14. Flora
— ? —
Flora
My mother is a meddler. I’ve always known this about her. She meddles the way other people breathe, constantly and instinctively and without a single word of apology.
But sending me to the farmers market with Aster is a whole new level of interference.
“I need peaches,” she announces at breakfast, pushing a handwritten list across the table. “And honey. And cheese from the goat farm on the hill road. You’ll have to go early, before they sell out.”
“I can go by myself.”
“Nonsense. Aster needs to see the town and get off this property for a bit. And I only have the one car.”
Which is how I end up wedged into the passenger seat of my mother’s ancient Subaru, a car that is older than my marriage and considerably more reliable, while my estranged husband drives us down a winding dirt road toward the village square.
She handed him the keys without asking whether he wanted them.
She has been handing him things without asking for four days now, and every single one of them has been a test, and the infuriating part is that he keeps passing.
He looks better today. Less wrecked. The dark circles under his eyes have faded a little and there’s color in his face that wasn’t there when he got out of that taxi. Manual labor and fresh air apparently agree with him.
His hands rest on the steering wheel, bandaged palm and all, and I catch myself staring at the way his forearms flex when he turns. I look away quickly, irritated with myself for noticing.
“Your mother isn’t subtle at all,” he says.
“My mother has never been subtle a single day in her entire life.”
“I like that about her.”
“You would.”
We drive in silence for a few minutes. The countryside rolls past, green hills and white farmhouses and the particular peace of a place completely untouched by celebrity gossip or trending hashtags.
We pass a hand-painted sign for a church supper and a mailbox with a cat sitting on it, and I watch a farmer lift two fingers off his steering wheel at us as he goes by, which out here is an entire conversation.
“Nobody here has any idea who you are,” I say.
“I noticed.” He sounds almost wistful about it. “It’s been a while since I’ve been anonymous anywhere.”
“Is that strange?”
“Strange good or strange bad?”
“I don’t know. Just strange.”
He considers it for a second. “Strange good, I think. Nobody looking at me like they want something. No phones pointed at my face. Just a guy driving his wife to the market.”
“Estranged wife.”
He doesn’t respond to that, but I see his jaw tighten.
The farmers market is small but lively, maybe thirty vendors spread across the village square selling everything from vegetables to handmade soap. People nod at us as we pass, friendly without being intrusive, and not one of them looks twice at my husband.
What I’m not prepared for is watching him at the market.
He’s good at this, and it keeps catching me sideways.
He carries the tote without being asked and he holds it open at the right height and he asks the woman at the peach table what the difference is between the two kinds, and then he actually listens to the answer, which takes four minutes and involves a digression about her late husband’s orchard.
He asks a follow-up. She tells him more.
By the end of it she’s given him a bruised one for free and told him to come back Thursday.
He’s been doing this to strangers for as long as I’ve known him. It’s not a technique, it’s just what he’s like when there’s nothing else pulling at him, and for the past year the only version of it I’ve seen has been on a screen, aimed at a camera, with a publicist standing four feet out of frame.
We work through Mom’s list. Peaches, then honey from an apiary two towns over, then cheese from the goat farm, which requires negotiating with a territorial goat while Aster stands well back and tries not to laugh at me.
“Very helpful,” I tell him once I’ve secured the cheese.
“You handled it perfectly. I didn’t want to interfere with your goat diplomacy.”
“Coward.”
“Absolutely.”
We’re almost finished when we pass the fountain at the center of the square. Local musicians have set up there, a ragtag group with two guitars and a fiddle, playing folk songs for tips. The crowd around them is small but appreciative, tapping their feet and swaying along.
One of the musicians, a weathered man with a gray beard, looks up as we approach. He studies Aster for a moment, not with recognition, just with the assessment of one player sizing up another.
“You play?” he asks.
Aster hesitates. “I used to.”
“Used to?” I raise an eyebrow at him. “You literally just came off a tour.”
“That’s different. That’s performing.” He’s watching the guitar in the man’s hands like it’s calling to him. “This is just music.”
The musician holds the guitar out. “Give it a shot. We don’t bite.”
Aster looks at me. I shrug, curious in spite of myself.
He takes the guitar.
The first chord is tentative while he feels out an unfamiliar instrument, adjusting to the weight and the action of it. Then his fingers find their rhythm and he starts to play something I don’t recognize at all.
It isn’t one of his hits. It isn’t anything I’ve heard on the radio or streamed late at night in our too-big house. It’s new, and raw, and unpolished in a way his studio recordings never are.
And it’s unmistakably about me.
The lyrics paint a picture I recognize immediately.
Curly hair and green eyes and freckles like a constellation.
A woman who plants roots wherever she stands and makes a home out of thin air.
The melody aches with longing and regret while he sings about waking up in hotel rooms and reaching for somebody who isn’t there, about counting the miles between shows and home, about a man who finally learned that fame means nothing without somebody to come back to.
A crowd gathers around the fountain. Not because they recognize him, but because the song is beautiful and his voice is rough with feeling and even strangers can hear the truth in it.
I stand frozen with the bag of cheese clutched against my chest, tears threatening to spill.
There’s a woman next to me holding a toddler on her hip, swaying without noticing she’s doing it.
There’s an old man by the fountain who has stopped mid-conversation.
None of them know. That’s what undoes me.
Not one person in this square has any idea that the woman in the song is standing eight feet away with a bag of goat cheese, that the marriage he’s begging for is a real marriage with a case number attached to it, that the man standing by the fountain slept in a cabin last night because his wife won’t have him in the house.
They just think it’s a beautiful song. They’re right. It is a beautiful song, and I’ve been in every song he’s put out for four years, and the ones he kept back I didn’t get to hear until a stranger in Vermont handed him a guitar.
He looks up and meets my eyes across the crowd.
The last verse is barely above a whisper. And if I lose you now, I’ll spend forever wishing I’d stayed. You’re my only home, the only song I want to play.
The crowd applauds. Aster hands back the guitar, thanks the musicians, and walks toward me.
I put the bag down on the edge of a planter because my hands aren’t reliable, and then I turn and walk quickly toward the flower stall.
He catches my wrist before I make it three steps.
“Flora.”
“Don’t.” I’m crying now and furious about it. “Don’t weaponize your talent against me.”
“That’s not what I’m doing.”
“Then what was that? A public declaration? Manipulation? You know I can’t resist you when you sing like that.”
“It’s just the truth.” His grip loosens but he doesn’t let go. “I wrote that song four months ago in a hotel room, missing you so much I couldn’t sleep. I’ve never played it for anyone until right now.”
“Why now?”
“Because you’re here. And you’re real. And I needed you to hear it.”
The flower vendor is pretending very hard not to eavesdrop. I pull Aster behind a display of sunflowers, out of direct view.
“You can’t just sing your way back into my life.” I wipe my face with my free hand. “This isn’t a movie.”
“I know it isn’t. I know I have to earn it.
” He steps closer, his thumb brushing my pulse point where he’s still holding my wrist. “But I’ve been writing songs about you for four years, Flora.
You’re in every verse of everything I’ve ever made.
Maybe that isn’t enough and maybe it doesn’t fix what I broke, but I need you to know that you were never an afterthought to me. Not once.”
I want to melt. I hate that I want to melt. Ten days ago I was filling trash bags with this man’s suits at two in the morning and now I’m behind a sunflower display with his thumb on my wrist, and both of those women are me, and I don’t know how to be both of them at once.
My phone buzzes in my pocket. Then again, and again.
I pull it out with shaking hands. The group chat, my friends who have been checking on me constantly since this whole nightmare started, is lighting up.
FLORA
Are you okay?
Just saw the news
And then, from Mara. Heads up, Cecilia’s people just announced she’s doing a primetime sit-down interview. Three nights from now.
The blood drains out of my face.
“What is it?” Aster asks.
I show him the screen.
His jaw goes tight. “She isn’t going to stop.”
“No. She isn’t.” I look up at him. “We need to watch that interview. Together. I need to see what she’s going to say.”
He nods slowly. “Then we watch it together.”
On the drive home, somewhere past the church-supper sign, he tells me, without me asking, about the phone call.
Cecilia pitching him a fake romance for the streaming numbers, Dylan standing there hearing it, his phone turning up in a planter on her floor, a service door at the end of that hallway.
He says it flat, like a man reading a weather report, and he doesn’t look at me while he does it, and I don’t say anything back. I file it. It’s a lot to file.
The rest of the drive is silent but charged. Every brush of our shoulders when the car hits a rut sends something through me, and I can’t tell whether I want to kiss him or scream at him or both at once.
I keep replaying it. Not the song, the moment before the song, when the man with the gray beard asked if he played and my husband said I used to.
Aster Golding has sold out stadiums on four continents and he told a busker in a village square that he used to play, and he wasn’t being modest, and he wasn’t being coy.
He meant it. Somewhere in the last few years the thing he loved turned into the thing he does, and he did that to himself, one yes at a time, while I was sitting in a house waiting for him to come home from it.
That doesn’t excuse a single thing he did. I want to be very clear with myself about that, sitting here with a bag of cheese on my lap.
It just makes it harder.
He parks in front of the cottage and neither of us moves. The engine ticks as it cools. Somewhere behind the house one of the chickens is complaining about something.
“The song,” I say quietly. “At the market. Did you mean it?”
“Every word.”
“That’s what scares me. Because I could believe you at the market. Standing there with a bag of cheese, listening to you, I believed every word, and I have believed you before and been wrong about it, and I don’t know how to tell the difference anymore.”
I get out of the car before he can respond and carry the groceries inside, leaving him alone with whatever that expression on his face means.