4. Chapter 4
Maya
***
I am elbow-deep in a bucket of ranunculus when the bell above the door rings at nine-fifteen, sharp enough to cut through the hum of the standing fan.
I know before I look up that the footsteps are wrong for Willow Creek.
It's not that they're loud. It's that they're measured.
Deliberate. The kind of footsteps that expect the floor to behave, that have never once navigated a space without knowing exactly where they were going and exactly how long it would take to get there.
Willow Creek footsteps are unhurried in a different way, the way of people who have nowhere to be that the person they're talking to isn't also going. These footsteps have a destination.
I look up.
Sawyer Ransome stands just inside my shop.
He's in a different suit today, charcoal instead of grey, and he holds a cream envelope in one hand with the relaxed certainty of a man who has never once in his life been turned away at a door.
His ice-blue eyes move across the shop in one clean sweep, taking inventory the way I imagine he takes inventory of everything, quickly and completely and without letting any of it show on his face.
Then they land on me.
I keep my hands in the ranunculus water because my hands are steadier when they're busy, and because something about the way this man fills a doorway makes me want to appear extremely occupied.
"Mr. Ransome," I say. Pleasant. Professional. Giving absolutely nothing away.
He crosses to the counter without being invited, which I note, and sets the cream envelope down on the only clear corner of my zinc worktable, which I also note, because everyone who comes into Finch and Fern touches something.
They pick up a stem, run a finger along a petal, lean in to smell whatever is closest. It's involuntary, the way flowers work on people, like a kind of gravity.
He doesn't touch anything.
Not a single stem. Not the edge of the worktable. He sets the envelope down with the precision of a man placing a document in a boardroom and steps back precisely one step, and I find, to my great irritation, that the deliberate absence of curiosity is more unnerving than curiosity would have been.
"I have a proposal," he says.
"I can see that," I say, nodding at the envelope.
"The community fundraiser requires floral displays. I'd like to underwrite the full cost. All arrangements, all installations, sourced and designed by Finch and Fern." He pauses. "No public credit taken."
I look at the envelope. Then I look at him.
"No public credit," I repeat.
"None."
"You'd like to pay for the entire event's florals and have no one know about it."
"Correct."
I consider this for a moment, the way I consider anything that arrives with too clean an explanation. In my experience, offers without visible strings don't have no strings. They have strings you haven't found yet.
I slide the envelope back across the counter without opening it.
"The fundraiser committee doesn't accept anonymous backing," I tell him, "from people with undisclosed interests in Linden Rise properties."
The words are out before I've fully decided to say them. I hear them land in the space between us and I watch his face, and what happens behind his eyes in the half second that follows is the most interesting thing I've seen all week.
It isn't anger.
It's surprise. Clean and unguarded, there and gone in less time than it takes to blink, but I catch it because I was watching and because I have spent enough years reading people across this counter to know the difference between a person performing a reaction and a person having one.
He hadn't expected me to know.
He recovers immediately, the way I imagine he recovers from everything, smoothly and without acknowledgment, like a current moving back into place after something passed through it.
But the moment happened and we both know it happened and now it sits between us on the counter like a third person neither of us invited.
"The offer stands," he says. His voice is exactly as measured as it was before. Whatever the surprise cost him, he isn't letting it show anymore.
He reaches into his jacket pocket and sets a business card beside the rejected envelope. Heavy stock, minimal print, just his name and a number. The kind of card that doesn't need to say anything else because the name is supposed to be enough.
Then he picks up the envelope, tucks it back into his jacket, and walks toward the door with the same unhurried precision he walked in with.
At the door he pauses. Just briefly. Not long enough to be a hesitation, just long enough to be a choice.
"The ranunculus," he says, without turning around. "You're conditioning them too long. Two hours maximum in cold water or the stems go soft."
And then he's gone.
The bell above the door settles into silence.
I stand at my worktable with my hands still in the bucket and the business card sitting on the counter and the unsettled feeling of someone who has just lost a point in a game she didn't agree to play.
I look at the ranunculus. I have been conditioning ranunculus for eleven years.
I know exactly how long to condition ranunculus.
I also know, because I pull one stem out and examine it with the objectivity of someone who is deeply annoyed and trying very hard to be fair, that he is completely wrong.
I set it back in the bucket.
I pick up the business card.
Heavy stock. Smooth edges. S. Ransome in clean serif font, and beneath it a number I recognize as a direct line rather than a switchboard because it has too few digits for anything else.
I set it under the register where I put things I haven't decided what to do with yet.
There is a small collection under there.
A business card from a property developer who wanted to buy the shop two years ago.
A note from the bank about refinancing options I never pursued.
A torn receipt from the day my mother handed me the keys and told me Finch and Fern was mine now, which I keep not because it has any practical value but because some things you just don't throw away.
Lily appears from the back room with a bundle of wire and the expression of someone who heard the bell and the footsteps and possibly the entire conversation and has been doing her best not to say anything.
"Was that," she says, in a tone of careful neutrality, "who I think it was?"
"Deadhead the dahlias," I say.
"Maya."
"The dahlias, Lily."
She picks up the dahlia bucket. She is smiling.
I can hear it in the way she doesn't say anything else, which is somehow louder than anything she could have said, and I turn back to my ranunculus and pull another stem out and examine it and put it back and try very hard not to think about ice-blue eyes that went briefly, genuinely surprised in the middle of my shop and then locked themselves back up before I could see anything else.
The Thursday afternoon passes the way Thursday afternoons pass in Willow Creek, steadily and with purpose, the shop doing what the shop does: sustaining me, exhausting me, giving me exactly enough to think about that I can't think about anything else.
At half past four Bette comes in for sweet peas she doesn't need and mentions, while rearranging a display that does not need rearranging, that the fundraiser planning committee has its first meeting next Thursday evening and wouldn't it be lovely if Finch and Fern were represented.
"I'll think about it," I say.
"Of course you will," says Bette, in the tone of a woman who has already put my name on the list.
She leaves with her sweet peas and her satisfaction and I stand at the counter in the quiet she leaves behind and look at the place on the worktable where Sawyer Ransome set down a cream envelope this morning and stepped back and waited to see what I would do with it.
I think about the business card under the register.
I think about undisclosed interests in Linden Rise properties, and a landlord's auction notice with thirty days on the clock, and the gap in my numbers that has not gotten any smaller since I did the arithmetic at six a.m. last Thursday.
I think about the offer that covered the full cost of the fundraiser florals with no strings attached, or at least no visible ones.
I close the shop at seven. I wipe down the worktable. I water the front window boxes and lock the door and stand on the step for a moment in the evening air with my keys in my hand.
Then I go back inside, take the business card out from under the register, and look at it for a long time.
I don't call the number.
But I don't throw the card away either.
***
What I notice, later, lying awake in the particular dark of a Thursday night that has decided not to cooperate, is that he had an opinion about my ranunculus.
Not a passing comment. Not a general observation about flowers.
A specific, confident, completely wrong opinion about the stems currently sitting in my cooler, which means he was paying attention to everything in my shop the moment he walked through the door.
The question I can't stop turning over is what else, besides the ranunculus.
***