Chapter Two
The smell hit Angela before she opened the van doors.
Rotting lilies. Sweet and cloying and wrong, the perfume of death accelerated by a night sealed in her delivery vehicle.
She'd loaded the Hartmann funeral arrangement yesterday afternoon—three hundred dollars' worth of white lilies, roses, and baby's breath meant for a memorial service at St. Nicholas this morning.
Now it looked like someone had taken a baseball bat to it.
Petals scattered across the van floor like snow after a storm. Stems snapped and crushed, green juice smeared across the metal walls. The crystal vase Mrs. Hartmann had specifically requested lay in pieces, water long since soaked into the carpet she'd shampooed last month.
Angela stood in the parking lot behind Shore Blooms, 5:44 AM, coffee going cold in her hand, and stared at three hundred dollars she didn't have destroyed for no reason she could understand.
No. That was a lie.
She understood exactly why.
The men in suits had come back last Thursday, same two as before—the taller one with the patient smile, the shorter one who never smiled at all.
They'd stood in her shop between the coolers full of roses and the display of ceramic pots she'd gotten on clearance from a vendor going out of business, and they'd explained their offer again.
Partnership, they called it. Shore Blooms would add certain packages to certain deliveries.
Nothing dangerous, nothing that would draw attention.
Just small additions to the arrangements she already brought into wealthy homes throughout the shore towns.
Easy money. Enough to pay off her small business loan in two years instead of ten.
Angela had said no.
She'd said no the first time, two months ago. She'd said no the second time, when they'd sweetened the offer with numbers that made her stomach flip. She'd said no last Thursday, when the tall one's patient smile had started looking less patient and more like something carved into his face.
Three days later, someone had keyed her van. A long scratch down the driver's side, the word THINK gouged into the paint.
Two days after that, a man had parked outside her apartment and watched her windows until dawn. She'd seen him when she got up at four to prep for a wedding delivery, his silhouette backlit by a streetlamp, cigarette glowing orange in the dark.
And now this.
Angela set her coffee on the bumper and climbed into the van.
Glass crunched under her sneakers. She gathered the destroyed lilies mechanically, muscle memory from four years of early mornings and late nights and arrangements that didn't always survive transport.
But transport damage looked different. Transport damage was a tipped vase, bruised petals, maybe a broken stem or two.
This was violence.
Someone had opened her van—she always locked it, always—and systematically destroyed an arrangement meant for a grieving family. Someone wanted her to know they could reach her whenever they wanted.
Her hands were shaking when she climbed out of the van. She noticed it distantly, the way she noticed the scratch on her palm from a piece of broken crystal, the way she noticed her coffee had developed a film of cold.
You're being stupid, she told herself. Call the police. Report the vandalism. Let them handle it.
But she knew how that would go. A report filed, a case number given, absolutely nothing done. The Margate police had bigger problems than a florist's ruined delivery. And if the men in suits found out she'd involved cops—
Angela's phone buzzed. She fumbled it out of her apron pocket, expecting a reminder about the Hartmann service, maybe an early call from Mrs. Hartmann asking about delivery time.
The text was from a number she didn't recognize.
Last chance. Say yes or things get worse.
She stared at the screen until the words blurred. Eight words. Eight words that turned three hundred dollars of damaged flowers into something much bigger. Something that felt like a hand closing around her throat.
Angela deleted the text.
She spent the next hour on the phone—apologizing to Mrs. Hartmann, offering a replacement arrangement at no charge, promising delivery before the ten o'clock service. Then she worked, because working was the only thing she knew how to do when everything else fell apart.
White lilies from the cooler, the good ones she'd been saving for the Castellano wedding next week.
Roses she'd have to reorder at a markup because the wholesaler didn't deliver on Tuesdays.
Baby's breath from the last of her backup supply.
Her hands moved through the motions while her mind ran circles around a problem that didn't have a solution.
Partnership.
She knew what they were really asking. Knew it the way she knew the shore towns weren't as quiet as they looked, the way she knew certain businesses paid certain people for certain kinds of protection.
The men in suits wanted to use her deliveries to move something—pills, probably, or powder, or whatever else flowed through the wealthy neighborhoods where she brought arrangements for anniversaries and condolences and Tuesday-just-because.
They wanted to turn Shore Blooms into part of their operation.
And Angela would rather burn the shop down herself than let that happen.
The replacement arrangement came together by eight-thirty.
Not her best work—rushed, using backup supplies, missing the personal touches she usually added—but serviceable.
She loaded it into the van, swept out the broken glass and ruined petals, and made the Hartmann delivery with fifteen minutes to spare.
Mrs. Hartmann hugged her in the church parking lot, tears streaming down her face, grateful for the flowers she didn't know had been destroyed and rebuilt in three hours.
Angela hugged her back and smiled and said all the right things, and the whole time she was thinking about the text message she'd deleted.
About the man watching her windows. About how long she could keep saying no before no stopped being an option.
The rest of the day passed in a blur. Two more deliveries—a birthday arrangement to a house in Longport, a get-well bouquet to the hospital in Atlantic City.
She kept her phone close, flinching every time it buzzed, but no more messages came.
Maybe they were giving her time to reconsider.
Maybe they were planning something worse.
By four o'clock, Shore Blooms felt less like a sanctuary and more like a trap. The big front windows she'd loved when she bought the place now felt like targets. The back door that opened onto the parking lot suddenly seemed flimsy, the lock old and easy to break.
Angela closed early.
She told herself it was because the Castellano wedding prep could wait until tomorrow, because she'd been up since four and her back ached and she deserved a night off. But the truth was simpler and uglier: she was scared.
The drive home took twelve minutes. Angela watched her mirrors the whole way, checking for headlights that stayed too close, cars that made the same turns she did.
Her apartment complex appeared on the right—two stories of beige siding and practical landscaping, nothing special but hers—and she pulled into her usual spot with her heart pounding.
No one in the parking lot. No silhouette waiting by the stairs. No cigarette glow in the shadows.
But that didn't mean anything anymore.
Angela sat in her van with the engine running, hands white-knuckled on the steering wheel, and tried to remember the last time she'd felt safe. Last month? Last year? Before the men in suits showed up with their patient smiles and their offers she couldn't refuse?
She'd built this life from nothing. From the wreckage of parents who didn't want her, from the ashes of a childhood spent bouncing between relatives who took her in out of obligation rather than love.
Her grandmother—her father's mother, the only person who'd ever chosen her—had taught her that beautiful things required ugly work.
That nothing worth having came without sacrifice.
Shore Blooms was her proof that she could make something beautiful from something ugly. That she wasn't her parents, wasn't their chaos and selfishness, wasn't the kind of person who destroyed things instead of building them.
And now men in suits wanted to turn it into something dirty.
Angela killed the engine. Grabbed her purse. Checked the parking lot one more time before she opened the door.
Tomorrow she'd figure out a plan. Tomorrow she'd call someone—a lawyer, maybe, or that reporter who'd done a story on local businesses last year. Someone who could help. Someone who knew how to fight back against people who saw a woman alone and thought easy target.
Tonight, she'd lock her doors and try to sleep and pretend she didn't see shadows in every corner.
Something had to give. She just didn't know what yet.