Chapter 8
Fletcher
August found the flower stall the way she found most things — by accident, and then completely on purpose.
We were on the main strip of Sable Cove town, the five of us walking slow in the evening light.
The shops were lit up, the restaurants spilling music out onto the pavement, the smell of fried food and salt air mixing into something that belonged entirely to summer.
Poppy was reading every shop sign out loud.
Callie had an ice cream. Margaux had her arm through mine and was telling me about an antique store she’d read about in a travel blog.
Then August stopped.
She stopped so suddenly that Callie almost walked into her.
There was a flower stall set up against the wall of a small grocery, buckets of cut stems arranged on a wooden cart, a hand-painted chalkboard sign propped against the wheel.
The man running it was older, maybe fifty, with an apron and an unhurried look.
August looked at the stall the way Poppy looked at trivia books.
She went straight over.
“These dahlias,” she said to the man, before she’d even said hello. She was already crouching down to look at the bucket. “Where do you source these? They’re so fresh. How long ago were these cut?”
The man smiled. “This morning. I grow them myself. My plot is about ten minutes from here.”
“You grow them yourself.” August stood back up. Her whole face was doing the thing it did. “What variety is this one? The coral one in the back.”
“Café au Lait.”
“I knew it. I knew it as soon as I saw it. I’ve been trying to get a reliable Café au Lait supplier in Millhaven for two years and nobody carries them consistently.” She shook her head. “These are incredible.”
The man looked at her the way Cliff had looked at her at the Millhaven market. Like he’d been sitting at a table alone and someone had just pulled up a chair.
Margaux steered me a step closer. We stopped right behind August.
“I love flowers too,” Margaux said. She said it to the group, to the stall, to the air. The man nodded politely.
“If we were back in Millhaven,” Margaux said, her arm tightening slightly through mine, “Fletcher would have bought flowers for me from your stall, August. Wouldn’t you, babe.”
“Probably,” I said.
August glanced back at us. Then she looked at me.
“You should buy the dahlias,” she said. “The Café au Lait ones. They’re the best thing on this cart.
” She straightened and stepped back from the stall.
“These are just as fresh as anything from my van, honestly. Better, actually.” She nodded at the man. “Thank you.”
She walked away with Callie and Poppy, the three of them falling back into conversation about something I didn’t catch.
I looked at the dahlias.
Margaux pointed at a large mixed bouquet near the front of the cart, whites and pale greens and something purple I didn’t know the name of. The man started wrapping it. I waited while he tied the paper.
I looked at the Café au Lait dahlias.
I picked one stem up.
“I’ll be right back,” I told Margaux.
August and Callie were about twenty feet ahead, stopped outside a window display, Poppy reading the shop name out loud and then explaining how ice creams started to be called ice creams to no one who had asked.
I caught up to them. August turned around and saw me and looked at the dahlia in my hand with an expression like she wasn’t sure if she was reading this correctly.
I held it out.
“I could see you wanted to buy something,” I said. “So.” I stopped. “It’s one flower. I’m not giving you a whole bouquet or anything.”
I could hear how that sounded. I kept going anyway because stopping mid-sentence was worse.
“I just thought—” I stopped again. “Here.”
She took it.
She looked at it. She looked up at me. Her face did the thing it did when dad said he had three daughters, except this time she wasn’t close to crying, she was just — happy. Straightforwardly, completely happy, the way she was happy about things, without trying to manage it.
“Thank you,” she said.
“It’s one stem.”
“I know.” She smiled. “Thank you, Fletcher.”
I went back.
Margaux was holding her bouquet when I returned. She looked at me, then at the direction I’d come from, then back at me. Her mouth was in a smile that didn’t move when the rest of her face moved.
“Thank you for the flowers,” she said. Very sweetly.
“Of course.”
She held the bouquet out slightly. “Can you carry them? They’re heavier than I thought.”
I took them.
My phone buzzed in my pocket. I pulled it out.
The email had come in. The one I’d been waiting on for two weeks. The subject line was twelve words and I read them once and the evening went flat around me, the music and the warm light and the smell of the restaurants all going to background noise.
“I have to get back,” I said.
Margaux looked up. “Now?”
“There’s something I need to deal with.” I looked at the group. “I have some work. I’ll head back to the estate.”
“I wanted to look at the antique store and there’s a boutique on the next block—”
“Take your time. I’ll see you back there.”
Callie, August, and Poppy were a few feet away. Poppy was already waving. Callie said goodbye. August looked at me for a second with something in her eyes that I didn’t have time to name and then she smiled and said goodnight.
I walked back to the estate alone.
The study was dark.
I didn’t turn the light on. I sat down at the desk and opened the email on my phone and read it through once. Then I put the phone down and went to the cabinet and poured two fingers of scotch and came back to the desk and opened the laptop.
The full report was attached. Twenty-three pages.
I opened it from the beginning, the way I always did, even though I had read most of it before in pieces, in drafts, in the quarterly updates. Every year I read the whole thing. Every year I sat with it.
The Greer Family Foundation annual report. Not the name anyone else would see. To anyone looking at the paperwork, it was a mid-size educational trust with anonymous donors and a focus on economic hardship scholarships. It was airtight. I had made sure of it.
Page three.
Primary beneficiary update: Emma Greer, 18, enrolled at Northeastern University, Environmental Sciences program. Full scholarship, housing, and living stipend maintained. Academic standing: excellent.
I read that paragraph three times.
Environmental Sciences.
I didn’t know what to do with that. I never did.
Every year there was some detail in the report that made my heart skip a beat.
Last year it had been that the youngest, a boy named Marcus, had won his school’s science fair.
The year before that, Paul Greer’s widow had gotten a job at a community center and the report mentioned she’d started a community garden.
Details I had no right to be moved by. Details I read anyway.
I turned to page seven.
The acquisition had taken eleven days. That was the thing that I still couldn’t sit with, even now, four years later.
Eleven days from the first offer to the company collapse.
Calloway Group had identified them as an undervalued target, my team had run the numbers, and I had taken the deal to my father.
He had looked at the projections and said that’s my son and put his hand on my shoulder and I had felt, for one specific moment, like I had finally done the thing I was supposed to do.
The company had three hundred and twelve employees.
I had known that number before I signed off.
It was in the report. Three hundred and twelve people, most of them in Millhaven and didn’t have a lot of other options.
I had read that number and I had looked at the acquisition margin and I had signed off anyway, because the margin was very good and my father had his hand on my shoulder.
He was proud of me acquiring this company.
I was twenty-eight years old and I had not yet learned the difference between a number and a person.
Three days after we closed, the company filed for bankruptcy.
Six months after that, a journalist called me.
She was working on a piece about the human cost of corporate acquisitions.
She had a list of names. She was calling everyone on the list. She told me about Paul Greer.
He was with that company for fifteen years.
He had three kids. A mortgage. No savings because the company’s pension had been part of the assets we’d absorbed in the acquisition.
She told me he had tried to find work for three weeks after the collapse.
She told me he had not found any. She told me he had taken his life on a Tuesday morning in November, three weeks after the company went under.
She asked if I had a comment.
I sat in my car in the Calloway Group parking garage for one hour after that call.
I never told my father. I never told anyone.
I didn’t know, fully, why. Part of it was that I knew what he would say.
He would say that it wasn’t our decision, that Paul Greer’s choices were his own, that the acquisition was legal and the projections were sound and business was business and you could not run a company by accounting for every possible downstream consequence of every decision.
He would have said all of that and he would have been able to sleep afterward.
I could not sleep.
I had built the foundation six months after the call.
Emma, the daughter, was twelve then. The boy, Marcus, was eight.
The youngest, a girl named Clara, was five.
I had funded it from my personal accounts, not the company, and I had structured it so carefully that my own lawyers couldn’t find my name in it if they looked.
I had not told my father. I had not told Callie. I had not told anyone.
The journalist never ran the story. I didn’t know why. I had expected it every week for a year and when it never got printed, I stopped waiting for it. By then it didn’t matter because the story was inside me anyway, running whether anyone published it or not.
Page nineteen.
Clara Greer, age 9, enrolled in after-school arts program. Showing strong aptitude and engagement.
Nine years old. The same age as Poppy.
I closed the laptop.
The room was dark and quiet. Somewhere outside, the ocean continued regardless. I sat with the scotch. I didn’t drink it. I just held the glass.
I thought about August.
Her laugh at the flower stall, the way she’d crouched down to look at the dahlias like they were something worth getting close to. The way she’d said thank you, Fletcher . The way she looked at the world like it was mostly good and worth tending to.
She saved people.
While I was responsible for getting one buried.
I set the glass down on the desk, and turned the chair toward the window.
She could not be near me.
Not because I didn’t want her near me. Because I wanted her near me more than I had wanted anything in five years.
Good things were not for people who had done what I had done.
You did not deserve to sit next to someone who drove to a children’s hospital every morning.
You did not get to hold her hand or watch her cry at her own shop opening.
You deserved to sit in the dark.
You paid the foundation.
You drove to nowhere after midnight.
And you kept your hands to yourself.
***