10. Chapter 10
Maya
***
Monday mornings have a particular rhythm at Finch and Fern.
The weekend orders need processing, the cooler needs restocking, and there is always at least one thing that didn't get done on Saturday that has been quietly accumulating consequence ever since.
I arrive at five-forty-five and work through the list with the focused efficiency of someone who finds comfort in tasks that have clear beginnings and ends, which is most tasks in a flower shop and almost none of the tasks currently occupying the back of my mind.
Lily arrives at eight with coffee and the careful expression she has been wearing since the fundraiser, the one that means she has questions she is exercising considerable discipline not to ask. I appreciate the discipline. I am also aware it has a limit.
"Saturday," she says, setting my coffee on the counter.
"Good morning, Lily," I say.
"You went to the estate on Saturday."
"For the Conservatory logistics," I say. "Site review. Vendor contacts."
"And?"
"And the vendor contacts are confirmed and the site survey is Wednesday."
She looks at me. I look at the ranunculus order.
"Grace called me," she says.
I look up.
"She needed the wholesale supplier contact for the greenhouse corridor," Lily says, in the tone of someone delivering information that is technically true and also not entirely the point. "We had a very nice conversation. She mentioned the cat."
I set down my pen.
"Lily," I say.
"She said he went straight to you," Lily says. "Apparently he's never done that with anyone. Grace seemed to find it very significant." She picks up a stem with the careful innocence of someone who is not at all enjoying this. "I also find it very significant."
"It's a cat," I say.
"It's his cat," she says. "That he definitely doesn't own."
I pick my pen back up. I look at the ranunculus order. The order is very straightforward and requires my full attention and has nothing to say about cats or Saturday mornings or the way a man looks when something he has kept carefully hidden has just been found and treated gently.
"The dahlias need..." I begin.
The bell above the door rings.
We both look up.
Sawyer Ransome stands in the doorway holding a paper-wrapped bundle that is unmistakably flowers, which is not, on the surface, surprising for a man standing inside a flower shop.
What is surprising is that he is not holding a cream envelope, not holding a clipboard, not holding any of the practical justifications he usually carries into Finch and Fern like a passport through my door.
He is just holding flowers.
Lily makes a sound beside me that she converts, with impressive speed, into a cough, and picks up the nearest bucket and takes it to the back room with the brisk purposefulness of someone removing themselves from a situation they have been waiting for since approximately the fundraiser.
Sawyer crosses to the counter.
He sets the bundle down between us. Brown paper wrap, loosely tied, the kind that comes from a specialist grower rather than a wholesaler, and through the paper I can see the soft, dense heads of garden roses in the blush-and-cream of Juliet varietals, the kind that smell like something from a different century and cost more per stem than anything I stock regularly because the growers who produce them don't deal in volume, they deal in quality, and you have to know to ask.
I look at the roses. My gaze lifts to him.
He looks at the roses too, briefly, as if reminding himself they are there, and then looks back at me with the expression of a man who has rehearsed something and has just decided, in real time, not to use it.
"Cotswolds grower," he says. "Baxter and Sons. Third generation. They don't supply wholesalers."
"I know who they are," I say, carefully. "I've tried to get an account with them for two years. They have a waiting list."
"Yes." He adjusts his jacket. "I may have mentioned your shop to them."
I look at him. "You may have."
"In passing." He straightens a non-existent wrinkle from his sleeve. "During an unrelated call."
"An unrelated call," I repeat.
"About property matters."
"You called a third generation Cotswolds rose grower," I say slowly, "about property matters."
Something moves at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile. The suggestion of one, contained immediately, like a door opened an inch and then held.
"They came up in conversation," he says, with the dignity of a man who has committed to a story and intends to see it through.
I press my lips together. My gaze drops to the roses before returning to him.
I say nothing, because sometimes silence is the kindest thing you can offer a person who is trying very hard to be cool about something that is not cool at all, and I find, to my complete surprise, that I want to be kind to him right now.
"They're Juliet varietals," I say finally. "How did you know they're my favorites?"
A pause. Brief, but there.
"I had a feeling," he says. "And I looked it up."
I meet his eyes. "You did?"
"Of course I did," he says, and I realize with a small, warm shock that he has just used my own words back at me, quietly and without fanfare, and the corner of his mouth is doing that thing again.
"At what time?" I say.
"That's not relevant."
"Late," I say.
He doesn't deny it.
"Why?" I say, and we both know I am no longer asking about the roses or the grower or the unrelated property call.
He looks at me across the counter and for a moment he doesn't answer, and the shop is very quiet around us, just the cooler hum and the morning light through the front glass and the quality of silence that has been building between us since a candlelit community center and a single white ranunculus and a bookmark on page forty-three of a book of French poetry.
"I thought you would like them," he says quietly. "And I wanted to bring them by. In person." He pauses. "No strings. No committee. No logistics." Another pause, smaller and more weighted than the first. "Just you."
The words land in the quiet of the shop and stay there.
My gaze drifts to the roses, then to his hands resting on the counter, still and unhurried, the hands of a man who has said what he came to say and is prepared to wait for whatever comes next.
I reach out and touch the paper wrap. Just lightly. Just my fingertips against the brown paper, feeling the slight give of the petals beneath.
His hand is close to mine on the counter. Not touching. Close enough that the distance between them is its own kind of conversation.
I look up.
He is already looking at me.
There is something in his expression that I have been collecting since the first morning at the gate, pieces of it appearing and disappearing so quickly I was never sure I had seen them correctly.
The guarded distance he wears like a second skin is still there, but it is thinner than it was, worn down by Saturdays and candlelight and eleven seconds of thunder, and what shows through underneath it is something quieter and more uncertain and more real than anything I have seen on his face before.
His fingertips graze the back of my hand where I have been gripping the edge of the paper wrap.
I feel it all the way up my arm.
Neither of us moves.
The cooler hums. The morning light shifts.
Somewhere on Main Street a delivery van rumbles past and the front window trembles slightly in its frame, and the world outside carries on in its ordinary way, entirely indifferent to two people standing on opposite sides of a zinc counter with their hands almost touching and everything unsaid between them taking up all the available air in the room.
"Thank you," I say finally. "For the roses."
"They suit the shop," he says. "And you."
He says it simply, without performance, the way he says everything true, and I find that I have no prepared response for that, which is unusual for me, and I file the fact of it away alongside everything else I have been collecting and not yet done with: the torn receipt, the bookmark on page forty-three.
He straightens. He adjusts his jacket, the small, precise gesture of a man reassembling his composure, and he says something about the site survey Wednesday and I say something back about confirming the time with Grace, and we are suddenly, by unspoken agreement, back in the language of logistics, which is safer and which neither of us entirely means.
"I should go," he says. "I just wanted to come by. To give you these." A pause. "And to see you."
I smile. He smiles back, small and real and entirely his, and turns and walks toward the door.
The roses are still in my arms.
At the door he pauses. He always pauses at my door, and I have come to understand this as the moment when he chooses what to take with him and what to leave behind. Then he is gone, and the bell settles, and the shop is just the shop again.
I stand at the zinc counter and look at the roses.
Then, because Lily is in the back room and the front window faces the street and there is no one to see, I lean forward and bury my face in the roses and breathe in, slowly and completely, the scent of Juliet roses from a third generation Cotswolds grower I have been trying to source for two years, which smells, up close, exactly like something worth waiting for.
I stay like that longer than makes sense for a woman with her feelings perfectly under control.
***
When Lily comes back from the stock room eight minutes later, the roses are in the best vase in the shop, the one I keep for arrangements I want people to notice, positioned at the front of the counter where the morning light hits them first.
She doesn't say anything.
She doesn't need to.