5. Flowers That Remember #3
I let two frightened men outvote the one thing I knew, which is her, which was always her, and I got in the car, and the specific charge on my sheet isn't that Beckett led us wrong.
Beckett gets his own courthouse. Mine reads, in small clear botanical script: he saw, understood, surrendered his conscience to the pack's fear, and called the surrender love from afar.
"I don't know," I tell Pippa, because she asked for the truth and she's earned it. "I genuinely can't tell you which it is. But her having the levers is right even if my reasons are only half clean, so we do it, and I keep asking myself your question until it has a better answer."
"That's fair." She turns to go, then stops in the doorway, softer. "For what it's worth, the proposal thing. The other growers' names in your own bid. That's not hiding. Hiding doesn't offer replacements."
She leaves me to write it, and I write it clean.
Two pages.
Transparent pricing, a seasonal plan that follows the real fields week by week into the equinox, Fern thank you, I'm glad, you won't regret, each one a hand reaching where no hand was invited. I send the one word, put the phone in my pocket, and stand there while the greenhouse drips.
Then I look down the glass length of the house: through the open end, out to the west field, where forty yards of apricot garden roses are coming into their second flush.
The display beds, the ones we walk every client past on the way from the parking area because they photograph like a sunrise and sell like one too, the exact cultivar, the exact color, her color, six of them pressed in a locked book upstairs.
Four hundred of them standing between the gate and my barn, where she will have to walk past every single head on Thursday at six, and there is no version of that walk in which she doesn't wonder, even for a second, whether I grew them for her.
Whether the whole field is a message.
Whether August Bellamy has spent five years farming a shrine, and the honest answer is I don't fully know, and she should never have to stand in a field doing that math, wondering whether she belonged only in the past or deserved to be in our futures.
If we hadn’t been cowards, the answer would have bloomed and created something magnificent that this town would be forced to acknowledge and admire.
Instead, we let our love wilt and die…
All for the sake of protection?
Sometimes I can’t help but laugh at the reality.
We truly are a bunch of cowards…
I get the snips and the big buckets, all of them, and I go down to the west beds in the last of the light, and I start cutting.
Every apricot rose in the display rows.
Four hundred stems at peak, thousands of dollars of flowers, into water, bound for the hospital, the church, Mrs. Okafor, the Driftglass bar top.
Anywhere, everywhere, gone by Wednesday, and Milo comes out at some point and stands at the end of the row watching his profit margin fill bucket after bucket.
To his eternal credit as a Bellamy, he asks no questions.
He just picks up a pair of snips and starts on the next bed over, and we cut her color out of the farm together in the dark.