, Mads trailing behind with a look that says we will be discussing this at book club. The door chimes as they leave, and then it’s just me and Levi, standing in my mother’s flower shop with a lifetime of history between us like humidity before a storm.
The shop is so quiet I can hear the cooler cycling.
The drip of water from a loose faucet in the back room.
My own breathing, too fast, too shallow.
The space that felt cozy with Jo and Mads in it now feels cavernous, like all the air left with them and what’s remaining isn’t enough for two people carrying this much unsaid.
He takes off his cap. Runs a hand through his hair—longer now, curling at the ends. I used to twist those curls around my fingers while we sat on the pier, feet dangling over the water, talking about nothing and everything. I remember the exact texture. Which is a problem.
The silence between us is thick enough to arrange flowers in.
“I came back for the wedding,” he says. “Dean asked me to help with stuff. I’ll be here for a couple months.”
A couple months. He’s going to be here, in my town, for a couple months. My hands find the edge of the counter again. I grip it like it’s the only solid thing in the room.
“I’m doing the flowers,” I hear myself say. “For the wedding.”
“I know. Jo mentioned it.” His mouth twitches—a different movement than before, more wry than wistful. “She’s not subtle either.”
“Must be a Twin Waves thing.”
“Must be.”
The light shifts through the front window as a cloud passes.
For a second, shadows move across his face, and he looks exactly like the boy I remember—young and uncertain and trying so hard to be brave.
Then the sun returns and he’s the man again, the famous one, the stranger wearing a familiar face.
We stare at each other. Two people who used to fit together like puzzle pieces, now standing five feet apart with no idea how to bridge the gap.
The counter between us feels like an ocean.
My fingers itch to reach across it, which is ridiculous and inconvenient and exactly the kind of impulse that got me in trouble the last two times.
I should say something normal. Something that doesn’t reveal that I’ve listened to every album he’s ever made, or that I know the bridge of “Petals” by heart.
Instead, I say nothing. Because apparently my mouth has decided to go on strike at the worst possible moment.
“I should go,” he says. “I just wanted to—” He stops. Swallows. “See you. Make sure you were real.”
The words land like a fist to the sternum.
Make sure you were real. Like I’m a song he wrote that he’s not sure actually happened.
Like he’s spent years replaying me in his head and couldn’t trust his own memory anymore.
I know that feeling. I know it because I’ve done the same thing—lying awake in apartments in cities that weren’t this one, wondering if the boy on the pier was ever as good as I remembered or if I’d turned him into a story I told myself to feel less alone.
And now he’s standing in front of me, flesh and blood and tired eyes, telling me he came here to make sure I wasn’t a ghost.
I don’t know whether to cry or throw a peony at his head.
“I’m real.”
“Yeah.” His eyes trace my face like he’s memorizing it. Like he’s afraid I’ll disappear between blinks, which is fair, because historically, that’s exactly what I do. “You are.”
He puts his cap back on, pulls it low, and turns for the door. His hand is on the handle when he stops.
“The shop looks good,” he says without turning around. “Your mom would be proud.”
My throat tightens. Of all the things he could have said, he chose that. The one thing guaranteed to crack me open.
“Levi—”
But he’s already gone, the bell singing his exit in two notes that sound almost sad. I watch his silhouette pass the front window, head ducked, hands back in his pockets. Disappearing into Twin Waves like he never left.
I stand there for a long time, surrounded by flowers and the ghost of his cologne—warm and woody with a hint of cedar, and it definitely costs more than it did when he was playing open mics at the Twin Waves pier. My hands are shaking. I press them flat against the counter and breathe.
In. Out. Like the ocean. Like the tide.
The shop settles around me. Water drips in the back room.
A car passes outside. Down the boardwalk, a woman laughs.
The world is still turning, still going about its business, completely indifferent to the fact that Levi Beckett just stood five feet away from me and said make sure you were real and I let him walk out without saying any of the thousand things I’ve rehearsed in my head over the past decade.
I could have said I’m sorry. I could have said I heard “Petals” and I cried. I could have said I left because I loved you too much to watch you stay small for me.
Instead, I said “I’m real.” Like that was enough. Like that was anything.
My phone buzzes on the counter. A text from Jo.
Jo: So on a scale of one to ten, how much trouble is Dean in right now?
I type back: Eleven.
Jo: Fair. Also—are you okay?
I stare at the screen. Am I okay? That’s a complicated question.
I’m standing behind my counter, surrounded by eucalyptus and gardenias and whatever expensive cologne Levi Beckett wears now, and my hands haven’t stopped shaking, and there’s a very real possibility I’m going to have to see this man on a regular basis because I’m doing the flowers for his brother’s wedding.
Me: We’ll talk at book club.
Jo: Book club isn’t for three days. I can’t wait three days. I have so many questions.
Mads: She’s already making a list. I can hear her typing.
Jo: It’s not a list. It’s a prioritized inquiry framework.
Mads: It’s a list.
I put the phone face-down on the counter. They’ll survive.
I’m less sure about me.
I’ve been building a new life here. Brick by brick, bloom by bloom. A shop I love, friends who feel like family, a town that’s starting to feel like home.
I’ve had a lot of fresh starts. More than most people get, and definitely more than I deserve.
Most ended with me packing boxes and running.
An apartment in Raleigh after college that I left when the job felt too small.
A house in Asheville with a husband I chose because he was safe and predictable and nothing like the boy who used to make my heart race on the Twin Waves pier.
A condo in Charlotte where I told myself starting over alone was brave and not terrifying, where I spent too many nights eating takeout and pretending I wasn’t listening to Levi Cole songs on repeat.
Every time, I told myself this was the real fresh start. The one that would stick. And every time, my restless feet started itching to move, to leave, to start over in a new city where my mistakes couldn’t find me.
Twin Waves felt different. I remember one of my first nights here, walking the beach after dark, trying to believe it.
Someone had been playing guitar down by the pier—a man’s voice, low and rough, singing something I almost recognized.
I’d walked toward the music without thinking, drawn to it.
But by the time I got close, the singing had stopped and it was just a stranger sitting in the dark. I’d turned around and gone home.
Funny, the things that stick with you.
And now Levi Beckett is back, and everything I thought I’d tucked away is blooming right back up.
Every feeling I buried, every memory I locked in a box labeled do not open—they’re pushing through the dirt like spring bulbs, and I can’t stop them.
That’s the thing about feelings you bury.
You think you’re planting them deep enough to die, but you’re really just giving them roots.
I look around the shop—my mother’s cooler, my mother’s counter, my mother’s bell that sings for every person who walks through the door. I chose this place to start over. To finally stop running.
And now the one person I’ve been running from is here.
The cactus mug catches my eye. The one in sunglasses. Looking Sharp.
“I’m trying,” I tell it.
I have a wedding to plan, a business to run, and apparently a rock star ex-boyfriend to survive until the last petal is placed.
Totally manageable. No problem at all.
The peony on the display shelf drops another petal. It lands on the counter with a soft tap, pink and fragile and already starting to curl at the edges.
“Same,” I tell it.
Then I pick up the phone, text Jo back a single heart emoji so she knows I’m alive, and go back to work. Because that’s what Smart women do. We keep going. Even when the past walks back through the door wearing a baseball cap and smelling like expensive cologne and regret.