Chapter 7
I’m at the front counter pricing out a new standing order for the bed and breakfast on Maple when my phone rings and it’s a number I don’t recognize. I almost let it go to voicemail, but I’m trying to be a business owner now, and business owners pick up the phone.
“Is this Rachel’s shop?” she asks. She doesn’t say her name. She doesn’t have to. I will never not recognize the smugness in her voice.
“It is.”
“I’d like to place an order. Table arrangements. At least a dozen of them. Something elegant but not fussy. White and green, maybe some blush.” A pause. “It’s for a party.”
I sit with the phone against my ear and let the silence go one beat longer than it should, because I want her to wonder if I’m going to hang up. I’m not. But I want her to wonder.
“What kind of party?” I ask.
“An engagement party.” Another pause, longer this time, and when she speaks again I can hear the smile in her voice. “Mine. You’re talking to the future Mrs. George. Drew proposed.”
She’s calling me to order flowers for her engagement to my husband.
My almost-ex-husband, technically, since the counter-proposal is still going back and forth between lawyers, but the distinction doesn’t make this less absurd.
She’s doing it on purpose. She wants me to say no so she can tell the story.
Rachel couldn’t handle it. Rachel fell apart.
She wants the reaction she didn’t get in my shop that morning, and she’s willing to pay for table arrangements to get it.
So... I decide I’m not letting her have it and she can pay me for the privilege.
“When’s the party?” I ask.
“Two weeks. At The Rail. They’re letting us use the back patio.”
“I can do that. I’ll put a quote together and email it over.”
“Perfect.” She sounds slightly off balance, which is becoming my favorite version of Sabrina. “You’ll need my email.”
“I’ll need a deposit, too. Half up front.”
She gives me her email. I write it down. We hang up. I sit at the counter for a long time looking at the note I just made, Sabrina’s name and a date and the words whit, green, and blush, and I think about what just happened.
Drew proposed. After weeks of her pulling her hand away at dinner and scrolling her phone while he talked and going to wine bars in Granville without him, he proposed.
He’s doubling down. He’s so deep into the story he told himself the night he walked out of my kitchen that he can’t see what everyone else is starting to see.
The woman he left me for is already leaving him.
She’s doing it slowly, the way she does everything, making sure the disinterest builds until he can’t ignore it, and his response is to buy a ring.
I could call him. Right now. I could pick up the phone and say, Drew, don’t do this. She told me why she came back and it wasn’t for you. It was for the win. You’re the trophy she’s already tired of.
I don’t call him.
I pull up my supplier list and start pricing white roses instead.
The next two weeks are busy in a way that keeps me from thinking too hard about what I’m doing.
I fill the standing order for the bed and breakfast. I do a small arrangement for a woman’s birthday lunch.
I build Sabrina’s table centerpieces in the back of the shop, twelve low arrangements in glass cylinders, white roses and eucalyptus and a few stems of blush ranunculus that cost more than they should but look exactly right.
I’m a professional. If Sabrina wants to pay me to make her engagement party beautiful, I’ll take her money and do good work.
Wes is mostly finished with the renovations now, but there are a few minor things I didn’t have to wait to be completed before I opened up for business. It’ll feel weird with him not around anymore once he’s done.
He watches me build the centerpieces and doesn’t say anything for a while, but he finally stops what he’s doing and leans against the doorframe.
“You’re making those for her party,” he says.
“I am.”
“And you’re okay with that?”
“She’s paying me five hundred dollars to arrange flowers for a party that’s probably going to go badly for my ex-husband. I’m very okay with that.”
He looks at me for a second. Then, he nods and goes back to work.
The day of the engagement party, I deliver the arrangements to The Rail at four and set them up on the patio tables myself.
The staff is hanging string lights. There’s a banner hanging at the front that says She Said Yes!
in gold script, and I set my flowers underneath it and try not to think about the fact that the she in question said yes to my husband in the same town where he said his vows to me.
I don’t stay for the party. I go back to the shop and work on inventory because I have wholesale orders to reconcile and because I don’t need to watch what happens next.
I already know what happens next. Sure, the relationship might not end tonight, but they are definitely not getting to the part where they actually walk down the aisle.
I suspect that there will be plenty of awkwardness though that I don’t need to see in person.
Donna will tell me all about, I’m sure.
And she does. She calls at nine thirty, while I’m still at the shop because going home means sitting in the quiet and tonight I’d rather sit in a place that smells like eucalyptus and feels like mine.
“It was bad,” she says. “Rachel, it was really bad. I mean… It’s not even ten o’clock and everyone is gone already, so that tells you how much of a dud the party was.”
“Tell me.”
“It started fine. People showed up. Drew was... You know. Drew. Smiling too big, shaking hands, acting like he was hosting his own wedding reception. He made a toast about fate and second chances and how sometimes life gives you another shot at the thing you were always meant to have.”
I close my eyes. I can see it. I can see him holding a glass up under those string lights with my flowers on every table, believing every word he’s saying because he’s spent his whole life believing in the version of the story where he’s the hero.
“And Sabrina?”
“She was there, but she wasn’t there. You know what I mean?
She smiled when people looked at her. She held his hand during the toast. But the second the attention moved off them she’d drift.
Check her phone. Talk to someone on the other side of the patio.
At one point she stepped outside to take a call and was gone for twenty minutes. ”
“What happened?”
“Drew noticed. Everyone noticed. He went to find her, and I don’t know what happened outside, but when they came back in he looked like he’d seen a ghost, and she looked like she’d rather be anywhere else.
He tried to pull it together. Did another toast, something about how the best things in life are worth fighting for.
She stood next to him and didn’t say a word. ”
“And then?”
“Then people started leaving. Not all at once, but the way people leave when they can feel something wrong and don’t want to be there when it breaks open. By nine o’clock it was just Drew and Sabrina and maybe four other people on that patio, and she was already getting her bag.”
“She left?”
“She left. She said she had a headache. She kissed him on the cheek like he was a grandparent she was saying goodbye to after Thanksgiving dinner, and she walked out. Drew stood there with the string lights and the banner and your flowers and about three people who didn’t know where to look.
Of course, you know me, I love watching other people’s drama so I was one of the three,” she says and laughs.
I’m quiet for a long time. Donna lets me be.
“The flowers looked beautiful, by the way,” she says. “If that matters.”
“It does.”
We hang up after a few more minutes. I sit in my shop with the lights off and the street quiet outside and I let myself feel what I’m feeling, which is not triumph and not satisfaction and not pity.
It’s something flatter than all of those.
It’s the feeling of watching something you predicted come true exactly the way you predicted it, and realizing that being right feels sweet but also a little bitter.
Drew is alone on a patio right now, surrounded by the evidence of a party that fell apart under the same string lights where he toasted fate. My flowers are still on those tables. He’s probably looking at them. He’s probably just now putting together who made them.
His ex-wife arranged the flowers for the engagement party where his fiancée couldn’t even pretend to want him for a full evening.
I could feel sorry for him. There’s a version of me, the old one, the one who managed and smoothed and held everything together, who would already be in her car driving to The Rail to make sure he was okay.
That version of me would sit across from him and say the right things and hand him a glass of water and drive him home, because that’s what she did. That’s all she ever did.
I lock up the shop. I drive home. I don’t drive past The Rail.
That version of me is gone.
She left the same night he did.