Chapter 2
Fletcher
David stopped mid-sentence. He turned to look at slide fourteen. The room went quiet.
“The growth rate,” I said. “You’ve applied last year’s seasonal adjustment to this quarter’s baseline. They’re not the same baseline.”
David looked at the slide. He looked at his notes. He looked back at the slide. “You’re right.” He cleared his throat. “I’ll correct it.”
“Send me the full report before end of day. The detailed one, not the summary.”
“Of course, Mr. Calloway.”
He moved on to slide fifteen. I leaned back in my chair and let him talk.
The flowers on the corner table smelled like the farmer’s market.
I hadn’t meant to buy that many. I never meant to buy that many.
I walked up to her booth and I looked at the dahlias and I thought, I’ll take one bouquet, maybe two.
That’s reasonable. That’s normal. And then she was standing there with her hair half out of its tie and a smudge of something green on her left wrist and she was smiling at me with that smile that makes the entire world around me disappear, and I bought everything on the table.
I’d done that exact thing four times now.
Every week I told myself I wouldn’t. Every week I did.
I looked at slide fifteen and tried to focus.
Her smile. That was the thing. She looked up and saw me and her whole face did something that I was still trying to convince myself I’d imagined. Her eyes had lit up like someone had switched something on behind them. It was fast. She’d almost caught herself doing it. But I saw it.
Or I wanted to see it.
That was the problem. I couldn’t tell anymore what was real and what I was constructing because I wanted it to be real.
Maybe to her I was just Callie’s older brother. Eight years older. The one who showed up at her booth every week with a bad excuse and bought her flowers. Maybe that was the whole picture and I was standing outside it building a story that wasn’t there.
She said Hey, Fletcher and smiled like the sun coming out from behind a cloud, and I said Hi August and looked away because I had to.
David moved to slide sixteen.
I had to stop thinking about her.
Margaux. I should be thinking about Margaux. I was with Margaux. I had chosen Margaux, and I had chosen her for reasons that made sense, even if those reasons lived in a part of me I didn’t open often.
August deserved someone without the darkness that was inside me.
She deserved someone clean. Someone who could look her in the eye without feeling like they were tracking mud across something white and irreplaceable.
She was sunshine. She walked into a farmer’s market and made friends with the elderly honey vendor in under ten minutes and hugged him like she’d known him for years.
She apologized to a dog for cursing in front of it.
She should not be anywhere near me and my sins.
I had decided that a long time ago. The decision still stood. It would always stand.
The presentation ended. People started gathering their things, pushing back chairs, the low shuffle and murmur of a meeting closing out. I stood and told David again about the report. He nodded three times, a bit too eager to want me to take him seriously.
The room emptied.
I walked to the corner of the office.
Floor-to-ceiling windows looked out over the city. Thirty-two floors up, the city looked like something organized and intentional. From up here you couldn’t see any of the mess. I’d always thought that was either the best or worst thing about this view, depending on the day.
The flowers were on the table behind me.
I turned around and picked up one of the dahlia bouquets. I held it for a second. Then I brought it up and smelled it.
I closed my eyes.
She had dahlias in the first bucket on the left. She always arranged them by color, lightest to darkest, left to right. I didn’t know when I’d started noticing that.
No.
I set the bouquet down.
She could not come close to me. That was the rule and it was the right rule and I was not going to stand in my office smelling dahlias and second-guessing it.
She would find out who I really was and what I had done and she would look at me with hatred in her eyes.
She would hate herself for ever trusting a man like me.
I would rather keep her at arm’s length for the rest of my life than see that look on her face even once.
She deserved someone better than me. Someone without my history. Someone who could give her something I couldn’t, which was a version of himself he wasn’t ashamed of.
My phone rang.
I looked at the screen.
My whole body did something involuntary. A small, fast recoil, like touching a hot pan without meaning to.
I stood there for a second. Just looking at the name on the screen.
Margaux.
I was aware, standing there, that I had just flinched at my girlfriend’s name. Then I answered.
“Hi, Margaux.”
“Hey, sexy.”
“Yeah, what’s up?”
A pause. “What’s up? Fletcher, I just called to hear your voice.”
I looked out the window. Thirty-two floors of organized city. “Right. Sorry. You all packed for the trip?”
“I am, yes, but I’m out shopping right now. I want to get a swimsuit that matches yours. Can you send me a picture of your swim trunks?”
“I’m in the middle of a meeting.”
“You just answered your phone in a meeting?”
“It just ended.”
“So send me the picture.”
“Margaux.”
“Fletcher, it’ll take two seconds—”
“I’ll send it later.”
She made a sound, short and pointed, like air going out of something small. “You’re always busy. You’re always too busy.” Then, before I could answer: “Fine. I’ll look through my online orders and find something that works. I also need to get gifts for everyone in your family.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“I do. This is the first time I’m meeting them not just as Mr. and Mrs. Bellamy’s daughter. I’m coming as your girlfriend. I have to make an impression.”
“They’ll like you as you are.”
“Fletcher.” She laughed, the way she did when she thought I was being simple. “I can’t just show up. I have to show up correctly. Anyway, I have a spa appointment in twenty minutes so I have to go. I’ll see you tonight.”
“Yeah. Tonight.”
“Bye, sexy.”
She hung up.
I kept the phone in my hand for a moment. Then I set it face-down on the corner table, next to the dahlias.
The flowers smelled like the farmer’s market. Like Millhaven on a Thursday afternoon. Like something I had decided, a long time ago, that I didn’t get to keep.
I picked up David’s corrected file from the printer and sat back down at my desk.
I had work to do.
***