Chapter 14
Chapter Fourteen
Present Day
The morning of Ivy’s meeting with Elliot at the flower shop, silver clouds overhead dumped six inches of snow.
Ivy walked the sparkling route in her snow boots, her face frozen where it peeked out between her hat and her scarf.
She half assumed that Elliot wouldn’t be there, that he’d text and tell her he couldn’t make it.
But when she arrived, he was leaning on his truck out front, waiting for her in that cool Carhartt jacket.
Her heart did a backflip. She jangled her keys and let him in.
“Coffee?” she offered, unsure if she could trust herself to act normally.
“I’d kill for some,” he said. He then opened his bag to show that he’d brought a box of donuts from the shop up the road. “I hope you like sweets for breakfast.”
“I like sweets every day of the week,” she confessed. “My weakness!”
“Mine, too.” He smiled and set the box of donuts on the counter.
Ivy watched his eyes drift across the flower shop at the naked racks, the crumbling walls, and the dilapidated ceiling.
There wasn’t a flower in sight, although there was a soft scent of something floral molding.
She marveled that she’d let things get so bad.
But before she had a chance to apologize or make some excuse, Elliot drew a notebook from his coat pocket and opened it to show her the plans he’d drawn up for the exterior and interior of the flower shop.
Just as he’d said, he’d thought about it a lot. Ivy couldn’t believe it.
“This place is pretty old, so it’s no surprise things need an update,” he said simply, flattening the notebook with the heel of his hand.
“I never got around to refurbishing after I took over from the last owner,” Ivy said, remembering Adeline and her sweet smile and her sweet hopes for Ivy.
Ivy poured two mugs of coffee for them both and set them on the counter, trying to work through her anxiety, her fear that once Elliot saw the extent of this mess, he wouldn’t want to talk to her any longer.
It was ridiculous, especially since he needed her for his sister’s flowers, but it felt like an active worry.
Elliot let his plan book fall closed and gestured at the donuts, as though he wanted to make sure they got to them before they did any work. “Have you had the caramel kind before?”
She laughed. “Never.”
“You have to eat it now,” Elliot said. “Seriously. I can’t live in a world where you haven’t tried it.”
With a tentative hand, Ivy took the donut.
Nervous to bite down in front of him, she closed her eyes and ate as delicately as she could.
Caramel oozed from the center and across her chin.
Oh, but the flavor. It was the most sensational thing she’d ever tasted: slightly salty and gooey and so sweet.
It was miles better than that autumn dessert he’d shared with her a couple of months back. Her eyes popped open.
Elliot smiled knowingly at her and took the other caramel from the box. “I knew I had to get two of them,” he said. “They’re just that good.”
“I can’t believe it,” Ivy stuttered. “I’ve been working five minutes away from them for, what? Eighteen years? And I’ve never had this!”
“It’s crazy how Bluebell Cove can keep surprising you,” Elliot said.
What he said felt heavy with meaning. Ivy dotted a napkin across her chin and tried and failed to maintain eye contact. Did he mean her? Did he mean them?
Don’t get your hopes up, Ivy. You know better.
Again, Elliot showed her the plans and explained how simple it would be to fix everything up “before Valentine’s Day, even. I know how many orders you’ll get for that.”
Ivy knew better than to explain to him how few orders she got these days.
Elliot walked around the space with his measuring tape, making little notes to himself in his book about the materials he needed to bring and how much of each.
When he stepped behind the counter and into her office, Ivy felt a jolt of fear.
The pile of bills on the desk was unmistakable, many of them red and yellow, with WARNING written across them in big black letters.
But it was too late to stop Elliot now. He stood in front of her desk and let the measuring tape snap back into its holder.
Did she want him to confirm what he saw? Did she want him to say that no amount of refurbishment could fix all that? She wavered in the doorway between the office and the rest of the flower shop.
But just then, her phone rang. It was Lily, calling from campus.
“I have to take this,” Ivy explained, waving her cell.
“Of course,” he said, offering a smile. He hadn’t moved away from her desk, but it looked as though he was analyzing the corner, where the wallpaper had begun to peel.
Ivy bolted away from him, unable to concentrate on her daughter when Elliot was in her office. “Hi, honey! How was it?” Ivy knew that Lily had just finished with her first-ever college class—a biology course that specialized in coastline critters.
“Ugh, it was a lot.” Lily laughed. “I felt out of my depths. It felt like everyone already knew everything. Like we were speaking a different language.”
Blustery winds went past her receiver, and Ivy prayed that her daughter was bundled up enough to handle them. Ivy’s heart softened at her daughter’s fear.
Lily had never really opened up to Ivy like this. Ivy wondered what had changed.
“The thing I always remember,” Ivy said, raising her chin, “is that everyone’s faking it, all the time. Everyone you heard in that classroom was trying to impress everyone else. They probably know less than half of what they say.”
Lily groaned. “I don’t know.”
But Ivy rejected this. “You got into that university because you’re brilliant. You’re driven, intellectual, and focused on what you want. The first day of anything is a doozy, but you can’t let that fear block you from achieving what you set out to do.”
Lily was quiet for a moment. Ivy pictured her walking across campus, maybe gripping a coffee cup in the hand not holding her phone. In Ivy’s mind's eye, she looked sort of like Rory in Gilmore Girls. She looked like her brilliant little girl.
“How was your first weekend away?” Ivy asked because she wanted to hear as much as she could before Lily escaped her again.
“It was fun,” Lily said. “Flora and I went to a party in the dorms. We met a ton of other people who just transferred in from other schools.” There was a brightness to her voice. “I have to run, though. My next class starts in ten.”
Ivy filled her lungs. “Good luck, sweet girl. I love you.”
“I love you, too, Mom.”
Lily hung up and left Ivy in the silence of her moldering flower shop, her phone pressed against her chest. It wasn’t for another moment that she remembered she wasn’t alone.
She spun around to see Elliot through the doorway into her office, slipping a pencil behind his ear.
Her eyes slid down to the stack of red and yellow letters on the desk.
“Sorry about that,” she said.
“You said your daughter’s at school?” Elliot asked. “How’s it going?”
Ivy set her forearms on the counter. “She’s freaking out a little bit. I can’t blame her. I never moved away from home, you know? I graduated, worked at the inn, got married, and had kids.”
And then, I opened the flower shop, and my husband died.
That was the story of Ivy’s life.
“It was wild to live in Boston.” Elliot stepped out from the shadows of her office to join her in the brighter light of the front room.
“Every person I met through my ex-wife was the smartest person I’d ever met.
They used language that mystified me. Up until then, I’d only known the folks in Bluebell Cove.
You know what it’s like around here. Unpretentious.
Kind-hearted. Suddenly, I was at dinner parties where intellectuals were trying to get the better of one another based on some academic paper some other intellectual guy had written, like, twenty years ago.
It felt hollow to me. I wondered what it was all for. ”
Ivy pictured the twenty-year-old Elliot Rhodes in an ornate Victorian home somewhere outside of Boston, sipping a glass of wine and dreaming of returning to Bluebell Cove.
“Not that that will happen to your daughter,” Elliot was quick to add.
“No. I think she’ll get through this rough patch,” Ivy said. “For better or for worse.”
Gently, Ivy outlined what it had been like for her to drop Lily off at school for the first time. Elliot listened, his brow furrowed, and said, “That must have been difficult.”
“It was,” Ivy said. “But I think we found something else in our relationship. Something we’ve neglected before. I think she’s resented me for months, and I think I’ve kept so much from her over the years. She’s nearly an adult woman. I don’t know why I’m so afraid for her to get to know me.”
This admission poured out of her. She had the strangest instinct to apologize. But instead of doing that, she took another bite of caramel donut, drowning her sorrows and her fears in sugar. Elliot did the same.
“It’s awful to be known,” Elliot agreed, wiping caramel from his lips. “But it’s what we’re put on this earth to try to do, I think. Show each other who we are. Genuinely care about one another.” His eyes glowed with meaning.
“When was the last time you let yourself be known?” Ivy asked.
Elliot thought about this. “I’ve had plenty of girlfriends through the years,” he said.
“But I think when I hit thirty, I felt bruised from so many failed relationships. I really wanted children, but I didn’t know how to tell any of the women I was with that I wanted that.
I left when things got hard, or I let them leave when I shut down on them.
For the past few years, I’ve guarded myself from potential relationships.
But I think it’s because I knew I wasn’t ready. ”
Ivy took a hesitant step back. She recognized that he was saying he was ready now, if she was. At least, she was pretty sure that was what he was saying.
If he wasn’t? Well, that would be devastating.
Elliot adjusted the pencil behind his ear. An exhilarated and secret part of Ivy thought he was going to draw himself across the counter and kiss her right there in the crumbling flower shop. But she took another small step back, as though something in her body couldn’t take it.
Elliot kept his smile, but the light in his eyes dimmed.
“My sister wants to talk to you, by the way,” he said. “About the flowers. Would you be up for that?”
Ivy nodded. “Of course.”
She didn’t want to add, “It might be my last-ever flower gig before I have to declare bankruptcy. Perhaps it would be a nice way to close things out. Maybe it would be a beautiful way to say goodbye to an eighteen-year career.” It was one she’d never expected.
Nevertheless, it had defined her life—almost as much as motherhood had.