11. A Different Bouquet #2
The walk-through winds down as the light goes fully gold, and Marlowe surfaces long enough to declare the tables "structurally honest, which is the nicest thing I've said about anything a Bellamy owns," and then vanishes back into the carriage house with a tape measure and a look that means she'll be a while.
Which leaves us alone in the west field.
Amber goes quiet in a way that changes the air.
She's stopped at the display beds. The ones every client gets walked past on purpose, the beds that used to hold four hundred apricot garden roses at peak, her exact color, the one I trialed two seasons to match the warm side of her scent.
They're empty now. Cut to the ground.
Bare stems and mulch where a sunrise used to stand.
"You had apricot roses here." She doesn't look at me.
She's looking at the bare bed, and her voice has changed register, off the clipboard now, into something with a floor under it.
"Two weeks ago. The whole town got them.
Ruth Kettle had a bucket on the general store counter.
The clinic had them in the waiting room.
Somebody left a jar of them on a grave up at St. Brendan's.
" Now she turns. "You stripped your best display bed and gave four thousand dollars of roses away in three days. Why?"
Here it is.
The one question I hoped she wouldn't ask and knew she would, because she reads a field the way I read a dahlia, forty-eight hours early.
I could deflect. I have the words. I feel Cade's whole toolkit sitting right there, the charming near-answer, and I understand for the first time in my life exactly why he reaches for it far too often.
Because the truth is standing in front of me with those stunning brown eyes with hints of green, and I would give a great deal not to say it.
I press my lips together.
"Because you were going to walk up that lane on Thursday.
And you'd pass four hundred apricot roses in your exact color between the gate and my barn.
There is no version of that walk where you don't stop, even for a second, and wonder whether I grew them for you.
" I keep my hands still at my sides. "Whether the whole field was a message.
Whether I've spent five years farming a shrine.
I couldn't stand the idea of you doing that math in my field, so I cut the evidence and gave it away before you got here. "
The wind moves the cosmos.
She doesn't say anything for a moment, and surely my admission was the wrong idea.
Anyone else would take offense to it. Removing something that held so much meaning because the person who inspired their beauty was coming into your space. Your world, and witness the evidence firsthand.
However, she isn’t like everyone else.
She always takes things different. Looks at scenarios in different perspectives that most would never fathom. That’s why she’s such a successful wedding planner, taking things from all aligns and achieving perfection at its finest.
When she does, it lands like a correction from a teacher I respect.
"That's still letting the past run the work, August."
I go very still.
"You made a floral decision…a real one, a display bed, your best color, gone.
Based entirely on what happened five years ago.
You didn't cut those roses for the wedding.
You cut them for the ghost." Her chin is up.
"You keep telling me you won't let the past control your flowers.
Then you gutted a bed to hide from it. That's not freedom from the past. That's the past holding the shears. "
She's right.
The understanding arrives all at once, clean and total, the way it does when someone says a true thing you've been arranging your whole life not to notice.
I removed the roses to prove I wasn't haunted, and the removal was the haunting. It was also in hopes of protecting her, but all it did was really emphasize that I haven’t moved on from that fateful date where we ran away like the cowards we were.
But has she moved on? Has she been able to forget the agony we delivered to her with our choices?
I performed being over her by making a decision I'd never make for any other client on earth.
"You're right," I say, and I feel the words cost me. "I did the thing I swore I wouldn't. I let it decide."
She blinks, like she braced for an argument and got a confession instead.
She just handed me back a piece of my own honesty — I ask the question that's been building in me since her truck came up the lane.
It is not only about flowers.
"So tell me." I turn to face her fully. "Forget what you carried five years ago. Forget the girl who ordered that bouquet. What would you choose now?"
She goes quiet again, but it's a different level of silence.
This one has her looking out over the beds like she's actually letting the question shimmer. I watch her decide to answer it honestly, watch her set the clipboard down on the fence rail so her hands are free.
Deep down, I understand I'm about to meet a stranger I've loved for five years.
"Coral," she says. "But bolder than I'd have dared at twenty-four. Not blush. Not the safe or the typical warmth everyone photographs. Real coral, loud, almost orange, the color that makes a mother-of-the-bride nervous."
"I have it. Second field. Keep going."
"Plum. Dark plum, nearly black at the center." She's moving now, walking to the bed, pointing. "That scabiosa, but more of it than is tasteful. And rust. I want rust in a summer wedding, which everyone will tell me is wrong, and I want it anyway."
"It's not wrong. It's early. Go on."
"Grasses." She says it almost defiantly.
"Wild ones. The kind that looks like a field, not a shop.
And—" She stops at a garden rose that's blown open uneven, one shoulder of petals higher than the other, a flower I'd normally cull from a client display.
She touches it. "This. The imperfect ones.
The ones where you can see the seam, where they didn't open evenly.
I don't want everything to match anymore.
" Her voice drops. "I spent years making everything match.
Every table. Every palette. My whole life, matched and pinned and perfect, so nobody could look at it and find the flaw.
I'm tired. I want a wedding where the flowers are allowed to be a little wrong and still beautiful. "
The field is very quiet.
I have arranged flowers for fifteen years, and I have never wanted to build something as badly as I want to build the thing she just described.
"It'll be better," I tell her, and my voice isn't quite steady, and I let it not be.
"Everything you just said — the coral, the rust, the flowers with the seam showing…
that's a better arrangement than the one you'd have ordered at twenty-four.
It's braver. The matched version was lovely, and projected a sense of fear for being the perfect balance of safe. This one isn't afraid of anything."
She looks at me sharply because we both hear it.
The sentence is sitting under the sentence.
I'm not talking about the flowers, and she knows it.
"Write it down," she says finally, picking her clipboard back up like a shield reclaimed. "The bold version. All of it. That's the proposal I want to see."
"It's already yours."
Now…if only we could fulfill that new bouquet by proving to you we deserve a second chance of being in your life…
I don't get the luxury of watching what that does to her face.
"Amber! Is that our Amber?"
My mother's voice comes down the barn lane like a change in weather, and I feel my whole spine set.
Celeste Bellamy in evening linen, silver hair pinned, sailing toward us with both hands out and her most gracious face on, the face that has smoothed forty years of society over its own cracks. She reaches Amber, and takes both her hands before Amber can lift the clipboard to stop her.
"Look at you. Look at this. You beautiful, accomplished thing, running the wedding of the decade.
" My mother squeezes her hands. "I have to say, and I'll say it plainly, I think it's wonderful.
All of us in the same field again, working together.
Perhaps this is exactly what everyone needed.
A chance to finally put that unfortunate history behind us and—"
"Mom."
I don't raise my voice. I’ve never raised my voice in my life.
I lower it, which the family has learned to fear more.
"It was not unfortunate history."
The lane goes silent. My mother's smile stays up out of pure architecture, but her eyes cut to me, startled.
"It wasn't a weather event, Mom. It wasn't a thing that befell us.
We abandoned her." I keep my eyes on my mother, because that's the whole discipline of it, saying the hard thing to the person it's hardest to say it to.
"Three men she trusted left her at an altar you helped decorate.
That's not unfortunate history. That's a thing we did, to her, on purpose, and I won't stand in a field and let it get renamed into something softer because the softer version is more comfortable at dinner parties. "
"August." Celeste's voice has gone thin. "This is hardly the—"
"And she's here as a client."
I don't let her finish, which I have never once done to my mother before this summer.
"She's evaluating a vendor. She is not here to absorb the word 'unfortunate' so the rest of us feel better about a bill we ran up ourselves. She doesn't have to soften a single thing that happened to her so that any of us can have a nicer evening. Not you, me, or anyone, gets that from her again."
My mother looks at me for a long moment.
Whatever's moving behind the starch — hurt, recalculation, both at full strength, knowing her — she gathers it, and she turns to Amber with her dignity reassembled.