Chapter 2 WREN
WREN
The peonies arrive early, and half of them are wrong.
I stand in the back doorway of the shop with the delivery clipboard in one hand and a coffee in the other, staring at three buckets of blush pink when I ordered coral.
The driver is already pulling away. I don’t bother waving him down.
It’s Tuesday. I have a wedding consultation at ten, a centerpiece order due by noon, and a front display that still looks like last Thursday because I haven’t had time to change it.
Wrong peonies are not the crisis they would have been a year ago. I’ve learned to work with what shows up.
I carry the buckets inside one at a time, shouldering the door open with my hip.
The shop smells the way it always does in the morning—green and damp and cold, like a garden that hasn’t seen the sun yet.
I set the buckets by the cooler and start sorting.
Stems that are too soft go in one pile. Blooms that won’t last go in another.
The rest I trim and place in fresh water, working by feel more than sight because my hands know the angles by now.
This is the part I love. Before the register opens and the phone starts and the sidewalk fills up with people who want something from me. Just the flowers and the quiet and my hands doing what they know how to do.
My phone buzzes on the counter.
I don’t look at it. Not yet. I finish the stem I’m trimming, wipe my hands on my apron, and glance at the screen.
Unknown number.
I decline without looking at it twice and set the phone face down. Spam. Everybody gets those.
I go back to the peonies. The blush pink will work for the Whitfield wedding if I pair them with the ranunculus I have in the cooler. Not what I planned, but no one will notice except me.
The phone buzzes again.
Same number. Or close enough.
I stare at it longer than I should. My ribs tighten before I can stop them. I decline and slide the phone into my apron pocket where I can’t see it.
It’s not him.
I go back to the ranunculus. They’re perfect—tight, layered, each bloom curled in on itself. I pull six stems for the sample and tell myself the phone meant nothing.
The front door chimes. Sasha, with two iced coffees and wet hair.
“You look like you’ve been here since five,” she says, handing me one.
“Six.”
“That’s not better.” She drops her bag behind the counter and ties on her apron. “Peonies?”
“Wrong color.”
“Naturally.” She peers into the bucket. “These are pretty though.”
“They’ll work.”
Sasha doesn’t push. That’s why I hired her. She reads the room without asking questions. If I’m quiet, she fills the space. If I’m buzzing, she matches it. This morning I’m somewhere in between.
She handles the front display while I prep the sample. The shop fills with the sounds I know by heart—scissors through ribbon, the crinkle of tissue paper, the cooler door opening and closing. Outside, Brooklyn wakes up the way it always does. Slow, then all at once.
By nine, the sidewalk buckets are out and the shop looks like mine again.
Bright, cluttered, alive. Every surface holds something growing or about to grow.
I know it’s not fancy. The tile is chipped in the corner by the register and the ceiling leaks when it rains hard and the awning out front has a tear I keep meaning to fix.
But it’s mine. Every bucket, every bloom, every pair of shears I’ve ruined along the way. I built this from nothing. It’s mine.
The phone buzzes in my apron pocket for the third time this morning.
I pull it out. Different number. I feel Sasha glance at me from across the shop.
“Everything okay?” she asks.
“Fine,” I say.
She nods and goes back to the display.
But my hands aren’t quite steady when I go back to the stems.
By ten, the morning has settled into its usual rhythm.
I think about texting Dawson, but I don’t know what I’d say.
He’d worry. He always worries. And I hate being the reason he does, like I’m proving him right about something I already handled.
He already thinks Tyler was worse than I’ve admitted, and maybe he’s right about some of it, but I ended that.
I’m not going to be the sister who calls her brother every time something feels a little off.
I don’t text him.
The rest of the morning is normal. Customers drift in and out.
A man buys tulips for his wife without knowing what color she likes—I pick soft peach because it goes with everything.
A teenager picks out a single rose and asks me to wrap it like it’s something important, so I do.
I tie it with the good ribbon, the silk one I save for wedding orders, and she leaves holding it in both hands like it’s made of glass.
Those are the moments that remind me why I do this. Not the weddings or the corporate orders or the Valentine’s Day rush.
It’s the kid with the one rose. The husband who showed up anyway. The people who walk in looking for something they can’t quite name and leave with a feeling they can carry home.
Sasha and I eat lunch standing up in the back, sharing a sandwich and talking about a reality show she’s obsessed with. She does terrible impressions of the contestants that make me laugh anyway, and for twenty minutes the morning’s phone calls feel like something that happened to someone else.
Normal. All of it. Completely normal.
Then, around two, I look up from the register and see a car idling across the street. Dark sedan. Windows tinted black.
It stays there too long.
Then it pulls away. Slow. Like it wants me to notice.