Epilogue
Maren
When you marry the same man twice, you know exactly what you’re getting.
I mean that in the good way. Mostly.
“Maren.” Rhodes appears in the doorway of the back room at the original Bellamy Blooms, Nora’s shop now, though I still pitch in whenever we’re back in California, where I’m elbow-deep in peonies for the Harrington wedding.
He’s in jeans and a sweater, which means he’s not working today, which means he’s up to something. “I need your help at The Sinclair.”
“No.”
“You didn’t let me finish.”
“You said ‘I need your help at The Sinclair.’ That’s a complete sentence.” I strip another stem, toss the leaves into the compost bin. “I have three hundred peonies to process before Nora gets back from her lunch break, and if I don’t finish, she’ll give me that look.”
“What look?”
“The one where she’s disappointed in me but too polite to say so. It’s devastating. She learned it from our grandmother.”
Rhodes leans against the doorframe, arms crossed. He’s doing the thing where he watches me work like it’s interesting, which after seventeen years shouldn’t still make my stomach do that little flip, and yet. Here we are.
“It’s important,” he says.
“So are these peonies.”
“More important than peonies.”
I look up. “Rhodes. Nothing is more important than peonies. I thought you understood that about me.”
He grins. That crooked one, the one that got me into this mess in the first place. “One hour. That’s all I’m asking.”
“What’s at The Sinclair that requires my presence so urgently?”
“A… situation.”
“A situation.”
“Yes.”
“What kind of situation?”
“The kind that requires your expertise.”
I narrow my eyes. Behind him, through the doorway to the front of the shop, I catch a flash of movement. Small, space-obsessed, terrible at secrets.
“Rowan James Bellamy,” I call out. “Come here, please.”
A pause. Then my son appears, hands clasped behind his back, face arranged into what he clearly believes is an expression of complete innocence.
He’s gotten taller in the last few months, all legs now, like a baby giraffe who’s just discovered the concept of running.
His hair is Rhodes’s color but waves the way mine does, refusing to behave no matter how much you beg it.
“Hi, Mama.”
“Hi, baby. Do you know anything about this situation at The Sinclair?”
He bites his lip. His eyes dart to Rhodes. Back to me. His cheeks are turning pink.
“No,” he says, in the voice of someone who has never successfully lied about anything in his entire five and a half years of existence.
“Really.”
“Really.”
“So if I asked you what Daddy’s been doing all morning, you wouldn’t know?”
Rowan’s face is now fully red. He looks at Rhodes with something approaching panic. “Daddy, she’s using her flower voice.”
“I know, buddy. Stay strong.”
“I can’t stay strong! She’s looking at me!”
I crouch down to his level. “Rowan. Sweetheart, light of my life. What’s at The Sinclair?”
He cracks like an egg. “It’s a surprise and I’m not supposed to tell you but it took us all morning and Daddy said a bad word when he cut his finger and I helped with the ribbons and please don’t be mad!”
“Rowan,” Rhodes says, without heat.
“Sorry, Daddy.” Rowan doesn’t look remotely sorry. He looks relieved, like he’s been carrying this secret for approximately forty-five minutes and it was slowly crushing him. “But Mama’s really good at the flower voice.”
I stand back up, wiping my hands on my apron. “A surprise?”
Rhodes sighs. “It was supposed to be a surprise.”
“I still don’t know what it is.”
“You know it’s a surprise. That’s significantly more than you knew thirty seconds ago.”
“Daddy,” Rowan stage-whispers, “I think she’s going to like it.”
Rhodes looks at me. There’s something in his expression, soft and a little nervous, which isn’t a look I see on him often.
The man runs a company, travels to California twice a month, negotiates with contractors who would make grown men cry.
But right now he looks like he did seventeen years ago, standing in the middle of a ballroom surrounded by catastrophe, asking a stranger for help.
“One hour,” he says. “Please.”
I take off my apron.
The Sinclair looks different in daylight.
I’ve been here plenty of times since that night two years ago, the apology, the speech, the moment Rhodes Calloway told a room full of people that he’d been wrong and I’d been right and he was sorry.
We got remarried here, eight months later.
Small ceremony. Just family, a few friends, Rowan standing between us in his tiny suit, holding the rings on a pillow and taking the job so seriously I thought I might actually dissolve.
I let someone else do the flowers for that wedding. Jamie and Sofia, working together. They were beautiful, simple, elegant, exactly right. It was the first time in my adult life I’d walked into an event and not immediately started cataloging everything I’d have done differently.
It was strange. It was nice.
Now, as we walk through the front entrance, Rowan’s hand in mine, Rhodes holding the door, I’m trying to figure out what possible situation could require my expertise on a random Thursday afternoon in September.
“You’re being very quiet,” Rhodes observes.
“I’m thinking.”
“About what?”
“About what kind of disaster you could have created that requires a professional florist to fix but was somehow worth dragging me away from three hundred peonies.”
“Who said anything about a disaster?”
“You said ‘situation.’ In my experience, when you say ‘situation,’ you mean ‘disaster that I’m hoping you won’t yell at me about.’”
He laughs, caught, and it’s the easy version of the sound, the one it took us years to earn back.
“That’s not true.”
“The bathroom renovation.”
“That was one time.”
“The bathroom renovation that resulted in a wall being removed that wasn’t supposed to be removed.”
“The contractor assured me-”
“The load-bearing wall, Rhodes.”
He reaches over and takes my other hand, tugging me toward the ballroom doors. “You’re stalling.”
I’m stalling, a little. Because I’ve learned to read him over the past two years, really read him, in a way I never quite managed before.
And whatever is behind those doors matters to him.
I can see it in the set of his shoulders, the way he keeps glancing at me like he’s trying to gauge my reaction to something that hasn’t happened yet.
“Rowan,” Rhodes says. “You want to do the honors?”
Rowan drops my hand and races toward the doors, shoving them open with all the drama a five-year-old can muster. Which is considerable.
I walk through.
And I stop.
The ballroom is mostly dark, just the late afternoon light filtering through the tall windows, laying long stripes of light across the floor. But in the center of the room, a single table is lit with candles, and on that table-
“Oh my God.”
“Now, before you say anything-”
“Rhodes.”
“I want to remind you that effort counts.”
“What happened?”
He frowns. “That’s incredibly rude.”
I walk toward the table. Slowly. Because I need to process what I’m seeing.
There are twelve centerpieces arranged in a row.
They’re, objectively, the worst centerpieces I have ever seen in my life.
I don’t say that lightly. I’ve seen a lot of bad centerpieces.
I’ve seen flowers shoved into mason jars by people who think that “rustic” means “chaotic.” I’ve seen roses crammed into vases so tightly they looked like they were in pain, greenery arranged by someone who clearly had a personal vendetta against eucalyptus.
But these. These are special.
The heights are wildly uneven, one arrangement is maybe six inches tall, the next nearly two feet.
Greenery is jammed into spaces where greenery has no business being.
There’s a centerpiece with what appears to be three different types of ribbon, none of which match.
One is listing so severely to the left that it looks like it’s trying to make a break for freedom.
Another has a single flower that’s been placed upside down, and I genuinely can’t tell if it was intentional.
I press my hand to my mouth. My eyes are burning.
“They’re centerpieces,” Rhodes says, coming up beside me.
“I know what they’re attempting to be.”
Rowan gasps. “Mama!”
“What?”
“Daddy worked hard.”
Rhodes points at him. “Thank you.”
“He did,” Rowan continues, warming to his role as advocate. “He practiced. We watched videos. And I did the ribbons.”
“I can see that, baby.” I’m laughing now, I can’t help it, the sound bubbling up out of my chest in a way that’s making my eyes water. “I can definitely see the ribbons.”
“Four ribbons is too many,” Rowan admits. “I see that now.”
I turn to Rhodes. He’s watching me with that nervous expression again, hands in his pockets, shoulders slightly hunched. Like he’s bracing for impact.
“Seventeen years ago,” he says quietly, “you walked into this room and saved the first event of my career. I was twenty-six and broke and terrified, and I had no idea what I was doing. And you made twelve centerpieces in two hours and you didn’t even charge me for the extra flowers and I-” He stops.
Swallows. “I never thanked you properly for that. For any of it. For all the years you arranged my life around me and I didn’t notice because I was too busy building something I thought mattered more. ”
“Rhodes.”
“I wanted to make twelve centerpieces for you. Even if they’re-”
“Terrible,” I supply.
“significantly worse than yours.”
I look at the arrangements again. Really look.
And that’s when I see it.
The first centerpiece has ranunculus. The petals are a deep coral, slightly faded, not fresh, I realize. Dried. Preserved. From a bouquet I made years and years ago.
The second has roses from our first wedding. I recognize the variety, Juliet, the David Austin ones I’d insisted on even though they cost more than Rhodes wanted to spend.