2. Chapter 2
Maya
***
I've been at the shop since five-thirty.
Not because I couldn't sleep, which would be admitting something I'm not prepared to admit, but because the Thursday morning delivery order doesn't sort itself and the eucalyptus wreaths for the Millar wedding won't bind properly unless the stems are conditioned at least two hours before assembly.
That's just science. That has nothing to do with the fact that every time I closed my eyes last night I saw ice-blue ones looking back at me.
Finch and Fern smells the way it always smells before the town wakes up.
Green and cool and faintly sweet, like the inside of a greenhouse after rain.
I love it at this hour, when it's just me and the flowers and the quiet hum of the cooler and the particular satisfaction of work that needs doing and hands that know how to do it.
My mother opened this shop thirty-one years ago with a folding table, a bucket of garden roses, and a belief that people in Willow Creek deserved beautiful things.
My grandmother kept the books. My father built the front counter from reclaimed oak the summer I turned six, and I still run my hand along the grain of it every morning like a habit I never examined closely enough to stop.
This shop is mine now. Every splinter of it.
Which is why the certified letter sitting under the register, the one I found when I unlocked this morning and have been deliberately avoiding ever since, feels less like a piece of paper and more like a hand around my throat.
I know what it says. I read it twice at six a.m. and then I turned it face down and buried it under the order clipboard because some things need an hour or two before you can look at them properly.
The landlord is auctioning the building.
Thirty days.
I keep cutting eucalyptus stems and telling myself there's a solution, because there is always a solution and I have never once in thirty-two years been a person who sits down in the middle of a problem and waits for someone else to pull her back to her feet.
The bell above the door rings at eight on the dot and Lily arrives the way she always arrives, coffee in each hand, her dark hair still damp at the ends, wearing the particular smile she puts on when she already knows something I'm not ready to say out loud.
She sets my coffee on the counter beside the eucalyptus bucket and leans against the cooler door and looks at me.
I keep my eyes on the stems.
"So," she says, in the tone of someone who has been composing this opening since approximately seven-fifteen. "Your Linden Rise billionaire. Did he apologize?"
I immediately regret calling her on the drive back from the Hargrove delivery this morning. I knew I shouldn't have. I did it anyway.
"Deadhead the dahlias," I say.
"I'll take that as a no." She picks up the dahlia bucket without missing a beat, because Lily has been working beside me long enough to know that keeping her hands busy is the price of admission when I'm in this particular mood.
"Bette stopped me on the way in. She says he moved into the Harwick estate six weeks ago.
Keeps to himself. Has a housekeeper, a chef, a groundskeeper, a driver, and someone named Grace who handles his correspondence.
" She pauses. "Bette knows a lot about a man who keeps to himself. "
"Bette knows a lot about everyone," I say. "It's her spiritual gift."
Lily smiles. "She also says he's not married."
"Lily."
"I'm just reporting the news."
"Report it to someone who cares."
She laughs, soft and unbothered, and I feel the corner of my own mouth try to move and I don't let it, because I am in the middle of a serious morning and Lily's laugh has always been the most disarming thing in any room it occupies.
I count the eucalyptus stems twice. Then I count the ranunculus order because numbers are honest even when everything else feels tilted, and right now I need something honest to hold onto.
"The letter is under the clipboard," I say finally. I don't look up.
I hear Lily stop moving.
"The one from the landlord?"
"He's auctioning the building. Thirty days." I set down my shears. "I found out this morning."
The shop goes quiet in a way that has nothing to do with the hour.
Lily crosses to the counter and lifts the clipboard and reads the letter without saying anything, and I watch her face do the thing it does when she's thinking hard and trying not to show me how worried she is, which means I can see exactly how worried she is.
She sets it back down. Face up this time.
"Okay," she says.
"Okay," I agree.
We stand there for a moment, the two of us on either side of the oak counter my father built, and the word sits between us not as a solution but as a decision.
We are not people who fall apart in the middle of the morning.
We are people who make the coffee last and cut the stems straight and figure it out.
"How much would it take?" she asks.
"More than I have."
"More than the shop can manage?"
I pick my shears back up. "Let me make some calls this afternoon. There are options." I say it the way you say things you need to believe before you've proven them. "There are always options."
Lily nods, and she doesn't push, because she knows me well enough to know that pushing before I'm ready only makes me dig in deeper, and digging in deeper is one of my more reliable personality traits.
We work through the morning the way we always do.
Orders filled, arrangements wrapped, the shop opening at nine to the first of the day's customers.
Old Mr. Henley comes every Thursday for a single white carnation for his wife's grave and stays for twenty minutes to tell me about her.
I listen to every word, because the flowers are never really about the flowers and I learned that from my mother before I learned anything else.
By noon the Millar wreaths are finished and I've returned four calls and started a fifth and gotten precisely nowhere useful, and the number in my head, the gap between what I have and what the building will sell for, has not gotten any smaller no matter how many times I do the arithmetic.
Bette comes in at half past two for her standing order of sweet peas and lingers, the way Bette always lingers, rearranging a display she has rearranged on every visit for the past six years and telling me about her cousin's neighbor's daughter who married a developer and deeply regretted it.
I smile and wrap her sweet peas and tell her I'll keep that in mind.
"You should come to the fundraiser planning meeting Thursday," she says at the door. "We need people who are good with aesthetics."
"I'll think about it," I say, which Bette correctly interprets as yes because she beams at me and slips out the door and disappears down Main Street with the satisfied air of someone who has accomplished at least two things she came in to accomplish.
Lily leaves at six, the way she always does. "See you tomorrow," she says. "See you tomorrow," I say. I lock the front door at half past seven.
The shop is quiet again, just the cooler and the last of the evening light coming through the front glass, and I stand at the oak counter and let myself feel it for exactly sixty seconds.
The weight of the letter. The gap in the numbers.
The quiet loneliness of being the only person responsible for something you love.
Sixty seconds. Then I pick up my shears and start on tomorrow's prep work, because the flowers don't wait and neither does morning.
I work until the light outside goes fully dark and the last of the prep is done and there is nothing left to do but go home. I reach for my keys to lock up. I open the door to leave, and that is when I see it, tucked on the outside above the mail slot.
An envelope, cream-colored and clean-edged, the kind of stationery that costs more per sheet than my wholesale ranunculus.
No return address. My name written on the front in handwriting that is precise and unhurried and somehow conveys, in eight letters, that the person who wrote it has never once been in a rush in their life.
At the bottom, in the same deliberate hand: S. Ransome.
I stand in the doorway for a moment with the evening air coming in around me and something cautious turning over in my chest.
Inside is a single sheet. A flower order, written out by hand with the kind of specific detail that tells me whoever wrote it did not simply guess.
Twelve arrangements. Standing weekly. Seasonal stems, no lilies, preference for garden varieties over hothouse.
Delivery to the Harwick estate on Linden Rise.
A price per arrangement listed in the bottom corner, clean and non-negotiable, signed with nothing warmer than two initials and a phone number for his assistant.
I read it twice.
Then I look at the number in the bottom corner again.
Twelve arrangements at that price would cover half a month's rent.
My pen is already in my hand before I remember what kind of man leaves notes instead of apologies, and I fold it and put it back in the envelope, lock the door, walk to my van, and drive home before I do something I haven't thought through properly.
I think through things properly. Always.
It's one of my better qualities.
***
The problem with thinking things through properly is that it requires honesty, and honesty requires admitting that an arrangement fee generous enough to matter, arriving in a cream envelope from a man I have already decided not to like or think about, feels less like a business opportunity and more like the beginning of something I don't yet have a name for.
And I have never once been good at leaving things unnamed.
***