Chapter 2
Emma
It’s dark and cool in the back room of the shop… my shop, to be precise. Well, mine and Christina’s.
I still have to remind myself that I am now a business owner, together with my best friend. I am so used to being a tiny cog in a giant, soulless machine that the idea of owning anything other than a pile of case files feels slightly unreal.
When Nana announced her retirement and said she wanted to sell the shop, the idea lodged itself in my mind and refused to leave.
Moving away from London, a city I loathe.
A better work-life balance. Working with flowers instead of twisting the law so an already rich corporation could get away with even more.
At the time, I was a corporate lawyer at one of the biggest firms in London. My mother was very proud. I hated every minute. Twelve-hour days, partners barking for blood, clients who saw entire countries as playgrounds. All of it built on the fantasy that money solves everything.
My mother left the Lake District when she was young and turned herself into a proper city woman.
She loves London. The restaurants, the shops, the social life.
But it’s easy to love a city when you float above it in an ivory tower, paid for by my father’s salary.
Nothing ever really sticks to you up there.
Me, I’ve never felt at home in London. Even as a child I always wanted what Nana described when she told stories about Fellside. Villages and hills and proper seasons. People who know your name because they actually know you, not because they’ve memorised it from a directory of “future talent”.
Nana could hear the strain in my voice whenever we spoke.
She invited me up last summer “for a break”, which turned out to be a gentle ambush.
I arrived exhausted and went to bed that night thinking I’d stay a week.
By the next afternoon I was standing outside this shop with a coffee from the little café down the road, watching the light hit the mint green front, and I knew.
I wanted this life.
When I refused to take the shop for free, Nana made me a ridiculously generous offer. “You need it more than I do,” she said, already bright-eyed at the thought of finally travelling the Silk Road. “Besides, I’d rather invest in you than any bank.”
It helped that I already knew I loved floristry. I’d been doing weekend courses for a few years, probably because some subconscious part of me wanted the life Nana had lived. On one of those courses, I met Christina.
Christina, with her loud laugh and bigger dreams, who joked about opening a shop of her own one day, “somewhere pretty, but with decent broadband”.
When Nana made her offer, I told Christina half as a fantasy, half as a panic.
Christina didn’t panic.
She said, “Right. We’re doing it. I’ll go halves with you.”
The idea of not doing it on my own made the whole thing feel possible. I could hide in the back and make things look pretty. She could handle actual humans. It all sounded perfect.
Except that our families did not take the news well.
My mother was horrified when I told her I was leaving my well-paid job to run “a little flower shop in a village no one has ever heard of”.
She didn’t even try to hide the disappointment.
Being a lawyer was the only thing about me she had ever approved of.
Everything else is too much, not enough, or wrong.
Christina’s mum was less horrified and more baffled. She came to London from the Caribbean before Christina was born and has never wanted to live anywhere else since. London was her dream, her badge of having made it. Why anyone would leave it voluntarily is beyond her.
Christina’s life in London was very different from mine, but we both understood the same thing: we were tired. Tired of noise and pressure and trains that cost a fortune and still made you stand under someone’s armpit for two hours.
So we did it anyway.
Three months ago, we packed our lives into boxes and moved north.
Now we each have a tiny cottage for less than the cost of a London broom cupboard.
Despite my old salary being respectable, I spent years house sharing, squeezed between other people’s laundry and late-night arguments.
Now I can sit in my own living room—naked if I were so inclined—put my feet up, and get lost in a book without worrying about a flatmate crashing in at two in the morning.
Christina’s commute is ten minutes. Mine is two. I definitely won the commuter jackpot.
We have divided the work in a way that suits us both. I handle the spreadsheets, stock orders and suppliers. I even secretly enjoy the bookkeeping. Columns of numbers that actually add up and match reality. No one tries to hide anything in a flower shop ledger.
Christina handles the front of house. She is the one who can talk a husband out of buying three limp supermarket roses and into a proper bouquet for his anniversary. She shimmers when she moves, always with a streak of colour in her dark curls. At the moment, it is lilac. Last month it was teal.
She fills a room without suffocating it. People gravitate towards her.
Me, on the other hand… I am all curves in all the wrong places, as my mother likes to remind me.
I hide my body in dark, loose clothes and pretend I don’t care.
I have blonde hair that falls in soft waves if I bully it into doing what it’s told.
I’m taller than Christina, which just makes me feel even bigger when we stand side by side like some sort of cruel cautionary tale.
I don’t like being seen. I prefer the back room. The quiet. The flowers. Here, I can focus. Think. Be useful without being judged.
Of course, when Christina is out on deliveries or taking a day off, I have to take my turn on the shop floor. Those days always leave me feeling wrung out, even when everyone has been perfectly nice.
“Listen,” Christina calls from the front now, dragging me from my thoughts. “We’ve been in this village three months and we haven’t even been to the pub. This is a crime. I refuse to flirt with only pensioners for the rest of my life.”
I snort, still wiring stems. “I’m sure Mr Burgess is devastated to hear that.”
Mr Burgess is in his sixties and comes in once a week to buy his wife flowers.
Christina flirted lightly with him the first time and he left so red-faced and flustered he accidentally spent twice what he meant to.
He still blushes when he walks in, but now he also brings us biscuits, so everyone wins.
“You’ve never had a problem going out on the pull alone,” I shout back, placing the last rose into the arrangement I’m working on.
Not that I ever go out on the pull. I am more… the friend who holds the handbags while everyone else gets hit on. The one who ends up sat on the edge of the dance floor with the coats while her friends text to say they’ve gone home with so-and-so.
Christina appears in the doorway, hands on her hips. “Firstly, who said anything about pulling? I am talking about flirting. Harmless. Recreational.” She pauses. “If more comes of it, that’s a bonus, not the goal.”
She steps into the back room and narrows her eyes at me. “Secondly, when did you last go on a date?”
I pretend to think, even though we both know the answer. “Define ‘date’.”
She snorts. “Emma, I’ve known you three years. In all that time, you have not been on even one proper date.”
“We were busy,” I say weakly. “Work. London. Life.”
She raises an eyebrow.
It’s an old conversation. She genuinely believes that if I wanted to, I could have a queue of men. My friends in London used to insist I was too picky and should just ‘give someone a chance’, usually a man they would never have considered for themselves.
My dating history isn’t exactly impressive. A handful of boyfriends, most of them chosen because they were interested rather than because I truly wanted them. The kind of men you talk yourself into liking because you assume you can’t do better.
The idea that I’m supposed to “love myself first” before anyone else can love me makes me want to scream.
I don’t love myself. I’m trying not to actively hate myself, and some days that already feels like a full-time job.
People say confidence is attractive, but no one ever explains how you’re meant to build it when every mirror, every photo and every careless comment from someone you trusted tells a different story.
I’m not a self-help project. I’m just tired of feeling like a flaw that needs fixing.
Christina softens a little, like she can hear the direction my thoughts are taking.
“You deserve someone,” she says. “And not some boring bloke who treats you like an afterthought. Someone who sees you.”
I shrug, because I do not know what to do with that level of belief. “Can I finish this flower arrangement before you fix my whole life, please?”
She grins. “For now.”
I carry the red and purple bouquet I’ve just finished through to the front and find a spot for it near the door.
The shop looks good today. Full without feeling crammed.
Light glancing off glass vases. The faint hum of the fridge in the corner.
It makes something in my chest loosen every time I look at it. For once, I did something right.
“See?” Christina says. “This is why you need someone. So they can tell you how brilliant you are and how fit you look when you’re bossing flowers around.”
Before I can respond, the bell above the door rings.
“Morning,” Christina sings out automatically.
I turn to head to the backroom, already halfway through my usual retreat, when Christina says, in a perfectly normal voice that still somehow manages to make me choke on air, “What exactly are you so busy with anyway, Em? Don’t try to fob me off with ‘paperwork’.
You mean reading romance novels and collecting book boyfriends. ”
My cheeks heat instantly. “That is slander.”
She ignores me. “You hide in here swooning over fictional men, then act like you’ve forgotten how to talk to a real one.” She winks at the person behind me.
I really should keep walking, but something – curiosity, masochism, who knows – makes me glance over my shoulder to see who has come in and if they could have possibly heard Christina whilst they are browsing the flowers.
Two men stand just inside the door watching us. Both in navy jackets with Fellside Mountain Rescue stitched on the chest.
The shorter one has kind eyes and the expression of a man deeply wishing he were anywhere else. The taller one…
Well.
The taller one is ridiculous.
Broad shoulders. Dark curls cut short enough to behave, but only just. There’s stubble on his jaw and a faint curve at the corner of his mouth, like smiling comes easily to him.
Our eyes meet, and my stomach does a weird, treacherous swoop.
Absolutely not!
“See?” Christina murmurs under her breath. “This is what I mean.”
“Don’t,” I whisper back.
She pretends not to hear me. Typical.
Instead she says, “Welcome to Blossom & Bloom. Ignore me. I’m just bullying my business partner into having a love life.” I freeze, staring at her and then at the lads, wishing harder than ever for the ground to develop a sudden interest in swallowing me whole.
The taller man’s mouth quirks properly this time, an amused glint in his eyes. The shorter man takes a tiny step back, as if he’s trying to blend into the display of eucalyptus.
“Sorry,” the taller one says, voice warm and easy. “We didn’t mean to interrupt.”
“You didn’t,” Christina says at once. “You’ve arrived at exactly the right time. We were just discussing how Emma here needs to get out more.”
Fantastic.
I can feel my face blazing.
The tall one looks at me again. Not in that horrible assessing way some men do. Just… looking. As if he’s genuinely interested in whether I will join in the joke or bolt for the back room.
My tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth.
“I, um,” I manage.
Christina, naturally, sails on. “Don’t mind her. She gets nervous around strangers.”
The shorter man nods. “Same,” he says quietly, which somehow makes me feel marginally less alone.
The taller man shifts his weight, that lazy ease still there, but there’s something gentler behind it now too.
“Well,” he says, grin tugging at his mouth again, “if you ever fancy practising not being nervous around strangers, I volunteer as tribute.”
My brain immediately decides to stop working.
Christina makes a noise that is half snort, half delighted gasp.
I open my mouth to respond, but the only thing that comes out is a tiny, undignified squeak.
Brilliant.
He watches me for a moment, and there’s nothing unkind in it. No judgement. Just a friendly curiosity, like he’s giving me space to find actual words.
Christina beams, far too ready to escalate the situation, and I desperately drag my gaze away before she can make it worse.
This is not going to end well… for me or, I have a slight suspicion, my heart.