Epilogue
ONE YEAR LATER
The shop has a new name now. I called it Wilder Flowers, because my grandmother’s maiden name was Wilder and because she’s the one who taught me that flowers have personalities and you have to respect them or they’ll die on you out of spite.
I had the sign made by a guy two towns over who does hand-lettering on reclaimed wood, and it hangs above the door at the corner of Oak and Vine.
The front windows are full. That’s the thing I’m proudest of, if I’m being honest. Not the accounts or the revenue or the fact that I’m booked solid through the fall wedding season, although all of that feels good in a way I didn’t know work could feel.
What I’m proudest of is the front windows.
I change them out every week. This week it’s sunflowers and dahlias in tall copper vessels I found at an estate sale, and yesterday a woman I’ve never met stopped on the sidewalk and took a photo, and I watched her do it from behind the counter and I thought, I made that.
That’s mine. Nobody gave it to me, and nobody can take it back.
The standing order with the bed and breakfast on Maple turned into three standing orders.
The restaurant on Main renewed for another year.
I did the flowers for six weddings this past summer, and I have four more booked before the leaves turn.
The subscription service I started, weekly bouquets delivered to your door, has twenty-two customers and a waiting list. I hired someone part-time, a local girl named Celia and has the same instinct with flowers that I do, the ability to see the finished thing inside the raw materials before you start.
Patricia got me the divorce settlement I deserved.
It took some back and forth, but Drew’s lawyer eventually stopped pretending that a clean split was the same as a fair one, and the final number reflected ten years of me running a household so Drew could build a business.
I used part of it to buy the building from Hershel Potts, who nearly cried when I made the offer.
The rest went into the business and a savings account with only my name on it, which is a sentence I never thought would make me feel powerful, but it does.
I kept the house. Drew didn’t fight me on it.
He didn’t fight me on much of anything by the end, which I think was less about generosity and more about the fact that fighting would have required him to sit across from me in a lawyer’s office and look at the full accounting of everything I gave up for a marriage he was only half present for.
Some truths are easier to pay for than face.
He’s still in town. I see him sometimes.
At the market, at the gas station, once at the diner where Donna and I were having lunch.
He’s smaller now. Not physically, although the weight he lost never quite came back.
Smaller in the way a person gets when the story they told about themselves turns out to be fiction and they haven’t found a new one yet.
He’s living in an apartment above the hardware store.
He sold the business to his partner and took a salaried position that I’m told pays less than what I earned from weddings alone this summer.
Brenda says he’s seeing someone—a therapist, not a woman—and she says it with the careful optimism of a mother who loves her son enough to tell him the truth and patient enough to wait while he figures out what to do with it.
We don’t talk. Not because I’m angry. The anger burned itself out somewhere around the sixth month, and what’s left isn’t forgiveness exactly, but something close to it.
Something quieter. I don’t talk to Drew because I don’t have anything to say to him, and that’s not a punishment.
It’s just the truth. He’s someone I used to know.
He’s someone I used to love. He’s someone I used to arrange my entire life around, and now he’s a man I nod to at the gas station and wish well in a vague, distant way that doesn’t cost me anything.
Sabrina, I have not heard from again. Donna says she’s somewhere on the west coast. I don’t care enough to ask where.
She got what she came for and left when she was done, the way she always does, and the only thing she left behind was a man who finally understands what it feels like to be someone’s waiting room.
I’d feel sorry for him about that, but he taught me what it felt like first. I doubt Sabrina will ever find true happiness when she’s so hell-bent on being destructive just because she can.
Wes and I are together. I’m saying it plainly because that’s how it happened, plainly and without drama and without a single speech about fate or destiny or some part of me was always waiting.
He asked me to dinner about two months after the night on his porch.
I said yes. He picked me up on time and brought me a bouquet of flowers he ordered my own shop.
He laughed. I laughed. We went to dinner.
He held my hand across the table and didn’t let go to check his phone, and I thought, this is what it’s supposed to feel like.
Not electric. Not earth-shattering. Not the kind of thing you’d make a toast about at a party.
Just steady. Just present. Just a man who shows up and pays attention and means what he says and doesn’t say more than he means.
He still brings me coffee every morning. Still with the chocolate caramel creamer. He’s never once gotten it wrong.
I asked him once, months into it, whether he worried that I was using him to fill a gap. That maybe he was just the opposite of Drew, and I was drawn to the contrast more than the man. He thought about it for a while. I appreciated that he didn’t just say no.
“Maybe at first,” he said. “But you’re not someone who stays anywhere out of convenience. You stayed because you wanted to. That’s enough for me.”
It was enough for me, too.
This morning I stood in the front of the shop and looked at the sign above the door.
Wilder Flowers. My grandmother’s name, now mine.
The sun was hitting it the same way it hits the front windows, and for a second the whole corner of Oak and Vine looked exactly the way I imagined it the first time I pressed my face to the glass and saw past the dust to the thing it could become.
A customer came in. She was picking up an arrangement for her mother’s birthday, something bright, lots of color. I built it for her at the worktable while she watched, and when I handed it over she said, “You love this, don’t you.”
I do. I love the weight of stems in my hands and the smell of fresh-cut greens and the way a peony opens over three days if you’re patient enough to let it.
I love that the shop is mine and the work is mine and the life I’m living is one I chose on purpose, not one I fell into because someone else’s choices pushed me there.
I love that nobody is waiting for anything in this building. Not me. Not the flowers. Not the man who shows up every morning with coffee and stays because he wants to, not because he’s keeping his options open.
Drew spent ten years waiting. Sabrina spent ten years wanting what someone else had. Both of them wasted all that time looking backward or sideways, and neither of them ended up with the thing they were after.
I’m not looking anywhere but right here.
The bell above the door rings. Wes comes in with two coffees and a look on his face that means he has an opinion about the window display.
I take my coffee. I tell him the sunflowers are staying.
He grins and doesn’t argue, because he knows I’m right, and because arguing with me about flowers is a fight he gave up on months ago.
“Morning,” he says.
“Morning,” I say.
That’s it. That’s the whole thing. And it is, without question, more than enough.
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