Chapter 3 #3
I took them. Scowled the whole time, said something short about not really being a flowers person, put them in a mason jar the second Briar's car pulled out of the driveway, and stood in my own kitchen looking at wildflowers on my counter, feeling something crack further loose in my chest, something I'd spent twenty years keeping carefully, deliberately shut.
I understood, watching those flowers catch the late afternoon light, what was actually happening to me.
It wasn't just Finn. It had never been just Finn, not really — it was an entire family, cheerful and relentless and entirely too good at this, deciding, one visit at a time, that I was one of theirs, without asking my permission, without waiting for an invitation I would never have extended.
It terrified me. I want to be honest about that, because I think it's important: it terrified me more than anything had in years, because I'd spent my whole life since I was twelve years old building the specific, careful conviction that the only safe thing was to want nothing and need no one, that bees were reliable precisely because they couldn't leave in the way people leave, couldn't choose to stop showing up the way my father had, the way my mother had, in her own slower, sadder fashion.
And here was a whole loud family, cheerfully proving that conviction wrong, one honey delivery and one bundle of wildflowers at a time, and I did not know, standing in my kitchen with wildflowers I refused to admit I loved, whether I had the courage to let them keep doing it.
I put the flowers in water. That was the whole answer, that night. I didn't have a bigger one yet.
Mustard watched me do it from his spot by the stove, head tilted, the way he does when he's deciding whether something is worth getting up for.
Apparently wildflowers in a mason jar did not clear that bar.
He put his head back down and sighed, and I found myself, absurdly, talking to him about it, the way I do when the house is quiet and there's nobody else to hear how much I'm actually thinking about a thing I've been pretending not to think about.
"They keep showing up," I told him. "All of them. Harper and the bakery talk. Nadia and her folders. Briar with her flowers. It's like they had a meeting about it."
Mustard's ear twitched.
"They probably did have a meeting about it. That's the kind of people they are. They'd hold a meeting about how to be nice to somebody. I've never met people like this. I didn't know people like this existed outside of — I don't know. Movies. Books. Places that aren't here."
I sat down at the kitchen table, wildflowers catching the last of the evening light through the window over the sink, and let myself think, for the first time in longer than I could comfortably admit, about what it might mean to actually let this happen.
Not just Finn — though God knew that was complicated enough on its own, a whole tangled knot of wanting and fear I hadn't sorted through — but the rest of it.
The family. The whole loud, warm, entirely too invested apparatus of the Iron Thorn, apparently deciding, one act of kindness at a time, that Hazel Dunmore was a project worth the investment.
I'd spent twenty years building a life specifically designed to never need anyone's investment.
Bees didn't ask for anything but consistent care, and in exchange they gave you honey and never once made you worry they'd stop showing up because they found someone better to show up for.
That arrangement had felt, for two decades, like the only sane one available.
And now here was a whole family, cheerfully proving that a different arrangement might exist — one where you let people in and they didn't leave, where being needed wasn't a liability but the entire point — and I did not know what to do with a truth that big landing this late, this fast, in a kitchen that had been quiet for so long I'd forgotten what it sounded like when it wasn't.
I looked at the flowers a long time. Then I got up, refilled the jar with fresh water even though it didn't need it yet, and went to bed without any better answers than I'd started the evening with.
But I put them in water, and I didn't throw them out, and for a woman who'd spent twenty years mastering the art of throwing things out before they could leave her first, that was, I would come to understand, the beginning of everything.
I didn't sleep well that night, not from distress but from something closer to anticipation, an unfamiliar, restless energy I didn't have a name for yet.
I lay awake running through the whole strange month — the deliveries, the market visits, the flowers, the laugh I still hadn't fully forgiven myself for — and understood, somewhere past midnight, that I'd crossed some threshold I couldn't uncross even if I wanted to.
I didn't want to. That was the most unsettling part of all.
Mustard, at least, slept soundly through all of it, entirely undisturbed by his owner's quiet reckoning, which felt, in its own small way, like a comfort.
I envied him that ease, that uncomplicated capacity for trust. I fell asleep hoping some of it might eventually rub off on me, and for once, the hope didn't feel foolish.
It felt, faintly, like the beginning of a plan.