Chapter 2
Geller didn't argue. He muttered something foul under his breath, backed out through the door, and let the brass bell rattle against the glass as he disappeared into the storm. The sound of his Buick coughing to life faded into the roar of the downpour.
Silence settled over the shop.
It was a heavy, sweet silence, thick with the scents of wet earth, cut greenery, and the faint, bitter perfume of crushed stems.
Amalia let out a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. Her shoulders slumped, the adrenaline draining out of her limbs and leaving behind the hollow, bone-deep exhaustion of a woman who had worked fourteen hours on her feet every day for two straight years.
“You didn’t have to do that,” she said softly, staring down at the spot on the floor where Geller’s wet boots had left gray puddle marks.
“Geller is a petty tyrant,” Sawyer said, his voice softer now that they were alone, though no less steady. “Men like that don't respond to polite correspondence. They respond to fear of litigation.”
“He was within his rights. I was three weeks behind.”
“You were nineteen days behind on a space his family hasn't updated since 1984,” Sawyer countered. He walked over to the tall galvanized bucket near the back, looking down at the bare branches of pussy willow leaning against the brick wall. “You keep this building alive, Amalia. He ought to be paying you for historical preservation.”
She laughed, a small, cracked sound that didn’t quite reach her eyes. She reached for the rag under the sink and knelt to wipe up the slush Geller had tracked in. “Historical preservation doesn’t pay for the heating oil. The radiators in the back work whenever they feel like it. I spent last night wrapping the hydrangeas in burlap so they wouldn’t freeze.”
Sawyer’s shoes entered her field of vision—polished black calfskin, wet at the soles.
“Get up, Amalia.”
She looked up from her knees.
Sawyer was standing over her, his expression tight, almost pained. The harsh light caught the hollows under his cheekbones. He looked like he hadn’t slept either.
“I’m cleaning the floor, Sawyer.”
“I said get up.”
He reached down. For an instant, she thought he was going to take her arm, but his hand hovered an inch from her sleeve, hesitating, before dropping back to his side. He stepped back instead, giving her space to rise on her own.
She stood, tossing the dirty rag into the sink. Her denim apron was smeared with green chlorophyll and dried compost, and her hair—auburn, unruly, escaping its copper clip—felt damp around her ears. Standing in front of him, she felt every single day of the twenty-four months that had passed since Julian died.
Julian had been all light, laughter, and impossible promises. When he bought the lease on this crumbling brick building, he’d told her they would fill the high windows with jasmine and live upstairs forever, drinking cheap Chianti on the fire escape while the city slept below. But the cancer had come before the second year was out, swift and ruthless, chewing through their small savings, through his life insurance, through her youth, until there was nothing left but this shop, thirty thousand dollars in unpaid medical co-pays, and a bed upstairs that felt entirely too wide.
She had survived by cutting stems until her thumbs were calloused, taking every funeral order, every desperate Valentine’s walk-in, every municipal banquet center arrangement she could book.
And then, eighteen months ago, Sawyer Vance had walked through the door.
He had come on a freezing Tuesday in November, holding a piece of heavy cream cardstock with a single line written in black fountain-pen ink: *Standing arrangement. White freesias, gardenia foliage, pale stock. Renewed quarterly.*
He hadn't offered a name for the recipient. He hadn't asked for a ribbon or a card. When she’d asked where it should be delivered, he had simply said, *“I will have a courier collect it. Just ensure it is ready on the twentieth of every third month.”*
He had paid cash that first time. Then cashier’s checks. Always five times the market value of the flowers, always enough to pull her back from the razor’s edge of bankruptcy.
Over the months, as he returned to renew the arrangement, Amalia had pieced together the tragedy of him.
Sawyer Vance was a man in mourning. She saw it in the deliberate, solitary way he moved, the absence of any ring on his fingers, the way he looked at the white blooms with an intensity that bordered on reverence. A corporate partner at a white-shoe firm didn't spend thousands of dollars on delicate, fragile, fleeting white freesia every ninety days unless those flowers were meant for an altar. For someone he had loved and lost so completely that he could neither stop buying them nor bear to write their name on a card.
She felt a profound, aching pity for him. And beneath the pity, something far more dangerous: a quiet, stubborn tenderness that she spent every waking hour trying to crush under the heel of her boot.
“Freesias,” she said, turning toward the cold-room display behind the glass partition. “White ones. You always want the double-bloomed ones from the greenhouse in Kennett Square.”
“If they have them,” Sawyer said, following her to the threshold of the cooler. The cold air spilled out across the floor, smelling of winter rain and damp moss. “The single-bloomed ones droop too quickly.”
“How do you know that?” Amalia asked, looking at him over her shoulder with a faint smile. “Most of my corporate clients don't know the difference between a freesia and a carnation.”
Sawyer’s jaw set. “I pay attention.”
“You pay attention to strange things.”
“I pay attention to things that matter,” he said softly.
The air between them seemed to thin.
Amalia turned fully around. They were standing barely two feet apart in the narrow aisle between the potting bench and the cold case. The scent of him—soap, wool, and that deep, quiet reserve—drifted over the crisp, green scent of the cut stems. She could see the tiny flecks of amber in his dark irises, the slight tension at the corners of his mouth, the tiny scar near his right eyebrow.
She had spent two years wrapped in the gray fog of Julian’s ghost. But standing this close to Sawyer Vance, the air felt violently, undeniably alive. Her pulse fluttered against her throat, hot and traitorous.
*Stop it,* she told herself. *He is a customer. He is an untouchable man carrying an untouchable grief.*
She cleared her throat, breaking the line of sight, and pulled a clean clipboard from the shelf. She uncapped a ballpoint pen.
“The twentieth is Saturday,” she said, her voice strictly business now, steady and rhythmic. “I can have the stems conditioned by Friday afternoon. White freesia, white ranunculus if they arrive in time, and the sweet-scented geranium leaves you liked last November?”
“Yes.”
“And the container?”
“The white ceramic. The unglazed one.”
She wrote it down. Her handwriting was neat, precise, the loops of her letters filling the grid of the receipt book.
“No ribbon?”
“No.”
She hesitated. Her pen hovered over the bottom of the form, where the line read: *Card message.*
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