Chapter 15
GRAHAM
Claire's text reached me while I was standing in the kitchen with a cup of coffee I had not touched.
A flower shipment came early. I need help moving six buckets into the cooler. Twenty minutes, nothing else. Can you come?
I answered before I could turn the request into a plan.
Yes. I'll be there in fifteen minutes.
My first thought was to call Rosa and have one of the estate staff meet me with a hand truck. My second was to contact the supplier whose name was printed on the invoice Claire had once left in my car and tell them their driver could wait until her staff arrived.
I set my phone on the counter and went upstairs to change.
Ten minutes later, I left the house in jeans, an old gray sweater, and the work boots I used when the garage flooded. I put a pair of gloves in my coat pocket. Nothing else went in the car.
The refrigerated truck blocked half the alley behind the studio. Claire stood at the loading entrance with the driver, her coat open over a green apron. She looked at my empty hands, then past me toward the street.
“You came alone.”
“You asked me to.”
The driver lowered the lift. Six black buckets were strapped together near the door, each one filled with water and tightly closed garden roses.
Claire pointed through the loading entrance. “They go on the left side of the cooler. Leave the front row where it is. Nina has those counted for the staircase.”
“Left side. Front row stays.”
I took the first two buckets off the lift.
Water shifted against my legs as I carried them through the studio.
The cooler door opened onto shelves of cream roses, greenery, and labeled plastic tubs.
Every available surface held part of an order I could not understand: stem counts in grease pencil, strips of ribbon clipped to invoices, photographs marked with tiny arrows.
Claire walked ahead of me and cleared exactly one space.
“There.”
I set the buckets down. The cold air bit through my sweater.
It took three trips. On the last, the driver handed Claire an electronic pad. She checked the packing slip before she signed.
“Where are the sweet peas?” she asked.
He looked at the buckets still on the truck. “This is everything under your number.”
“There should be twelve bunches of white sweet peas.”
He scrolled through his device. “Shorted at the warehouse. The invoice should show a credit.”
Claire's mouth tightened. “A credit doesn't go in forty centerpieces.”
I knew three hotel florists, two event planners who could open a wholesaler after hours, and a man who had flown peonies in from the Netherlands for my mother's birthday dinner. My phone was already in my hand.
“I can find twelve bunches,” I said.
“Not in time to condition them.” Claire looked past me at the worktable. “And I don't want warm flowers from six different refrigerators.”
“What do you want?”
She read the packing slip again. “The spray roses were fuller than the sample. I'll move those to the table pieces and use the jasmine vine on the staircase. The sweet peas were supposed to soften the edges, not hold the design together.”
She turned to the driver. “Mark the shortage and email the revised invoice.”
He nodded and climbed back into the truck.
I put my phone away.
Claire looked through the open loading door at the clock above the office. “Do you have to leave?”
“No.”
“Nina will be back before ten. If you can stay until then, I need the candle boxes moved to the first van and two tubs brought down from storage. Nothing in the tubs gets opened.”
“Show me which ones.”
The work was simple once she gave it to me.
I carried four boxes of candles, brought down the tubs labeled BELLAMY—STAIRCASE, and shifted a folding table far enough for Claire to reach the rose buckets without twisting around it.
When I asked where the empty delivery crates belonged, she pointed to a stack beside the sink.
I had been in the studio before, usually after closing. I had brought Claire dinner while she finished proposals, stood behind her with my hands on her shoulders, and asked how much longer she needed. I had never known where the empty crates went.
At nine, two employees came through the front. Paolo carried coffee for himself and Carmen; Carmen carried a tool case and the revised floor plan. They greeted Claire, looked once at me in my jeans beside the cardboard stack, and went to their stations.
“Paolo, the sweet peas were shorted,” Claire said. “You have extra spray roses for the tables. Jasmine moves to the staircase.”
He set down his coffee. “All of it?”
“Keep two vines for the entrance piece. Use the narrower mechanics Nina marked last night.”
“Got it.”
Carmen opened the first candle box and counted against the packing list. Claire asked her to check the van inventory before anything else moved. Neither of them needed Claire to stand over the worktable. They took the changes and carried them into the next task.
I had treated the studio's deadlines as obstacles to dinners and its emergencies as problems that followed Claire home. Here, people understood her in half a sentence, and labels moved an order from cooler to ballroom before I thought to offer a solution.
Claire handed me a roll of blue painter's tape. “These three buckets need a stripe around the handle so no one loads them with the table flowers.”
I wrapped the first handle.
“Once around,” she said. “They have to get it off later.”
I unwound half of what I had done and tried again.
At nine forty, Nina came through the front carrying a roll of floor plans and stopped when she saw me breaking down cardboard.
“He follows directions,” Claire said.
“We should document it,” Nina replied.
I folded the last box. “I was promised twenty minutes.”
Claire glanced at the clock. “Submit an invoice.”
The old rhythm landed among the buckets before any of us could avoid it. Claire's mouth curved. I looked down at the cardboard in my hands and let myself smile too.
Nina reviewed the revised flower recipe while I tied the flattened boxes. She asked Claire one question about the staircase, made a note, and then told Paolo over the phone to use the jasmine vine. No one needed my opinion about how to replace the missing flowers.
At ten, I put on my coat.
Claire caught the edge of the worktable with her fingertips. “There is one more thing.”
I waited.
“A storage cabinet was delivered yesterday. It's in the office. I bought it for the baby things.” Her voice changed slightly on the last three words. “I need it upstairs, and the box says two-person assembly.”
Nina looked at the schedule. “I can help tonight.”
Claire kept her attention on me. “If you have time now. I need to be downstairs again by eleven thirty.”
“I can stay until then.”
The box was narrow, flat, and heavier than it looked. Nina took the lighter end until we reached the bottom of the stairs, then Claire unlocked the office door and led us up. I carried the cabinet box behind her, one step at a time, careful of the turn.
The apartment had changed since the night she told me about the baby.
A line of paint samples had been taped beside the cleared wall.
Three baskets were stacked beneath the window, still carrying their price tags.
The ultrasound image from the screening was fixed to the refrigerator with the florist magnet.
She had sent me the same picture. Seeing it here, among her bills and grocery list, made my copy feel less like evidence and more like something she had let travel out of the room.
Inside one basket were folded cotton sleepers in pale gray and yellow. A package of diapers leaned against the baseboard. The cleared wall was barely wide enough for the cabinet and the bassinet Claire had measured for.
Claire knelt beside the box and ran a thumbnail under the tape. I took the other end when she pointed to it.
“The cabinet goes there,” Claire said, pointing to the cleared wall. “White side out. The diagram online showed the shelves on the left.”
I opened the box on the rug. The hardware came in six numbered bags, none of which matched the numbers in the instructions. Nina sat cross-legged beside me and began sorting screws onto the cardboard.
“Money things,” she said.
I looked at her.
“Claire told me that's how Theo described your job.”
“It was an accurate summary.”
Claire's phone rang when the takeout driver reached the loading entrance. We left the cabinet half assembled and went downstairs. At a cleared corner of the studio worktable, she opened three cartons of noodles.
“If your consulting clients ever see you lose an argument to particleboard, I'll deny everything,” she said.
“This is compressed wood fiber. Particleboard would show more integrity.”
“There he is,” Claire said softly.
For a moment, none of us moved.
Nina picked up the instruction sheet. “The shelves go on the right.”
Claire looked at the drawing. “I hate that website.”
Nina divided the noodles into bowls, Claire took all the pieces of broccoli from mine, and I gave her the plain rice she had been eyeing. The exchange happened before either of us thought about it.
“You still hate broccoli?” Nina asked me.
“I have been consistent in at least one area.”
Claire lowered her eyes to her bowl, smiling.
“He used to order from this place when I worked late,” she told Nina. “Every time, he asked for no broccoli. Every time, they sent extra.”
“They were trying to improve me.”
“They were trying to use what was left at closing.” Claire pushed another piece into my carton. “You tipped them enough to keep the experiment going for years.”
I put two slices of mushroom in her bowl. “You ate the evidence.”
Nina watched the exchange with a look she was polite enough not to explain. She reached for the carton of dumplings instead.
Nina left at eleven to meet the van at the museum. Claire and I went back upstairs. Once the apartment door closed, the room went quieter. She sat on the rug and held the side panel upright while I attached the final shelf.
“We bought a bookcase our first year in the house,” she said. “You put the back on upside down.”
“The back was unmarked.”
“The warning label was at eye level.”
“A design flaw.”
She laughed. It came out full and warm, without the caution that had lived between us for weeks. My hand stopped on the screwdriver.
Claire's laughter faded. She adjusted her grip on the panel. “Finish that corner.”
I tightened the screw.
The bottom drawer stuck when we slid it into place. I removed it, reset one runner, and tried again. This time it closed evenly.
“That's all I needed,” Claire said.
The kitchen drawer beneath the sink still dragged at an angle. The short chair clicked when she stood. A loose hinge showed bright against the cabinet above the stove. I packed the extra hardware into its small plastic bag and placed it on the top shelf of the new cabinet.
“The assembly instructions are here,” I said. “There are two spare screws and an extra shelf pin in the bag.”
Claire checked the time. “Eleven twenty-six.”
“Enough time for the cardboard.”
I tied the flattened packaging with the twine from the box and carried it downstairs. At the loading door, I put on my coat while Claire stood inside the studio.
“Thank you for coming,” she said.
“Any time you ask.”
Her eyes held mine for a second. I wanted to tell her she could ask for more than flowers and furniture. I wanted to ask whether I could come back after the dinner, when she was less tired, when there was no task between us.
I picked up the cardboard instead. “Good luck Friday.”
“Good night, Graham.”
I left the instructions on the new cabinet, the empty floor swept, and the other crooked pieces of her apartment exactly where they had been.
The studio clock changed to eleven thirty as I stepped into the alley.
At one sixteen that night, my phone lit on the bedside table.
Claire.