14. Maren
— ? —
Maren
The bell above the shop door hasn’t stopped ringing in my ears for the past three days.
Every time it chimes, my heart does this stupid little stutter, like maybe it’s him, like maybe he’s finally going to show up and say something that actually matters.
And every time it’s just another customer wanting peonies for a birthday or roses for an apology that probably won’t work, I feel relieved and furious and exhausted all at once.
Today is Thursday. Thursday means wholesale deliveries, which means I’ve been up since four in the morning checking stems for damage and arguing with our supplier about the quality of the ranunculus. They sent me straight ones this time. Perfect, uniform, boring. I almost laughed.
“You look like death,” Nora says, sliding a ginger tea across the worktable. “And I mean that with love.”
“I know what you mean.” I take the tea because my stomach has been staging a rebellion since 6 a.m. The nausea comes in waves now, unpredictable and inconvenient, and I’ve gotten very good at pretending I’m fine while quietly calculating the distance to the nearest bathroom. “I’m fine.”
“You’ve said that fourteen times today.”
“Have you been counting?”
“Yes.” She pulls a bucket of dahlias toward her and starts sorting. “Because you say it every time you look like you’re about to pass out, which has been fourteen times.”
Nina walks past us carrying an armful of ribbon spools, shooting me a concerned look that she thinks I don’t notice.
I notice everything right now. Every sideways glance, every whispered conversation that stops when I enter a room.
The gossip blogs have been running daily updates on my marriage for a week.
Yesterday someone posted a photo of me leaving the shop with the caption “Spotted: Rhodes Calloway’s wife looking ROUGH amid cheating rumors. ”
I looked fine in that photo. Tired, maybe. But fine.
“What’s on the schedule for this afternoon?” I ask, changing the subject with all the grace of a freight train.
“Henderson wedding consultation at two. That event for Julian’s office at three-thirty-”
I look up. “Julian. As in Julian from the company?”
Nora winces. “I was going to tell you. They booked it weeks ago, before everything happened. I can cancel.”
“No.” I shake my head, even though my stomach flips again. “We’re professionals. We don’t cancel jobs because my husband decided to publicly destroy our marriage while I watched.”
“Maren-”
“It’s fine.”
“Fifteen,” she mutters.
I’m about to respond when the bell chimes again, and this time my heart doesn’t just stutter. It stops completely.
Rhodes is standing in my doorway.
He’s wearing the navy suit I used to love, the one that makes his shoulders look broader and his eyes look darker. He looks tired. Good - he should be tired. He should be exhausted from carrying all the weight of his own terrible choices.
“We need to talk,” he says.
Nina freezes with the ribbon spools still in her arms. Nora sets down her pruning shears very carefully, like she’s calculating whether she can reach them fast enough if she needs a weapon.
“I’m working,” I say.
“Maren, please.”
“I said I’m working.”
He steps further into the shop, and I hate that he still moves like he owns every room he enters.
Like the world should rearrange itself around his presence.
Like my flower shop, this thing I built with my own hands and my own vision and my own endless hours of work, should pause because Rhodes Calloway has decided he’s ready to have a conversation.
“You haven’t answered my calls,” he says. “You haven’t responded to my texts. I’ve been trying to reach you for three days.”
“I told you to text me unless it was important.”
“This is important.”
“No.” I set down my tea and cross my arms. “This is inconvenient for you. There’s a difference.”
Nina looks at Nora. Nora looks at me. I can feel them both vibrating with the desperate need to either leave or stay and watch, and honestly, I’m not sure which would be worse.
“Nora,” I say, not taking my eyes off Rhodes. “Take Nina and go to lunch.”
“It’s ten in the morning.”
“Then go to brunch, go anywhere. Just go.”
Nora hesitates for exactly two seconds before grabbing her purse and Nina’s arm. “We’ll be at the coffee shop. Text me if you need me.”
They slip past Rhodes like he’s a bomb that might go off. He watches them go, and I watch him watch them, and something bitter and sharp rises in my throat.
The bell chimes as they leave.
I walk past him and flip the lock on the front door.
“What are you doing?” he asks.
“Making sure we’re not interrupted.” I turn to face him. “You wanted to talk? Fine, let’s talk.”
“Maren-”
“No, you don’t get to ‘Maren’ me in that voice anymore. You don’t get to say my name like I’m being unreasonable when you’re the one who showed up at my place of business without warning.”
“I showed up because you won’t answer your phone.”
“I won’t answer my phone because I don’t want to talk to you.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Fair?” I laugh, and it sounds wrong even to my own ears, sharp and hollow and nothing like the way I used to laugh when he was around.
“You want to talk to me about fair? You humiliated me in front of a ballroom full of people, told the press I was having emotional problems, and publicly defended the woman half the city thinks you’re sleeping with. And I’m the one being unfair?”
“I wasn’t defending-”
“You said you weren’t going to punish her because your marriage was having problems. Those were your exact words, Rhodes. I watched the clip.”
He runs a hand through his hair, and I hate that I still know exactly what that gesture means. Frustrated. Cornered. About to say something he thinks is perfectly reasonable that’ll actually make everything worse.
“Rachel didn’t do anything wrong,” he says. “The press was treating her like she was some kind of homewrecker when all she did was her job. I was protecting an employee from being blamed for problems that have nothing to do with her.”
“Right.” I nod slowly. “Right, because Rachel is just an employee. Rachel is just doing her job. Rachel just happens to be at every event standing next to you, just happens to be the one you call when you’re stressed, just happens to be the person you defend while your wife sits alone at-”
I stop myself.
The words are right there, pushing against my teeth, desperate to escape. While your wife sits alone at a prenatal appointment you don’t even know about. While your wife stares at a grainy ultrasound image and cries in her car for twenty minutes because you should have been there.
But I can’t. I won’t. Not while he’s still doing this.
“While your wife sits alone in her sister’s guest room,” I finish instead. “Watching you protect everyone except her.”
“I didn’t realize you needed protecting, Maren. You’ve never needed anyone to protect you.”
“That’s not-” I press my hands against the worktable, steadying myself.
“That’s not the point. The point is that you have protected Rachel.
You have protected your company. You have protected your reputation, your events, your image, your precious fucking Calloway legacy - protected everyone and everything from every consequence imaginable.
And you have expected your wife to absorb all of them. ”
“That’s not true.”
“Isn’t it?” I step closer to him, and I’m shaking now, actually shaking, because this has been building for so long and I’m finally letting it out.
“When the blogs started running stories about us, who took the hit? When the gala fell apart, who apologized? And when you gave that interview about how I was emotional and needed time to cool off, who sat alone while the internet picked apart her mental health?”
“I never said you were-”
“You implied it. You let them think it. Because that was easier than telling the truth, which is that you have slowly and systematically made me feel like a guest in my own marriage for years.”
“Maren, lower your voice.”
Everything stops.
The air in the room goes very still, and I stare at him, and for a moment I genuinely can’t believe he just said that to me. Lower my voice. Like I’m a child throwing a tantrum. Like my anger is the problem here instead of the symptom.
“No,” I say.
“Maren-”
“No.” I’m not shaking anymore. I’m completely, terrifyingly steady. “You got to humiliate me in front of that whole ballroom. You can survive me yelling in my own flower shop.”
His jaw tightens. “I came here to talk, not to fight.”
“Then you should have come years ago. Because I tried to talk. I tried and tried and tried, and you told me I was overreacting and that Rachel was just doing her job and that the events were important and that the company needed you and that you’d be home soon, you’d make time soon, you’d remember our anniversary soon-”
“I made a mistake with the anniversary. One mistake.”
“No, Rhodes. You made one mistake that I couldn’t ignore anymore.
That’s different.” I move around the worktable because I need something between us, some barrier.
My hands find a bucket of gardenias and start sorting them automatically, muscle memory taking over while my heart pounds against my ribs.
“The anniversary was just the moment I finally stopped pretending.”
“Pretending what?”
“That the man I married still exists.”
He goes very quiet.
“The old Rhodes,” I say, and my voice is steadier now, colder, “was a wonderful husband. He came home. He listened to me talk about my day, respected my work even when it wasn’t as important or prestigious as his, made me feel chosen every single day, even when things were hard. He was the reason I stayed.”
“I’m still that person.”
“You’re not.” I look up at him. “You’re really not. And I’m furious at myself for loving you for years based on who you used to be. For looking at you and seeing a ghost.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Maybe not. But it’s true.”