12. Az
— ? —
Az
Day One
Lupe doesn’t ask.
That’s the thing that breaks me first, not the quiet of Grandma June’s room, not the familiar smell of lavender sachets tucked into dresser drawers, not even the way her quilts still hold the shape of someone who slept here for sixty years.
It’s that Lupe takes one look at my face when Dez’s car pulls up the gravel drive at two in the morning, and she just opens the door wider.
“June’s room is made up,” she says. “There’s water on the nightstand. We start at dawn, but you sleep.”
“Lupe-”
“Mija.” She touches my face, her palm rough from decades of soil and sun. “You’re home. That’s all I need to know tonight.”
I cry in the shower for forty minutes. The water pressure here has always been terrible, Grandma June used to say it built character, and I stand under the lukewarm trickle and let myself fall apart in a way I couldn’t in the car with Dez.
He’d tried to talk to me, and I’d just stared out the window at the highway lights blurring past and thought about how I’d imagined this drive so many times.
Bringing Eli here. Showing him the rows where I learned to love growing things, the greenhouse where Grandma June taught me to read a dahlia’s health by its leaves, the porch where she’d sit with her coffee and tell me I was going to be somebody worth being.
I never brought him. Seven years, and I never brought him here.
Now I’m here without him, twenty-two weeks pregnant with his daughter, and I can’t decide if that’s poetic justice or just sad.
The bed smells like cedar and old books. I pull the quilt up to my chin and stare at the ceiling, at the same water stain that’s been there since I was fifteen, and I think about calling him.
I don’t.
Day Two
“Gloves.” Lupe presses them into my hands at five-forty-five, the sky still purple-gray. “You remember how to deadhead?”
“I was twelve, not brain-damaged.”
She snorts. “Mouthy. Good. You’ll need that.”
The work is brutal and perfect. My back aches within an hour, my knees protest every time I crouch, and my hands, soft now from years of arranging instead of growing, sting inside the gloves.
But there’s a rightness to the rhythm of it, the quiet focus of pinching off spent blooms so the plant can put its energy into new growth.
Pruning. Letting go of what’s done so something else can live.
I’m not thinking about metaphors. I’m just thinking about dahlias.
“You’re slower than you used to be,” Mateo calls from two rows over.
He’s seventeen now, all gangly limbs and the same sharp eyes as his grandmother.
When I was last here for more than a flying visit, he was twelve and obsessed with dirt bikes.
He still is, apparently. I can hear the engine from his morning patrol of the property lines.
“I’m pregnant, you little gremlin.”
“Excuses.” But he grins, and it’s the first time I’ve smiled in three days.
The town finds out I’m here by noon. Of course it does. Ojai isn’t big, and Grandma June was a fixture for sixty years. The feed-store guy, Marco, shows up with a “delivery” that’s clearly just an excuse to check on me.
“Heard you were back,” he says, not quite meeting my eyes. “Lupe mentioned she might need extra fertilizer.”
“Lupe orders fertilizer in bulk. She’s got enough.”
He shifts his weight. “Well. You know. Thought I’d check.”
“Marco.”
“Yeah?”
“You can just say you wanted to see if I was okay.”
He exhales, relief flooding his weathered face. “Are you? Okay, I mean. We saw… there was some stuff online, and my daughter showed me, and I don’t understand half of what these kids look at, but-”
“I’m fine.” The lie tastes like copper. “Just needed some quiet.”
“Sure, sure. That makes sense.” He pauses. “Your grandma, she was… well, you know. She was something. This place was her whole heart.”
“I know.”
“And you were the other part of it.” He clears his throat, embarrassed by his own sincerity. “So. You need anything, you call. That’s all.”
He’s halfway to his truck before I find my voice. “Marco? Thank you.”
He waves without turning around, and I stand in the driveway and feel the tightness in my chest give a little. Nowhere near fixed, not yet. But held.
Day Three
The flood starts after breakfast.
I’d kept my phone off since I got here, not deleted anything, just powered down like a coward, and when I finally turn it on to text Wren that I’m alive and ask how Whiskers is settling into her apartment, the notifications nearly crash the thing.
Three hundred and forty-seven messages. Eighteen voicemails. My email is a disaster.
“Don’t,” Lupe says from the kitchen doorway. “Whatever it is, don’t.”
But I’m already scrolling, and my stomach drops with each new headline.
Old photos from the tour bus are circulating again.
Him curled in that stupid narrow bunk, hand pressed to the wall like he’s reaching for something that isn’t there.
His face is wrecked, I can see that even in the grainy shots someone on the crew must have sold, and the headline calls it HEARTbrOKEN ELI’S LONELY NIGHT.
“That’s private,” I say out loud, to no one. “That’s his… who took that? Who sold that?”
Then I see the interview.
A friend of Brynn’s, some woman I don’t recognize, sitting on a morning show couch with performative concern plastered across her face.
“I just think people should know the whole story,” she’s saying.
“Azalea has a history of running when things get hard. And Brynn is pregnant. She’s scared and alone and the father of her baby just publicly humiliated her. ”
“She said the father is Eli Jackson. Is that-”
“I can’t confirm anything Brynn wouldn’t want confirmed. But I can say that Azalea has always been jealous of their friendship. And now that it’s more than friendship-”
I close the video. My hands are shaking.
Then I see my mother.
Diane Moore, in a pink suit I’ve never seen before, perched on the same morning show couch.
Different day, same performative sincerity.
“It breaks my heart,” she’s saying, dabbing at eyes that are completely dry.
“Azalea and I have had our struggles, but she’s my daughter. I just want her to be happy.”
“There’s been speculation that you and Azalea have been estranged. Can you speak to that?”
“Every mother-daughter relationship has its seasons.” She smiles, and it’s the same smile she used when I was sixteen and she told me Grandma June was filling my head with unrealistic expectations.
“But Elliot has been so generous to our family. He’s been helping me keep my home for years now.
He understands that family comes first.”
I stop breathing.
Generous. He’s been paying Diane’s mortgage.
For years.
I didn’t know. I didn’t know, and he never told me, and my mother is on national television using his money, my husband’s money, our money, as a character reference while she implies I’m an unstable daughter who runs from her problems.
“Mija.” Lupe’s voice, sharp. “Put the phone down.”
“He’s been paying her mortgage.” My voice sounds far away. “This whole time. She told me she was managing, that she didn’t need help, that I was selfish for not visiting more, and he was paying her mortgage.”
“Azalea.”
“She hates me. She’s hated me since I was old enough to have opinions she didn’t like. And he’s been… why? Why would he-”
“Because he loves you.” Lupe takes the phone from my hands, gentle but firm. “And he probably thought he was helping. Men are stupid that way. They think money fixes things.”
“It doesn’t fix this.”
“No. It doesn’t.”
I stare at the kitchen table, at the same scratched wood where Grandma June taught me to arrange flowers when I was nine.
I think about Eli, writing checks to a woman who told me I’d never amount to anything without a man’s help, thinking he was doing something kind.
Thinking he was protecting me from having to deal with her.
He was wrong. But I understand why he did it.
That’s the worst part. I understand.
“I need to say something,” I tell Lupe. “I can’t just… they’re making up stories, and I can’t just let them-”
“So say something. But say it once, and say it true, and then you’re done.”
I take the phone back. I scroll through my camera roll until I find the photo I took yesterday, the rows stretching out under golden afternoon light, dahlias in every color, the hills rising green behind them. I post it before I can overthink.
I’m Azalea Moore. I grow things. That’s the whole story.
Then I lock the phone, hand it back to Lupe, and go back to the fields.
The pull comes around four o’clock.
I’m crouched between rows, working on a stubborn weed that’s wrapped itself around a dahlia stem, when I feel it, a tightening low in my belly, sharp enough to make me gasp. I press my hand to the curve of my stomach and wait, heart pounding, for it to happen again.
It doesn’t. After a minute, maybe two, it fades. I can’t tell what caused it, and guessing won’t help. I call my maternity team’s advice line from the shade, answer their questions, and follow their instructions about resting and when to call back.
But I sit down in the dirt anyway. Right there between the rows, soil staining my jeans, the afternoon sun warm on my face. And I think.
Not about leaving. I don’t regret leaving. I needed this, needed space that wasn’t full of his apologies and her photographs and a nursery with an empty space where the crib I chose should be. I needed to remember who I was before I was his wife.
But.
The baby shifts inside me, a flutter like butterfly wings, and I press my palm flat against the movement.
She’s his daughter too. In about four months, she’ll be here, and she’ll have his eyes or my nose or some impossible combination of both, and she won’t care about any of this. She’ll just want to be warm and fed and loved.
I still love him. That’s the thing I keep not saying, even to myself. I still love him so much it feels like a bruise, and I’m so angry I could burn down mountains, and both of those things are true at the same time.
He failed me. He did. He let her into our marriage inch by inch, and he didn’t see it, and when I tried to tell him he made me feel crazy.
But he also stopped. He fired her. It’s in every headline.
He canceled his tour. He posted that video that made me cry for an hour, the one where he said I was right, where he didn’t make excuses or beg for sympathy.
I don’t know what that means yet.
I just know I’m sitting in the dirt on my grandmother’s farm, twenty-two weeks pregnant, and I miss my husband so much I can barely breathe.
“Az?” Mateo’s voice, from the end of the row. “You okay?”
“Fine.” I wipe my face, I didn’t realize I was crying, and push myself to my feet. “Just taking a break.”
He doesn’t look convinced, but he’s seventeen and knows better than to push. “Abuela says dinner’s in an hour.”
“Tell her I’ll be there.”
I sit in the shade at the end of the row until Mateo comes back for me. My hands are filthy. My back aches. The baby is quiet now, sleeping probably, and I talk to her the way I’ve started doing when no one’s around.
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” I tell her. “But I’m going to figure it out. I promise.”
Dinner is quiet. Lupe makes green chile stew, the same recipe Grandma June taught her thirty years ago, and we eat at the kitchen table while Mateo does homework and the radio plays oldies too soft to hear.
“Your grandmother would be proud,” Lupe says eventually. “Of what you did today. Speaking for yourself.”
“She would’ve told me to say more. Something sharp. Something that made them feel stupid.”
“Probably.” Lupe smiles. “But she also would’ve told you that the best revenge is a life well-lived. So.”
“So I’ll live well.”
“That’s the plan.”
I’m helping clear the dishes when Lupe says it.
“He’s called this house every day since you got here. Three days. I don’t pick up.” She sets a bowl in the sink and turns to face me, expression unreadable. “But he calls.”