I’d already told Momma I’d be out again, walking the fields and checking what would be ready when we needed it. We’ddone this dance a hundred times—my parents growing beauty with their hands, me turning it into arrangements for people who wanted a feeling they couldn’t name.
But now the Montana job had a different weight.
It wasn’t just scale. It wasn’t just money or logistics.
It was the quiet, relentless sense that I had stepped into a world where flowers were not just flowers. Where weddings were not just weddings. Where names—Dane, Dominion, Vanguard—meant things you didn’t say out loud unless you were prepared to pay for it.
I tried not to think about any of that.
I tried to focus on stems and ribbon and the familiar pleasure of making something perfect.
It worked—until my phone rang.
Not a text this time. A call.
Momma.
My stomach dropped before I even answered.
“Hey,” I said quickly, stepping into the back room and shutting the door behind me. “Everything okay?”
There was noise on her end—voices, the distant bark of Sunny, the clink of something metal. The sound of my childhood in motion.
But my momma’s voice was tight.
“Joy,” she said, and the way she said my name made my skin go cold. “Where are you?”
“At the shop,” I said. “What’s wrong?”
“We have … we have a woman here.”
I blinked. “A woman?”
“Yes.” A pause. “She’s not here to buy flowers.”
My pulse skittered.
“Momma, who is she?”
“I don’t know,” she said. And that alone was wrong. My mother knew everyone on Wadmalaw. She knew their families, their dogs, their gossip, the history of their grudges.
If she didn’t know someone, that someone was either a tourist—lost and harmless—or trouble.
This didn’t sound like a tourist.
“She asked for you,” Momma continued. “By name.”
My throat tightened. “How?—”
“And,” Momma added, her voice dropping, “she asked about a man named Micah.”
The air left my lungs the same way it had in my shop when that first woman said his last name. Could it be the same woman?
“Momma,” I said, forcing the word out carefully, “put Daddy on.”
“He’s right here,” she replied quickly. “He’s—Joy, honey, don’t?—”
“Put him on,” I repeated.
