Chapter Nineteen
Mandy
The after-party of Lucy and Ryan’s wedding spilled out across the lawn behind the resort, string lights strung low between the palms, the ocean a dark, restless line beyond the torches.
Every woman who walked through the arch at the entrance got a plumeria crown settled over her hair by one of Nora's assistants; every man got a lei looped over his shoulders, the scent of it—sweet, green, faintly coconut—thickening the air until it felt like something you could almost taste.
I'd never seen anything like it. Simple, warm, unmistakably Hawaii, and somehow it made the entire party feel like it belonged nowhere else on earth.
I found Nora near the bar, glass of champagne in one hand, surveying her own handiwork with the satisfied look of someone who'd pulled off exactly what she'd promised.
Her partner, Colin, stood beside her, sleeves rolled up, still faintly damp from wrangling the last of the floral deliveries off a truck an hour before the ceremony started.
"Nora." I touched the crown still sitting slightly crooked on my head. "I love this. I mean it—I actually love this."
She laughed, pleased. "It's the easiest sell I've ever made. Nobody says no to plumeria."
"My mother's birthday is in the spring." The idea had been building since the ceremony, and it came out before I'd fully decided to say it. "I want this. Exactly this. Crowns, leis, all of it."
Colin winced, sympathetic but honest. "In New York? Plumeria doesn't travel well—it bruises if you look at it wrong, and half of what makes it through customs is already brown by the time it clears. You'd be looking at serious cost for something that might not even survive the flight."
He softened it with a small shrug. "Honestly, carnations hold their shape and their color for days. Garden roses too, if you want something with more texture. You could build the same silhouette—crowns, the draped leis—just with something the East Coast actually cooperates with."
It was good advice. Practical. The kind of answer I would have given a client myself.
I felt the old, small deflation start up anyway—the same one I used to feel over hydrangeas, over a hundred tiny negotiations I'd learned, a long time ago, to just let go of before they turned into anything worth fighting for.
"Actually." Damon's voice, from just behind my shoulder.
"There's a place in the Flower District that specializes in tropical imports specifically. I used them for a firm event two years ago—they fly plumeria in fresh twice a week, keep it in cold storage,
and they do the crown-and-lei assembly themselves if you don't want to deal with wiring it all by hand."
He glanced at me, not at Colin. "It'd cost more than carnations. But if this is what you actually want for her, I think it's worth a call before we settle for the substitute."
I looked at him for a second too long.
He wasn't arguing with me. He wasn't building a case for the practical option and waiting for me to concede it, the way he used to—calm, reasonable, already three steps ahead of whatever I wanted, steering me gently toward the outcome he'd have chosen anyway.
He'd taken the thing I actually wanted and gone looking for a way to make it real instead.
"You remember the name?" I asked, keeping my voice light, testing whether this was an accident or something he'd actually meant.
"I can find it again by tomorrow morning." No hesitation. No performance in it either—just a man answering a question. "I'll call first thing, see what their lead time looks like for a spring date."
Nora glanced between the two of us, something knowing flickering behind her champagne glass, and had the good sense to say nothing at all.
"Okay." I turned back to him fully. "Do that. And—thank you."
"You don't have to thank me for agreeing with you, Mandy." A small, almost rueful smile pulled at his mouth, like he'd caught the same thing I had, a half-second behind me. "I think I owe you at least a decade of that."
The music shifted behind us, something slower, and Lucy's laugh carried across the lawn from wherever she'd found Ryan again.
I didn't say anything else. I just stood there a moment longer, plumeria crown slightly crooked on my head, watching Damon watch me back—patient, unhurried, asking for nothing—and let myself notice, for the first time in longer than I wanted to admit,
that it didn't cost me anything at all to let him stand that close.