Chapter Seven
Flowers Are Not the Language He Speaks
The flowers took up nearly the entire front counter, an extravagant arrangement of white peonies and dark ranunculus that made Imke stop dead in the doorway when she arrived for her shift.
"Okay," she said, setting down her bag slowly. "That's a lot of flowers."
Senna stood over them with a small card in her hand, and for exactly the length of time it took to open the envelope, she let herself believe, with an eagerness that embarrassed her the moment she recognized it, that Colt had finally done the thing every wronged woman in every story she'd ever directed eventually received: the grand, expensive apology, delivered in bloom.
The card was from the publisher's Berlin office, congratulating Klarheit Audio on the strong early reception of the mystery adaptation and confirming interest in extending the contract for three additional titles.
Senna read it twice, feeling the specific, hollow drop of an expectation she hadn't admitted to having, and set the card down with more care than the moment required.
"Good news?" Imke asked, watching her face with obvious confusion at the mismatch between the words and Senna's expression.
"Very good news." Senna picked up the vase, moved it to the reception desk where clients would see it, and made herself smile in a way that felt, for once, entirely manufactured. "The publisher wants to extend."
She didn't say the rest of it, the part that sat in her chest for the remainder of the day like a stone she couldn't quite swallow: that in three years of marriage, Colt had never once sent her flowers.
Not for their anniversary, which he'd marked instead by fixing the studio's temperamental door hinge without being asked.
Not after arguments, which he'd ended by simply showing up and doing whatever task around the loft had been sitting unfinished the longest. She had never thought of it as a lack before.
She had thought of it, if she'd thought of it at all, as simply who he was, a man who didn't traffic in gestures that could be bought.
She thought of it differently now, turning the fact over while she worked through the afternoon's session, and by the time she closed the studio that evening she had arrived somewhere she hadn't expected: not disappointment that he hadn't sent flowers, but a kind of unwilling clarity about what his absence of flowers had always actually meant.
She thought, too, about her own habits of communication, the way she'd spent three years directing actors toward truth in a booth while somehow never once asking her own husband the plain, unglamorous questions a marriage actually required.
What happens at the yard. Who is Rein to you, really.
Why do you come home some nights with your knuckles split and never once offer an explanation I have to drag out of you.
She had told herself, for three years, that not asking was a form of respect, the same accommodation she'd made about the clubhouse itself.
Sitting alone in the control room with the flowers glowing white under the desk lamp, she wondered, for the first time, whether it had actually been fear wearing the costume of respect: fear that if she asked, she might not like the answer, and might have to choose between the life she'd built and the man she'd built it with.
? ? ?
He arrived at his usual hour, and for the first time since the vigil began, Senna opened the studio door all the way, no chain, no gap, cold air rushing into the warm front room as she stood back to let him in.
He hesitated on the threshold, water dripping from his jacket onto the mat, visibly unsure whether the invitation extended past the doorframe. "You sure?"
"Just inside," she said. "Not further."
He stepped in, careful, like a man conscious of every place his boots might leave a mark, and stood near the door while she moved behind the reception desk, putting the width of it between them out of an instinct she didn't examine too closely.
"I got flowers today," she said, watching his face for whatever it would do. "From the Berlin office. Contract extension."
"That's good." A small, genuine warmth crossed his expression, unguarded in a way she hadn't seen from him in weeks. "You've been working toward that for months."
"You've never sent me flowers." She said it plainly, no accusation in it, just the fact laid on the desk between them like evidence. "Three years. Not once. I never thought about it until today."
Colt was quiet for a moment, turning something over.
"Where I grew up, flowers were what men sent when they didn't have anything real to offer instead.
Rein used to say it, actually, more than once: a man who sends flowers is a man asking to be forgiven cheap.
The ones who meant it bled for it. Took the beating instead of buying the bouquet.
That's the only currency anybody in that world ever trusted.
" He shook his head slightly, like even he could hear how strange it sounded said out loud in her studio's warm light.
"I know that's not normal. I know most people would've sent the flowers and called it done.
I never learned how to do the normal thing.
I only learned how to do the hard thing and hope it counted for more. "
"It's why you've been standing outside in the rain instead of leaving a note."
"I don't have the words for a note that wouldn't sound like an excuse.
" His jaw worked, the same small, contained motion she remembered from the kitchen table.
"I'm trying to learn a different way to say it.
I don't know the words yet. I only know how to keep showing up until you believe I mean it. "
Senna stood behind the desk for a long moment, the flowers from a stranger's contract sitting between them on the counter, absurd and beside the point, and felt something in her chest shift that she wasn't ready to name.
"You should leave," she said, and then, before he could turn toward the door, "Not yet."
The two words hung in the room, and she watched him go very still, the way he did when he was trying not to let something show on his face and failing anyway.
"Okay," he said, quiet. "Not yet."
They stood like that for a while, the width of the desk between them, neither of them moving to close it, the rain outside picking up again against the glass, and when he finally did leave, twenty minutes later, neither of them had said much else at all.
But something had changed in the shape of the silence, Senna thought, watching him cross the street back to his bike. It no longer felt entirely like a wall.
She locked the door behind him and stood with her hand still on the deadbolt for a moment, listening to her own pulse, thinking about the specific, particular strangeness of a marriage where the person who had hurt her most completely was also the only person who had ever made total silence feel like something other than absence.
She did not have a category for that either, any more than Greta had.
She only knew that the studio felt different once he'd gone, not emptier exactly, but aware of itself in a way it hadn't been an hour before, as though the room itself had been listening to the whole exchange and was still turning it over.
? ? ?
Two days later, staying at the studio deliberately past her usual hour, editing a session she didn't actually need to touch, Senna caught herself checking the clock every few minutes and finally admitted, to no one but the empty control room, exactly what she was doing.
She was waiting to see if he'd come at his usual time.
She hated how much that admission cost her, and hated more how little it seemed to change the fact of the waiting itself.
Imke had left an hour earlier, the day's sessions finished, the building settling into the particular hush it took on after the last client left, and Senna sat alone at the mixing desk with a session file open that she'd already exported twice, scrolling through waveforms she'd already approved, simply so her hands would have something to do while the rest of her waited for an engine she'd told herself, only two weeks ago, she never wanted to hear again.
When it finally came, right on schedule, she felt something in her shoulders loosen that she hadn't realized was tight, and made herself sit very still at the desk for a full minute before allowing herself to acknowledge, even privately, what the relief actually meant.