Chapter 5
The shop starts looking like a shop.
It happens in pieces. Wes replaces the wiring first, then the supply lines, then rebuilds the baseboards with stock that matches the original so closely I have to run my fingers along the seam to find where old meets new.
He works with the radio on low and doesn’t talk unless he has something to say, which turns out to be a quality I didn’t know I needed until I had it.
I’m here every day. I tell myself it’s because I want to oversee the work, and that’s partly true, but the fuller truth is that the shop is the only place I feel like myself right now.
The house still smells like Drew no matter how many windows I open.
The shop smells like sawdust and new lumber and the lavender bundles I’ve started hanging in the windows to see how they look.
They look good. Wes told me so, and I believe him, because he doesn’t say things he doesn’t mean and that’s become the standard I’m measuring everyone against whether I want to or not.
We develop a rhythm. I work on the business end at the front counter, supplier research and wholesale accounts and budget spreadsheets.
He works on the build. We overlap at the utility sink, where I’m testing arrangements with buckets of cheap carnations to get the spacing right and he’s washing up.
Sometimes our elbows bump and neither of us mentions it.
He tells me things about himself in pieces.
He moved here three years ago and has a younger sister he talks to every night.
He built his own kitchen cabinets because he didn’t trust anyone else to get the grain right, which I understand better than he knows, because I once spent an hour rotating a single peony in a centerpiece until it faced the direction I wanted.
I tell him things too. Not about Drew. Not yet.
But about the arrangements I used to do, the weddings and the garden club shows and the one time I made a funeral spray entirely out of wildflowers because the woman’s family said she would have hated roses because they’re too perfect.
I tell him about learning to condition stems from my grandmother, who kept a cutting garden behind her house and believed that every flower had a personality, and you had to respect it or it would die on you out of spite.
He laughs at that. A real one, short and surprised, and I realize I haven’t made anyone laugh in a while.
One afternoon, I’m arranging peonies in a test vase when Donna texts me. She’s not subtle about it.
Drew and Sabrina had dinner at The Rail last night. She seemed bored. He seemed like he was trying too hard. Thought you’d want to know.
I read it twice. She seemed bored.
It’s been three weeks since Sabrina stood in this shop and told me she came back to see if she could still take him.
She’s already bored, because of course she is, because the game was never about keeping him.
The game was about proving she could get him, and now that she has him he’s just a man sitting across from her at a restaurant trying too hard, and there’s nothing left to win.
The thrill for her is gone.
I put the phone down. Wes is cutting trim at the back of the shop, measuring twice the way he always does. I watch him work for a minute, the pencil behind his ear, the easy focus, and I think about calling Drew.
To warn him. Because underneath all of this, underneath the betrayal and the papers I signed and the ten years he spent waiting, there’s still a reflex in me that wants to step in and fix it.
He’s going to get hurt. She’s going to lose interest and leave, and he’s going to be standing in the wreckage of two lives instead of one, and some stubborn, caretaking part of me wants to call him and say, Drew, she told me everything.
She’s not in love with you. She’s never going to be.
I pick up the phone but then put it right back down.
If I call him, I’m the woman who manages his disasters again. I’m the safety net he always assumed would be there, and I swore I was done being that. He chose this, so he gets to live with it now.
I go back to the peonies and strip the lower leaves and recut the stems at an angle the way my grandmother taught me. Wes comes up to wash a brush in the utility sink and glances at what I’m doing.
“Those are nice,” he says.
“They need another day to open all the way.”
“Still nice.” He rinses the brush. Water runs over his hands, and he shakes them dry instead of reaching for a towel. “You’ve got a thing with flowers. It’s obvious.”
“A thing?”
“Maybe not a thing. A gift. Like you already know what they’re going to do before they do it.” He sets the brush on the edge of the sink. “Wish I could do that with drywall.”
I smile. It catches me off guard, the way it comes up without effort or calculation, and for a second I just let it sit on my face and be what it is.
“Thank you,” I say.
“For what?”
For not asking. For not pushing. For showing up at the same time every day and building something solid with your hands and never once looking at me the way the rest of this town does, like I’m a story they already know the ending to.
“For the baseboard match,” I say instead. “It’s perfect.”
He goes back to his trim. I go back to my flowers. The late sun comes through the front windows and lays a long stripe of gold across the hardwood, and for the first time in a month the quiet around me doesn’t feel like absence.
My phone buzzes again and it’s Donna.
You okay?
I type back. I’m good. Then I delete it and type, I’m getting there.
That feels closer to the truth.