Chapter 11
CADE
The phone lights on the desk.
I didn’t accept the flowers and I won’t accept any others. Stop. Donate the money to a good cause.
I read the message again.
There is no anger in it.
I have been waiting for anger since she left. I would know what to do with anger. I could apologize to it. I could let it strike me and stand still. I could answer every accusation with the fact beneath it and keep going until she had nothing left to say.
This gives me nowhere to go.
She has cleared the flowers from her door and given me an instruction for the money. Even now, she has taken the inconvenience I sent her and decided what should happen next.
She is still managing my mess.
From a cottage I did not know she owned, in a town whose name I had never heard her say.
I drove there yesterday.
The first florist was beside a pharmacy. The second was in the back of a shop that sold candles and painted furniture. The third was six miles farther north, in a white building with buckets standing outside beneath an awning.
At each counter, I said I wanted flowers delivered to Sienna Ellerin. I caught myself before the woman could write it down. Sienna Belluomo. My name. She still has my name. I have no right to the relief I feel about that, and I feel it anyway, so deep in my chest it aches.
The first woman asked what she liked.
I said, “Anything beautiful.”
She waited for more.
I had nothing.
The second asked whether Sienna preferred bright arrangements or something quieter. The third wanted to know whether there were flowers she disliked, whether she kept animals, whether the message was for an anniversary, an apology, or a death.
I told all three women to use their judgment.
Then I sat at three different counters and wrote my wife’s name on card after card because her name was the one part I knew.
Sienna
Call me.
Cade.
By the last card, the words had begun to look borrowed. The pen pressed a groove into my finger, and I kept writing because ordering more flowers felt like doing more.
On the drive back, I passed the lane to the cottage.
I knew it from the photographs before I saw the number. There was a light in the kitchen.
My foot came off the accelerator.
For several seconds, the car moved slowly enough that I could have stopped without frightening anyone behind me. I could have turned into the lane. I could have walked to her door without a driver, an appointment, or somebody else’s instructions in my pocket.
I imagined her opening it.
Not welcoming me. Not forgiving me. Only standing there, looking at me, waiting to hear what I had come to say.
I drove past. The road opened again, and I kept going until the cottage disappeared behind me.
Then I sent flowers to do what I had been afraid to do myself.
Now I am sitting at my desk with her refusal on the screen. I type, Sienna, I— The cursor waits. I delete it. Please, just— That goes too.
Every sentence wants something from her. An answer. A meeting. Permission to come closer now that I am the one who cannot bear the distance.
I put the phone down. It rings before six.
“Mr. Belluomo, this is Margaret from the shop. I coordinated the other two orders for you, so I’m calling on behalf of all three.”
The woman from the first shop. Her voice is careful, the way people sound when somebody else has handed them the awkward call.
“I wanted to call before the system sent you a notice. The recipient declined today’s deliveries. All of them. She signed the refusal herself.”
“I know.”
“The order was standing, so they would have continued tomorrow. I’ve put tomorrow’s delivery on hold.”
“Thank you.”
“There is one other matter.”
Paper moves near the receiver.
“The arrangements had already been delivered and signed out to the driver, so the shops couldn’t put them back into stock. Mrs. Belluomo asked whether they could be donated instead.”
“All right.”
“She kept the driver there while she made calls. Two nursing homes and a women’s shelter. She checked what each place could accept before sending anything. She had the whole load split up so nothing went to waste.”
The woman pauses.
“He said she was very kind about the trouble.”
Of course she was.
“He also said she made him laugh.”
I reach for the pen beside my keyboard and turn it between my fingers.
“What did she say?”
“I’m sorry?”
“To the driver.”
“Oh.” Margaret sounds surprised. “Just that it was the most interesting thing to happen on her road in months. And she sent him on his way with shortbread.”
A stranger in a delivery van got a joke and shortbread from my wife. He knows what her voice sounds like when she’s taking the sting out of someone else’s bad day. I spent thousands of dollars trying to buy an audience, and another man got the conversation.
I close my eyes. Two years, and I still don’t know the sound of her voice when she’s talking about something she loves.
“For the remaining days on the standing order,” Margaret says, clearing her throat. “Should I cancel it?”
“Yes,” I say. “Thank you.”
“Of course, Mr. Belluomo.”
She hangs up.
I look at the monitor. The document is minimized on my taskbar. I bring it up. Her name is at the top, and below it, the address of the cottage.
I type the next line:
She notices what people need.
It looks thin. It looks like an executive summarizing an asset he failed to maintain.
I add a second line underneath it:
I let her do that for me until there was nothing left between us but what she could provide.
The phone sits beside my hand. Her text is still glowing against the dark screen.
Stop.
The flowers are canceled. It is not the same thing as giving up.