Bonus Chapter Two Kieran
Itake the stairs two at a time, my shoes echoing off the concrete. The bouquet bounces against my palm—white ranunculus. My lungs burn by the time I reach the top, but I don’t stop. I can’t.
Outside the door, I stop.
My chest heaves. I look at my watch. I’m forty-five minutes late.
I curse under my breath and then force myself to breathe.
Deep breaths. Even them out. I run a hand through my hair, smooth the mess.
Check the flowers. I turn the stems between my fingers, feel for a soft spot, a split.
The stems aren’t crushed. The petals are still fresh. Good. That’s something.
Then I open the door.
The terrace is exactly as it always is. String lights overhead, the town spread out below, the sound of traffic rising from the street not as noise, but as a low, granular hum. And Nora is sitting in her chair, a book open in her lap.
She stills.
Just for a moment. A fraction of a second where her fingers pause on the page, where her shoulders tense, where the air around her holds its breath.
She knows I’m here.
But she doesn’t acknowledge me. Doesn’t look up. Doesn’t speak.
She’s mad.
A smile fills my face. Wide. Unstoppable.
I should be apologizing already, explaining, fixing this before it grows.
But all I feel is happiness.
Because she’s mad at me.
It’s not the first time. She gets irritated now. Frustrated. Annoyed. And she lets it show. She huffs when Maeve steals the last pastry. She rolls her eyes when Claire changes the music for the third time. She scowls when I show up late, like today.
Every single time, my heart forgets its rhythm. It trips, recovers, then pounds twice as fast, leaving me breathless and useless and unable to do anything but stare at her.
Because the woman I met a few years ago wouldn’t have let you see a single flicker of annoyance.
She would have swallowed it, smoothed it over with a small smile and a softer voice.
She would have made herself smaller so you wouldn’t have to see her take up space with something as ordinary as being bothered.
But now she sighs loud enough for the room to hear. She sets her mug down too hard. She says, “That’s annoying,” and doesn’t apologize for it.
She doesn’t know what she’s giving me when she rolls her eyes or huffs or crosses her arms and waits for me to notice.
She doesn’t know that every flicker of annoyance is proof that she feels safe enough to be bothered.
That she trusts me enough to let me see her unhappy.
That she no longer believes her anger will drive people away.
I move to take my seat beside her. One look at the chair and I know she’s really, truly mad. Because she moved it. Just a few inches. Deliberately. Exactly far enough that our shoulders wouldn’t touch.
Was I supposed to feel this delighted that she was mad at me?
I glance at her, though she still hasn’t looked up. I pick up the chair so it won’t scrape the floor. I set it down right beside hers, close enough that the armrests touch. Then I sit.
Her eyes are still on the book, but the illusion doesn’t hold for long. She flips a page. Then another. Too quickly. Her fingers move, but her focus isn’t there. Her jaw is set, tight enough that I can see the tension from where I’m sitting.
She isn’t reading.
She’s waiting.
I press my lips together, trying to keep the smile from showing too much, and clear my throat.
“When I went to After Rain to buy flowers, they were suddenly closed. Some kind of emergency.” She flips another page.
“I went to another shop, but they didn’t have white ranunculus.
So I went to another one. Then another one.
I was panicking, running from place to place, watching the minutes disappear, convinced I’d show up here empty-handed. ”
That thought had sat wrong in my chest. Heavy. Unacceptable.
I turn my head into the line of her vision, trying to catch her eye.
“Finally, on the fifth try—a little shop tucked behind a laundromat, the kind of place you’d walk past without noticing—I found them.
They had exactly one bunch left. Like they’d been waiting for me. ” I pause. “I’m sorry I’m late.”
She doesn’t look at me. But after a long moment, she speaks. “You could have called. Or texted.”
I sigh and pull out my phone. Hold it up so she can see the cracked screen—a spiderweb of fractures spreading from the corner where it hit the pavement. “My panic might have done some damage.”
Coming out of the third shop, already late, already sweating, already imagining showing up to the terrace empty-handed, I had walked straight into a parking meter.
The phone flew out of my hand. The screen shattered.
I didn’t even stop to check it properly.
I just picked it up and kept moving, too busy thinking about the flowers on her nightstand—the ones I’d given her last time, the ones that would be starting to wilt by now.
I could see the petals going brown at the edges, a slow dry curl inward.
The stems, softening where they sat in the water, their green turning slimy and translucent.
I always alternate, never repeating a flower twice in a row. I want her room to fill with new scents, each one carrying its own meaning pressed into the stems. A secret conversation between us.
Everything except dandelions. Those I never bring. Those belong to her. She chooses those for herself.
The book in her hands finally closes. For a second, she stays like that, staring at it. Then her eyes lift and meet mine. And just like that, everything in me eases. I didn’t realize how much I’d been waiting for her to look at me until she did. My smile comes before I can stop it.
There she is.
She looks at me properly now. Her gaze moves over me slowly, taking everything in. My hair, still slightly out of place. The faint flush from the stairs. The unevenness in my breathing I hadn’t fully hidden. Her expression softens. The hard line of her jaw dissolves. “You ran up the stairs.”
I let out a quiet breath, a hint of a laugh slipping through. There’s no point trying to hide anything from her.
I hold the flowers out to her.
Her face lights up. Instantly. Completely.
All the panic. All the running. All the cracked phones and desperate sprints through unfamiliar streets—worth it. Every second. Every step. Every stupid, breathless moment.
Because of this. Because of her. Because of the way she looks at flowers like they’re made of starlight.
She takes them from my hands, and the evening shifts.
The air softens. Everything fades. And I sit beside her—close, no space between—watching her breathe in the scent of petals, and I think: I would do this every day.
I would run through every flower shop in the town.
I would break a hundred phones. I would collect their shattered screens like a rosary of small disasters.
Just to see her smile like that.
She sets the flowers down carefully on the side table, adjusting them just enough to make sure they sit right. The book follows, placed beside them, forgotten now.
Then she turns back to me. “Take the elevator next time.”
“It’s too slow.”
That elevator is ancient—probably one of the first ever installed in this town. It creaks and groans and takes forever to climb three floors. No one uses it except the elderly residents and the occasional delivery person who doesn’t know any better.
She crosses her arms over her chest. “Still.”
There’s no arguing with that tone.
“Okay.”
She nods, satisfied.
I watch her face. That tiny change in her expression—that flash of approval—hits my chest and stays there. She’s pleased. I did that. I made her feel that.
Then her hand lifts to my hair.
This again. This miracle again. Her hand has found my hair many times before, and still my heart fumbles like the first. Still I forget to breathe. Still I think: She is touching me. She chose to touch me. Out of everyone, she chose me.
I will never stop being astonished by her hand in my hair. Not if she does it every day for the rest of my life. Not if I live to be a hundred. Not if my hair goes gray and thin and brittle and she’s still running her fingers through it.
I don’t realize my shoulders have gone tight until I feel them start to loosen. Her fingers move through my hair with care, handling something fragile. Something worth tending to.
I want to close my eyes. But I don’t. I keep them open because I don’t want to miss a single second of her face while she does this. Her fingers move gently. Smoothing down the mess I made running up the stairs. Tucking the stray pieces back into place.
Each touch is so faint I almost can’t feel it. Almost. But I do. I feel every single one. A brush near my temple. A slow drag through a tangled piece. The whisper of her knuckle against my forehead. A touch light enough I might have mistaken it for my own pulse.
I stay very still. I’m afraid that if I move even a little, she’ll stop. And I don’t want that. The loss of it, not the moment where her palm lifts and her warmth on my face begins to cool. I would sit here forever. Just to keep feeling her hand in my hair like this.
When she’s done, her hand hovers for a second.
I almost whisper something. I don’t even know what. Thank you. Or again. Or her name, just her name, like a prayer.
She drops it.
I shake myself loose from the spell of her touch and look back at her.
I frown.
She looks nervous.
I start to speak—to ask her what’s wrong, to fix it, to do anything to smooth that look off her face—but she speaks first.
“What’s your favourite flower?”
My brows draw together. Of all the things I expected her to say—that wasn’t one of them. “Red rose.” I say it slowly, still confused. Because she knows this. I’ve told her before. I’ve left them on her desk. She’s watched my face light up every time I see one.
And Nora doesn’t forget things.
So why is she asking?