Chapter 14
MALLORY
The market is loud before it's fully awake. Awnings snap. Crates scrape over pavement. Someone two stalls down argues cheerfully about whether the peaches are ripe enough for jam, and a child keeps asking his mother if sunflowers count as flowers if they're bigger than his head.
"They count," I say without looking up.
The boy gasps as if I've delivered a ruling from a very important court. Coralee snorts beside me and keeps weighing tomatoes.
I tuck the last corner of brown paper around a bouquet of snapdragons, basil, and late roses.
My fingers move before I have to think. Fold.
Turn. Hold the stems firm enough to keep them together, gentle enough not to bruise the green.
The old apron sits against my waist, faded blue canvas soft from years of work.
There's twine in one pocket, crackers in the other, and a ribbon spool balanced near my elbow because I've already lost it twice this morning.
"What do you think for my sister?" a woman asks, leaning over the buckets. "She's having one of those weeks."
"Birthday bad, husband bad, or work bad?"
"Work bad."
"Then nothing too cheerful," I say, reaching for deep orange zinnias. "Cheerful when you're furious can feel like an insult."
The woman points at me. "Exactly."
I add purple stock because it smells good and a stem of Queen Anne's lace.
The morning keeps moving. Five dollars. Eight dollars. Two bunches for Mrs. Larkin because her daughter is visiting. Trim the rose stem lower. Pull the wilted leaf. Smile when someone says, "You're the florist lady," and pretend it doesn't make something warm loosen beneath my ribs.
Just Mallory, with damp stems in my hands.
I reach for the pale green ribbon, and my fingers close on air. Again.
"Under the dahlias," Coralee says.
"Stop knowing things before I do."
"It's my most irritating gift."
I bend, find the ribbon where it's rolled beside the bucket, and come up with a strip caught around my knuckles.
Then I see him.
Rourke stands on the other side of the stall, and everything in me stops.
My hand locks around the ribbon. The market drops away in pieces: the peach argument, the child's laugh, the paper crinkling beneath my wrist. For one second there is only my husband, too tall for the narrow lane, too still among the moving crowd.
He's tried to dress plainly. Dark jeans.
A shirt without a tie. No jacket sharp enough to cut a room open.
No watch. But nothing makes Rourke Carmichael ordinary.
The shirt fits his shoulders too well. His hair is less perfect than usual, pushed back as if he's run his hand through it too many times.
Stubble darkens his jaw. There are shadows beneath his eyes I can see even with the morning sun behind him.
His gaze finds mine and stays.
My body recognizes him before my anger can take control. The last night in the penthouse comes back in one hard rush. His body over mine. His hands at my waist. His mouth warm and certain against my skin. The way he looked at me in bed, stripped down to something that felt real enough to trust.
Before the photograph. Before the watch. Before Jocelyn's name turned the room cold.
My fingers ache with the urge to touch his face. To ask if he's slept. To step around the buckets and let him pull me into the place against his chest that used to feel like the safest part of the world.
That wanting frightens me more than him being here.
I grip the edge of the table. Wood presses into my palm. "What are you doing here?"
My voice holds. Barely.
Rourke looks at my hand, then back at me. "I came to buy flowers."
Coralee's movement beside me changes. She sets down the bag she's holding and shifts closer to my shoulder, close enough that I feel the decision in her body before she says a word.
She knows. I tell myself it wouldn't take a rocket scientist. There are only so many exhausted, handsome men who can make me go still in the middle of a market.
Rourke doesn't look at her. He doesn't ask me to step away. He doesn't say my name like a claim. He simply stands there with the buckets between us, waiting like any other customer.
It shouldn't affect me.
It does.
A woman reaches past him for a jar of preserves, and he steps back at once to give her room. Another customer asks Coralee about zucchini bread. A man with a reusable bag studies the bouquets and then wanders away. Rourke waits through all of it.
When the space clears, I pick up my snips. "What kind of bouquet do you want?"
"I don't know."
I lift my eyes despite myself. "I can't build a bouquet if I don't know who it's for."
His throat moves. "My wife."
Two words and my whole body wants to climb over the stall and run to him. But that would get me nowhere. There would still be all the questions. Like where is Jocelyn? When does it all go back to your version of normal?
I look down at the buckets. "What does your wife like?"
A faint breath leaves him. Almost a laugh, but smaller. Sadder.
"She likes flowers that look as if they grew together," he says. "Nothing forced into symmetry."
My fingers still on the stem of a rose.
"She prefers color that feels alive instead of expensive. She notices scent before appearance." He pauses. "She hates arrangements that look like they were designed for hotel lobbies."
Don't you dare react, Mallory.
I reach for zinnias because they're closest.
"She once told me flowers should look like someone chose them," he says. "Not purchased them."
I cut the stem too short. Coralee notices, but she says nothing.
I set the ruined stem aside and choose another.
My hands remember what to do, even if my heart feels like it's going to pop out of my chest. Orange zinnias.
Bright blue cornflowers. A late cream rose with one imperfect outside petal.
Basil tucked where the scent will rise first. Ruscus to keep it loose.
Rourke watches my hands. I feel his stare in my wrists, my fingers, the bare strip of skin where my sleeve shifts back.
He used to know my hands. He used to catch one and kiss the center of my palm when I was trying to tell him something practical, just because he could.
I used to pretend to be annoyed, but I never pulled away.
Because I had him right where I wanted him.
My apron tie sits flat against my waist. There's no visible proof yet. Nothing for him to notice unless he's looking for it, and Rourke is looking at my face like he's afraid if he glances away I might vanish. The baby stays hidden, but the secret feels lit from the inside.
You’re buying flowers for the mother of your child.
The thought rises so suddenly I nearly say it. I imagine his face changing. The shock. The stillness. His hand covering his mouth, maybe. The knowledge that I could bring him to his knees right here nearly chokes me.
I wrap the bouquet tighter than necessary. The paper crinkles. "Eight dollars," I say.
Rourke pulls out cash and lays down a bill too large for a bouquet from a market stall. I pick it up, open the cash box, and count his change.
"Keep it," he says.
"No."
He watches me for half a second. I can see the debate, the impulse to equate money with care.
And then I see the let down, when he realizes he's doing exactly that.
"Okay." He opens his hand.
When my fingers graze his palm, I do my best not to pull back as if I've been burned. If he notices, he says nothing.
I hand him the bouquet. This time, our fingers don't touch.
For a moment, no one is waiting. The market gives us one fragile pocket of quiet.
"Can I say one thing?" he asks.
I should say no, but I want to hear it. I want to hear him say every stupid thing I laid awake imagining.
"I'm not leaving the stall," I say. "And I'm not having an argument in front of everyone."
"I don't want either."
Rourke holds the bouquet carefully, his thumb resting against the folded paper. "I understand now that nothing physically happening doesn't make what I did harmless."
I'm holding my breath, waiting for him to say the wrong thing.
"I gave Jocelyn access that never should have belonged to her," he says. "I let her into decisions about your feelings. I allowed another woman to appear beside me while my wife stood alone."
I grip the ribbon spool hard enough that the cardboard edge bends.
"I protected myself from an uncomfortable conversation and called it protecting you." His voice roughens. "I made you doubt what you saw because I didn't want to look at what I had allowed."
There should be relief. Maybe I should forgive him instantly.
What I feel is just more anger.
This is the man I needed in the penthouse. This is the man I all but begged for. This is the man who would have understood before I ever walked out the door what I needed to hear.
This is the man I could have given the white box to.
The delay makes me furious.
"Why can you see it now?" I ask. "Why not when I was standing in front of you?"
His eyes hold mine. "Because you leaving was louder than everything I kept refusing to hear."
My throat burns. For the first time since he arrived, I let myself look at him fully: the exhaustion beneath his eyes, the stubble, the shoulders that don't seem as invincible in daylight between a crate of tomatoes and a bucket of crooked flowers.
I remember his face above mine when he told me he loved me. I remember believing him. I hate that I believe he means this, too.
"Understanding the damage doesn't undo it," I say.
"No," he says. "It doesn't."
He doesn't ask me to forgive him. He doesn't ask me to come home.
"I only wanted you to know I'm not pretending the problem was a photograph anymore."
A customer steps up beside him, holding a small bunch of sunflowers. "Sorry. Can I pay?"
It's as if a curtain has lowered, ending the moment.
I turn away from Rourke because work gives my hands somewhere to go. "Five dollars."
The woman pays in singles and quarters. I count them twice because my fingers are no longer entirely trustworthy.
Rourke waits until she leaves. "Thank you for the flowers," he says.
I nod.
He doesn't touch me. The space between us feels thin enough to tear with one careless breath, but he keeps his hands on the bouquet.
For one dangerous second, I imagine leaning across the stall. I imagine his mouth meeting mine over brown paper and basil. I imagine the market noise dropping away. I imagine what it would feel like to have the safety of his arms around me.
Then I see the watch on the dresser again. Dark blue face. Steel. Jocelyn's engraving hidden against the skin he let it touch.
I don't move.
Rourke steps back. "I'll return next Saturday."
My head comes up. "Why?"
He lifts the bouquet slightly. "Because my wife makes beautiful flowers."
Don't do this. Don't make me fall in love with you all over again.
"I may not speak to you next time."
A beat passes.
"And I would understand that," he says. "But I'll buy every bouquet you make if that's the only way you'll let me stand here."
I don't answer.
Rourke waits one more breath, then turns and walks into the market crowd with flowers I put together. He doesn't keep looking back to see if I'm watching. He leaves because I haven't invited him to stay.
Only when I can no longer see him do my hands begin to shake. The ribbon slips from my fingers. I try to catch it and miss. It rolls beneath the table, pale green flashing once before it disappears.
"Mal," Coralee says softly.
"I'm fine."
"No, honey. You're not."
She takes the stems from my hands before I crush them and guides me behind the stall. I sit on the overturned crate where I kept my water last week. My knees feel loose.
Coralee crouches in front of me, blocking the market from view. "Do you want him gone?"
I open my mouth.
Yes should be easy. After everything, yes should be sitting right there, clean and ready.
But Rourke's voice is still in my ears.
My wife.
The problem was never a photograph.
Because you leaving was louder.
My ears ring with the phantom sound of a fluttering heartbeat.
I can't say yes.
Coralee sees it. She rests one hand over mine, warm and steady, and doesn't force me to tell her a lie.