20. Az
— ? —
Az
The numbers are bad.
That’s the first thing I think when I open my laptop the following Thursday morning and pull up Dahlia & Thorn’s accounts.
I’ve been putting this off for days, okay, weeks, telling myself that Marisol has everything handled, that the shop doesn’t need me checking in every five minutes, that shorter workdays mean I can put off the hard calls.
But the email from Fran at Salazar Blooms has been sitting in my inbox since Tuesday, all cheerful exclamation points and just checking in, honey!, and I finally made myself look at the attached invoice.
The numbers aren’t just bad. They’re red.
“No, no, no-”
I’m scrolling through orders, through payments, through the careful spreadsheet Marisol’s been maintaining, and it’s worse than I thought.
We’re behind on three major accounts. The Salazar debt is two months overdue.
There are pending arrangements that should have shipped last week, still sitting in the system marked awaiting flowers.
I’ve been so focused on the farm, on Eli, on June, that I let my shop fall apart.
My grandmother’s voice in my head: A dahlia doesn’t care about your feelings, mija. It blooms or it dies.
The shop is dying.
“Az?”
I jolt so hard I almost knock the laptop off the table. Eli’s standing in the kitchen doorway, fresh from wherever he was, the bunkhouse, probably, or the barn with that supposedly-dying fan, looking at me with concern creasing his forehead.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. Nothing, I’m just-” I close the laptop too fast. “Work stuff.”
“What kind of work stuff?”
“The kind that’s none of your business.” It comes out harsher than I mean it to, and I see him flinch, just a little. “Sorry. I didn’t… I’m sorry. It’s fine.”
“It’s not fine.” He moves closer, careful, the way he approaches everything these days. Like I might shatter if he moves wrong. “You’ve got that face.”
“I don’t have a face.”
“You do. You get a little…” He gestures vaguely at his own forehead. “Crinkle. Right here. When you’re trying not to freak out about something.”
“I don’t crinkle.”
“You definitely crinkle.”
“Eli-”
“Is it the shop?” He’s beside me now, not touching, just present. “You’ve been avoiding looking at those emails for a week.”
“How do you know what I’ve been avoiding?”
“Because you make this noise every time a new one comes in. This little…” He mimics a strangled sigh. “And then you close the laptop and go pet the goat.”
“The goat likes me.”
“The goat tolerates you. That’s not the point.” He pulls out the chair across from me, sits down. “Tell me.”
I don’t want to tell him. Telling him means admitting I’ve failed at something, means showing him another crack in the armor I’ve been holding together with sheer stubbornness and spite.
But he’s looking at me with those eyes, that patient impossible blue, and I’m so tired of holding everything alone.
“The shop’s in trouble,” I say. “Like, real trouble. We’re behind on orders, we owe Salazar Blooms, that’s my Texas supplier, two months of invoices, and I haven’t been there in-” I stop, count backwards.
“Eight weeks? Almost? I thought the bookkeeper had the payments scheduled. Marisol kept forwarding warnings, and I kept asking for one more day instead of checking the account myself. She’s doing her best, but she’s a designer, not a manager, and I’ve been-”
“Here,” Eli finishes quietly. “Dealing with me.”
“Dealing with us.” I open the laptop again, turn it so he can see the spreadsheet. “Look at this. That column? That’s what we owe. That column? That’s what we’ve got coming in. Notice anything?”
“The second number’s smaller.”
“The second number’s a lot smaller.” I push back from the table, start pacing, because I can’t sit still with this much anxiety crawling under my skin.
“I should have been paying attention. I should have… I have a responsibility to this business, Eli. I built Dahlia & Thorn. My grandmother trusted me with Juniper Hill. And I’m failing at both of them because I can’t get my own life together. ”
“Hey.” He’s on his feet now, hands out like he wants to reach for me but won’t without permission. “You’re not failing. You’re thirty weeks pregnant and dealing with… with all of this, and you’re still standing. That’s not failure.”
“Tell that to Fran when she doesn’t get paid.”
“Okay.”
I stop pacing. “What?”
“Okay. I’ll tell her. Let me help.”
“Eli-”
“Not with money.” He says it quickly, hands up, like he knows exactly where my mind went.
“You made the rules. I heard them. I’m not trying to…
I just mean, let me help. Physically. With the orders, the arrangements, whatever needs doing.
I’ve got two hands and I’m not totally useless with flowers anymore. ”
“You killed that succulent last month.”
“The succulent was already dying. Lupe said so.”
“Lupe was being nice.”
“Lupe’s never been nice a day in her life.” He’s smiling, trying to coax me down from the ledge. “Come on. Let me drive you to the shop. Let me carry things and sweep floors and do whatever you need. You can yell at me the whole time if it makes you feel better.”
“That’s not-”
“I’m offering labor, Az. Nothing else. Just me. For whatever you need.”
He’s so earnest it hurts. Standing there in my grandmother’s kitchen, offering to haul flower buckets and sweep petals because that’s what I’ll accept from him right now. Because he knows he can’t fix this with a check, and he’s trying anyway.
“Fine,” I hear myself say. “But if you bruise a single peony, I’m making you sleep in the barn.”
“With Elliot?” He looks genuinely wary.
“With Elliot.” I keep my face straight.
“He hates me.”
“Then don’t bruise my peonies.”
***
The drive to Beverly Hills takes two hours in traffic, and I spend most of it on the phone with Marisol, getting a full status report while Eli navigates and pretends he’s not listening.
It’s worse than the spreadsheet suggested.
Three weddings worth of arrangements are sitting in the cooler, half-finished, waiting for flowers that haven’t arrived because we haven’t paid the invoices to bring them in.
The Salazar debt is the biggest chunk, Fran’s been patient, more patient than we deserve, but there are smaller suppliers too, local farms that I’ve built relationships with over years.
“I don’t know what to do,” Marisol says, voice cracking through the speaker. “I’m trying, Az, I swear, but I’m not… I’m not you. I can’t talk to these vendors the way you do, can’t make them understand-”
“Hey.” I cut her off as gently as I can. “You’ve been holding this together while I’ve been gone. That’s more than I should have asked of you.”
“But the Castellano wedding is Saturday and we don’t have-”
“I’m on my way. We’ll figure it out. I promise.”
I hang up and stare out the window at the freeway, at the endless sprawl of cars and concrete, and I feel the weight of everything I’ve been ignoring settle back onto my shoulders.
“You okay?” Eli asks.
“No.”
“Want to talk about it?”
“No.”
He nods. Keeps driving. Doesn’t push.
Dahlia & Thorn looks the same from the outside, the sage green awning, the hand-painted window sign, the buckets of sample arrangements on the sidewalk that Marisol refreshes every morning. But when I step inside, I can feel the difference.
The cooler’s too full. The worktables are cluttered. There’s a stack of invoices on the counter that makes my throat go tight.
“Oh thank God.” Marisol practically runs from the back room, wrapping me in a hug that’s half relief and half desperation. “You’re here. You’re actually here.”
“I’m here.” I hug her back, feeling June kick in protest at being squished. “Show me everything.”
***
Two hours later, I’m sitting in the walk-in cooler crying.
I didn’t mean to. I was going through the orders, making lists, figuring out what could be salvaged and what was going to have to be apologized for, and then I called Fran to explain that I was working on it, that the payment was coming, that I just needed a little more time…
And she was kind.
“Oh honey, don’t you worry about it. We’ve all had a year, you know? Take your time. Pay when you can. I know you’re good for it.”
She knows I’m good for it. She’s known me since I was twenty-four, handling supplier calls for Rosa. Later she extended credit when I opened my own shop. She believed in me then. She believes in me now.
And I can’t pay her.
The cooler door opens.
“Az?” Eli’s silhouette against the fluorescent light. “Marisol said you were… oh.”
He sees me crying. Of course he does. I’m sitting on an overturned bucket surrounded by roses, mascara probably halfway down my face, sobbing like a child.
“Hey.” He’s beside me in two steps, crouching down, not touching. “Hey, hey. What happened?”
“She was nice,” I manage. “Fran was so nice and I can’t… I can’t pay her, Eli. I can’t pay anyone. And they’re all being so understanding and it makes it worse, because I don’t deserve-”
“Stop.” His voice is firm in a way it almost never is with me anymore. “Stop right there. You deserve understanding, you deserve kindness. You deserve people giving you grace when your life falls apart.”
“My life didn’t fall apart. I let it fall apart. I was so focused on being angry at you that I forgot I had a business to run.”
“No.” He shifts, sits down on the cold floor beside me, shoulder almost touching mine. “Your life fell apart because I wasn’t there. Because I was on tour instead of home, because I let Brynn-” He stops. Breathes. “I helped put you in this position. Let me help get you out of it.”
“You can’t fix it with money.” I wipe my face with the back of my wrist. “We talked about this.”
“I know,” he says. “So let me fix it with my hands instead. What needs doing?”
I laugh, which is absurd, because I was just crying over a stack of invoices. “You want to make bouquets.”
“I want to help.” He stands, offers me his hand. “Teach me.”