Chapter 25
LILY
The morning in the shop is all mine, and I need it. I'm tired in that bone-deep way that comes from being up past midnight with someone you can't stop touching, even when you know you should.
Callahan left me at my doorway close to one, both of us whispering goodbyes like teenagers while I checked the street for witnesses and he chuckled against my hair.
Sneaking around is getting harder. We've been doing it for months now and somehow it's not getting easier, not becoming routine, not settling into something manageable the way I kept telling myself it would.
I'd hoped we would have gotten this obsession with each other under control by now. I told him that last week, sitting cross-legged on my bed while he played with my hair.
”Trouble," he said as he pulled me back to bed with him, "it's going the opposite direction and you know it."
He wasn't wrong. If anything, each stolen hour has us greedier for the next one. Every time I tell myself this will level out, that the wanting will settle into something sustainable, my whole body calls me a liar.
Erin's text came through at seven-thirty, right as I was unlocking the front door.
Erin
Running late. Don't judge me.
Followed immediately by a second one.
Erin
Okay, judge me a little. Worth it.
That tells me everything about how her evening with Rome had gone, which was disturbing. I turn on the lights, start the water for the buckets. The shop has its own rhythm in these early hours, before anyone comes in, before Ruth shows up for her daily visit.
Just me and the flowers and the morning light coming through the big front window, golden.
I like this version of the day. The one where I haven't talked to anyone yet, where the only thing that needs me is a bucket of peonies that opened overnight, their petals unfurling like they couldn't wait for me to see them.
Ruth arrives on the clock, as always, with coffees and a pastry bag and a look on her face that says she has information and fully intends to use it. Also as always.
"Morning, gorgeous." She sets everything on the counter and hoists herself onto the stool that might as well have her name carved into it, settling in like she's preparing to hold court. "You look rested."
"Good make-up."
"Mm." She tears open the bakery bag and pulls out a blueberry muffin, handing me one.
"So. Cherry was at the diner yesterday."
I pick up my coffee and take a sip. Ruth watches me with patience. She has planted seeds and extracted confessions from people for longer than I've been alive.
"She was telling anyone who would listen that Cal Holt took her to some dinner thing in Bridgeport last week," Ruth continues, biting into her muffin casual as anything. "Said they've been seeing each other on and off. Quietly, you know. Because he's so private."
I set my coffee down. There's a flicker of anger, hot and immediate, and I have to work to keep it off my face.
"That is a lie."
Ruth chews. Watches me.
"Cherry is a lying, bitter woman who plants rumors because she can't handle being irrelevant."
I pick up my muffin and bite into it with more force than strictly necessary. "He wouldn't touch that woman with a ten-foot pole. Anyone who knows Callahan knows he would never date someone in this town."
"Never ever?" Ruth asks, mild as milk.
"Never ever."
She hums. Low, thoughtful, the kind of hum that carries an entire cross-examination in two notes. She picks a blueberry off the top of her muffin and eats it separately, like it requires its own moment of consideration.
"You seem to know him pretty well," she says. "For a girl who only sees him when she's visiting his father."
I shrug, keeping my hands busy with my own pastry. "Will talks, I listen. You pick things up."
"Mm-hmm."
Ruth studies me openly and without a shred of apology, like my face is a newspaper she's reading for the interesting parts.
"You know," she says, waving her muffin at my general head area, "I've been looking at you for months and it still doesn't make sense."
"What doesn't make sense now, Ruth?" Every other time I see her she has to make some comment about my looks, my clothes, the circles under my eyes.
"That face. The skin. The lips. The hair." She shakes her head like I've done something personally offensive. "It's an offense to every woman over forty who has to stand in the same room as you, Lily. A genuine offense."
"Woman, I am literally full of freckles and I have a sun spot forming. What skin are you talking about?"
"I'm serious. You walk around this town looking like a high-end shampoo commercial and nobody talks about it because they're all too busy being charmed by you, but I notice." She jabs a finger in my direction. "I notice and I am filing a formal complaint."
"You can take it up with my parents. They're the ones who made me."
"God made you and then went on vacation because the job was done." This woman thinks she is so witty.
"It's a real shame you and Cal can't happen. The gene mashup would be criminal. Unfair to every child born in this country."
My hand stalls on the coffee mug. Just for a beat, just long enough that Ruth probably caught it.
"I have no idea what that means," I say, and my voice comes out almost normal.
"Sure, you don't."
She glances at her phone and sighs. "Gotta go before those fools burn down my kitchen."
She hops off the stool and gathers her coffee, already moving toward the door because she's a woman who has places to be and people to torment.
"Tell Erin I said good morning when she finally drags herself in from whatever Rome did to her all night." She blows me a kiss at the door, quick and warm. "Drink your coffee. Eat the muffin. You're too thin."
"I thought I was unfairly perfect, you senile witch," I call after her.
Ruth just laughs as the door swings shut behind her, the bells chiming in her wake.
I stand at the counter and stare at the peonies without really seeing them. Ruth knows. She doesn't know what she knows, but she knows something, and Ruth with partial information is more dangerous than most people with the full picture.
She'll poke and prod and drop little comments like landmines until something blows up, and all I can do is keep my face neutral and hope she gets distracted by someone else's drama before she figures out mine.
Erin shows up at eleven with wet hair and positively glowing. Three hours late to work can only mean one thing, and the thing is my brother, which is information I am choosing not to think about too hard.
"Don't," she says, holding up a hand like she's stopping traffic. "Not a word."
"I wasn't going to say anything. Trust me on that.”
"Your face is saying everything, though."
"My face is saying I took a morning shift so you could have morning sex with my brother, and you're welcome, but if you share a single detail I will never set foot in this shop again."
She ties her apron on and bumps me with her hip as she passes, grinning in a way that makes her whole face light up. "He made breakfast, that's all."
"Yeah, right."
"Pancakes. He's gotten really good at pancakes."
"Those better be actual pancakes and not a euphemism."
She grins and says nothing, which is an answer in itself, and I gag loudly and go back to my flowers because some things a sister does not need to know.
This is what I signed up for. Loving someone means loving the people they love, and loving Erin means accepting that she goes home to my brother every night and comes back glowing like she swallowed the sun.
I'm okay with it. Thrilled about it, actually. The glowing means Rome is happy, which means the world is working correctly. It just also means I can never eat pancakes at their place again without wondering, and that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make.
Erin settles into the rhythm of the shop, checking orders, starting on an arrangement for a wedding consultation next week.
We move around each other with ease, two people who have been sharing this space long enough that we don't need to talk about it, handing off scissors and reaching for the same ribbon at the same time without colliding.
"So," she says, not looking up from a spray of eucalyptus she's trimming. "Ruth was here."
I scoff. "She was talking about Cherry spreading lies about Callahan again. Same old."
I am being assessed before she says, "you seem worked up about it."
"I'm worked up because Cherry is a toxic human who spreads lies about a good man to make herself feel relevant. It's gross." I strip leaves from a stem with too much force. "Anyone would be worked up about it."
"Sure." She snips a stem, casual. "How's Cal doing, by the way? I feel like I haven't seen him in a while."
"How would I know?"
"You see him at Will's."
"I see Will at Will's. Callahan is barely there when I am."
That's technically true. We've gotten very good at making sure our overlap at the house looks minimal and accidental, even though every minute of it is planned through a text thread that would end both of us if anyone ever saw it.
"You've been scarce lately," Erin says, still casual, still not looking at me. "Poppy mentioned it, too. We used to see you every day. Now it's a few times a week and you're always busy in the evenings."
"I'm studying."
"On a Saturday night?"
"I'm very committed to my medical career."
The look she gives me is full of doubt.
"Lily," she pushes gently. "If there's something going on, you know you can tell me."
"There's nothing going on."
The lie tastes bitter on my tongue. I hate lying to Erin more than anyone.
She was the first person outside of Rome to see me clearly and love me anyway.
She fought for my gap year when Rome wanted me on a plane back to Chicago.
She opened this shop to me like it was mine, never once made me feel like I was too much or not enough or anything other than exactly right.