Chapter 4 WREN
WREN
I lock the door.
I don’t realize I’ve done it until I’m standing there with my hand on the deadbolt and the shop still open for another four hours.
Sasha is restocking the cooler in the back.
A woman with a stroller just walked past the window.
It’s the middle of a Tuesday afternoon and I’m locking up like something is wrong.
Nothing is wrong.
I flip the lock back and prop the door open again. Sunflower bucket back in place. I wipe my hands on my apron and stand behind the counter and pretend the last twenty minutes didn’t just rearrange something inside my chest.
Jace Carrington walked into my flower shop.
I haven’t said his name in years, but it still lands somewhere low. It’s not a flutter. I’m not fourteen anymore. More like a bruise I forgot I had until someone pressed on it.
He looked different. Not older—he was already older when I knew him, already carved out of something harder than everyone else in the room.
But the edges are sharper now. His shoulders, the way he stood inside my shop like he was measuring every wall.
He filled the space without moving through it.
That used to intimidate me. Back when I was a teenager, that stillness made him feel untouchable.
Dangerous, though I didn’t have the vocabulary for it yet.
Now it just makes me aware of how small the shop actually is.
He wore his hair longer back then. Now it’s buzzed close to his head, and it makes everything else more visible. The jaw. The cheekbones. A face that has no business looking better than it did all those years ago.
And his eyes. Green—vivid, specific, startling.
They were the thing I remembered most from those dinners. I used to stare at them across the table and wonder what it would feel like to have them land on me. Really on me.
Now I know. And it felt like being caught somewhere I wasn’t supposed to be.
His sleeves were rolled, and I noticed his forearms before I meant to.
The way he used his hands like nothing he did was accidental.
And I hated myself for it, because this is Dawson’s friend.
This is the man my brother sent to check on me like I’m still a kid who can’t handle her own life.
I should be annoyed, not watching the way he held the bouquet I wrapped for him like he’d never touched flowers before.
He probably hasn’t.
He stood in front of the white peonies like a man studying a detonation sequence. Picked them without asking the price. Didn’t smell them, didn’t touch the petals, just pointed and waited. A man who makes decisions fast and doesn’t revisit them. I know the type. I dated the type.
That thought lands wrong and I push it away.
Jace isn’t Tyler. But he’s doing the same thing every man in my life seems to think is his right—deciding what I need without asking.
Dawson called him. Jace showed up. Neither of them asked me.
I built this shop with my own hands, left a man who tried to make me small, put myself back together in a borough where nobody knew my name—and now my brother’s friend strolls in like he gets to assess whether I’m safe?
I don’t need Jace Carrington checking up on me. I’ve been taking care of myself since I was twenty-two and I’ll be fine long after he’s driven back to Manhattan and forgotten my name.
“You okay?” Sasha asks from behind the cooler door.
“Fine.”
The word tastes stale. I’ve been using it a lot lately.
I focus on the Whitfield order because focusing on things I can control is what I do when things I can’t control start pressing in.
Ranunculus, garden roses, the blush peonies that ended up better than expected.
I trim each stem at an angle and strip the lower leaves and let my hands do the thinking while my head does something less useful.
When I was fourteen, fifteen, sitting across from him at my parents’ dining table while he and Dawson talked about deployments and people I didn’t know, he never looked at me.
Not once. Not in any direction that counted.
I was furniture. Dawson’s kid sister, present but irrelevant, and I spent entire dinners trying to earn a single glance while pretending I wasn’t trying at all.
I got very good at pretending.
It wasn’t long, and it wasn’t obvious. But when I came around the counter to hand him the flowers, his eyes tracked me.
Not my face—me. Where my hands were. How I moved behind the counter.
How close I got when I handed him the bouquet.
It was controlled and quick and I would have missed it entirely if I hadn’t spent three years of my adolescence memorizing exactly what his attention looked like when it was pointed somewhere else.
This time it was pointed at me.
My phone buzzes on the counter.
Unknown number.
I don’t want to look at it. I look at it anyway.
Four words.
Unknown: I saw you today.
I set the phone down. Stare at the counter.
I am not doing this.
So he saw me. He sees everything. That’s nothing new.
I finish the arrangement and step back.
Sasha leaves at five. I close up alone, which I’ve done hundreds of times—pulling the sidewalk buckets in, sweeping the floor, wiping down the counter, cashing out the register. The same routine I could do with my eyes closed.
I lock the back, then the front. Check the front. Walk away. Go back and check it again.
The walk home takes ten minutes. I’ve done it so many times I don’t think about it anymore—left on Atlantic, past the laundromat, past the church with the crooked fence, right on my block.
I have my keys out before I reach the door, and by the time I’ve kicked off my shoes and poured a glass of wine, I still haven’t turned on the lights.
I sit on the couch in the dark. Street noise filters in through the window I always leave cracked—someone laughing on the sidewalk, a car door somewhere close. Sounds that usually make me feel settled.
Then I get up and check the lock on my apartment door. The one I never check.
And somehow it’s not what’s on the other side of that door keeping me up tonight.
It’s a pair of green eyes and the way they finally landed on me.