Chapter 7
THE FLOWER FARM SAT at the end of a dirt road three miles outside Providence, behind a stone wall covered in climbing roses that hadn’t bloomed yet.
Early June. The canes were green and thorny and full of tight buds that would open in a week, and Katy knew this because she’d been counting.
Counting buds. Counting days. Counting the small, visible things that made the invisible ones survivable.
She’d been here for twenty-six days.
The farm grew cut flowers for farmers’ markets and local florists.
Zinnias, dahlias, sunflowers, sweet peas on trellises that caught the morning light.
The owner asked no questions and paid cash and let Katy sleep in the converted potting shed behind the main barn, a room with a single bed and a window that faced east and a shelf where someone had left three paperback romance novels that Katy hadn’t been able to read because romance, at the moment, felt like pressing on a bruise.
Reid had arranged everything. One phone call from the prom parking lot, Katy rigid in his passenger seat with mascara on her face she didn’t remember putting on, and within forty-eight hours she’d had a bus ticket, a prepaid phone, and an address in Rhode Island.
The Jamieson family foundation funded the farm.
Reid’s grandmother had started it thirty years ago as a workforce development program.
Nobody there knew Katy’s last name, and nobody asked.
The rows kept her sane. Six to two, weeding, watering, deadheading, harvesting.
The work was physical and repetitive and required exactly enough attention to keep her brain from circling back to the gymnasium doorway, to the charcoal suit and her sister’s hand on his arm, and when it circled back anyway she pulled another weed and another and another until her fingers were stained green and her back ached and the image faded to a thing she could hold without her hands clenching.
Amy got a call once a week from the prepaid.
Short conversations. “I’m okay, Mom.” “I know, baby.” Amy didn’t push.
Amy understood disappearing. Amy had done her own version of it, years ago, with chemicals instead of geography, and she recognized in her daughter the animal need to go somewhere quiet and bleed in private.
Reid called every few days. Never long. “You eating?” “Yes.” “Sleeping?” “Some.” “Need anything?” “No.” He didn’t ask about Julian.
He didn’t ask when she was coming back. He asked about the flowers, and she told him about the dahlias, how they grew from tubers that resembled dead things and turned into blooms so vivid it hurt to face them, and he listened, and the listening was enough.
The tears didn’t come for the first two weeks.
They finally arrived on day fifteen, in the shower, standing under lukewarm water with her forehead against the tile, and once they started they didn’t stop for forty minutes.
She sat on the shower floor and cried with her arms around her knees and her face hidden and no one to hear it.
After that, the crying came in waves. Unpredictable. She’d be harvesting zinnias and the orange of the petals would catch the afternoon light and turn copper and the copper would remind her of his voice, and she’d have to stop and put her hands on her thighs and wait until it passed.
And she missed him. That was the part she couldn’t forgive herself for.
After everything he’d done, the destruction speech and the fixation and the prom and her own sister on his arm, she still missed him.
Not the cruelty. The other thing. The man underneath the cruelty, the one who’d asked her to walk with him and gone rigid when he touched her and put his forehead on her shoulder and stayed there like someone who’d been lost for a very long time and had just found the only place that felt like home.
She missed that man. She hated that she missed him. She missed him anyway.
On day twenty-six, she was kneeling in the sweet pea row, tying tendrils to the trellis, when she heard a car on the dirt road.
Cars came down the dirt road twice a day: Marguerite at six, the delivery driver at noon. It was three o’clock. The light was golden and the sweet peas smelled like sugar and the air was warm and still, and the car slowed, and stopped, and a door opened and closed.
Footsteps on gravel. Heavy. Male.
Her hands kept working, tying a tendril to the wire, and her heart was doing something she couldn’t name because it was too early and too impossible and her brain refused to process what her body already knew.
“Katy.”
His voice.
Her eyes closed. Her hands stopped. The sweet pea tendril she’d been tying curled around her finger, delicate and green, and she held onto it like it was the only thing keeping her tethered to the ground.
“Katy. Please.”
When she opened her eyes, Julian Ventura was standing at the end of the sweet pea row in a white shirt with the sleeves rolled and dirt on his shoes that hadn’t been there when he’d gotten out of the car.
His eyes were bloodshot. His face was thinner than she remembered, the bones sharper, and he carried himself like a man who hadn’t slept or eaten properly in a month.
His hands were at his sides, and they were shaking.
Not the rigid, white-knuckled grip she’d come to associate with him fighting himself. Shaking. Open. Visible.
She stood up, brushed the dirt off her knees, and pulled her gardening gloves off one finger at a time and set them on the trellis wire. She did these things with care, because the alternative was running to him or running from him and she was not going to do either.
“How did you find me?” she asked.
“My brother.”
A brother. There were so many things she didn’t know about him, so many rooms in the fortress he’d never let her enter, and here he was standing in her sweet pea row with his sharp face, and the word brother hit her with the weight of everything he’d never told her.
“Why are you here?”
“Because Dionne lied.” His voice was raw.
“Everything she told me about you was a lie. You never bragged to the staff. You never told anyone I was wrapped around your finger. You ate lunch alone every day and you couldn’t even order your own coffee and she knew that, she knew exactly who you were, and she fed me a version of you that I could walk away from because the real you was too terrifying to let close. ”
Katy stood in the sweet pea row with the afternoon light on her face and the smell of sugar in the air and studied the man she loved and felt nothing settle. No relief. No vindication. Just a bone-deep weariness and the question she’d been carrying for twenty-six days.
“You believed her.”
“Yes.”
“You didn’t ask me. You didn’t ask the staff. You didn’t do a single thing to verify what she told you. You just believed her, and then you stood in front of me and called me a fixation and told me I was nothing.”
“Yes.” He didn’t flinch. Didn’t defend. Stood there and took it, every word, with his hands at his sides and his bloodshot eyes on her face. “I believed her because believing her was easier than trusting you.”
“Why?”
The question was quiet. Not an accusation. A genuine question, from a girl who’d given him everything she had and gotten a destruction speech in return, and who still, after all of it, wanted to understand.
He was quiet for a long time. The sweet peas rustled. A bee worked the row behind her, heavy and purposeful. When he spoke, his voice was stripped to the studs, nothing left but the frame of the thing he’d been building walls around since he was thirteen years old.
“My father was a man named Salvatore. El Diablo. He had the resources to find anyone on earth. My brother stole me from him when I was a baby, gave me to a woman who raised me under a different name, and my father never came for me. Never hired anyone. Never placed a call.” His hands opened and closed at his sides.
“I was eleven months old, and I wasn’t worth finding. ”
The sweet pea tendril she’d been tying swayed on the wire.
“I built everything I have on top of that wound. Gubat. The money. The penthouse. All of it, proof that I couldn’t be overlooked.
That no one could throw me away.” His eyes were on her, and behind them was every locked door she’d ever tried to open.
“And then you showed up. You, with your two ice cubes and your club sandwich ramble and your complete inability to hide what you felt, and you terrified me. Because you saw me. You saw past everything I’d built, and being seen meant being known, and being known meant you could decide I wasn’t worth keeping.
So when Dionne gave me an excuse to push you away first, I took it. ”
He stopped. Swallowed. His throat moved, the hard, visible swallow she’d cataloged a hundred times from behind a serving tray.
“I made myself into him.” His voice cracked on the last word. “The one thing I swore I’d never be. A man who throws away the person who loves him because keeping her requires more courage than he has.”
Silence. The bees. The sweet peas. The Rhode Island afternoon, warm and golden and indifferent to the two people standing in it with a month of damage between them.
“You walked into my prom with my sister.”
“I know.”
“You walked into the one night that was supposed to be mine, the one place where I was allowed to be a normal girl in a dress, and you brought Dionne, and she held your arm and smiled, and I was standing in a twelve-dollar dress from a thrift store and you destroyed me. In front of everyone. At my own prom.”
“I know.” His voice was barely audible.