Me, I’ve never felt at home in London. Even as a child I always wanted what Nana described when she told stories about Fellside. Villages and hills and proper seasons. People who know your name because they actually know you, not because they’ve memorised it from a directory of “future talent”.
Nana could hear the strain in my voice whenever we spoke. She invited me up last summer “for a break”, which turned out to be a gentle ambush. I arrived exhausted and went to bed that night thinking I’d stay a week. By the next afternoon I was standing outside this shop with a coffee from the little café down the road, watching the light hit the mint green front, and I knew.
I wanted this life.
When I refused to take the shop for free, Nana made me a ridiculously generous offer. “You need it more than I do,” she said, already bright-eyed at the thought of finally travelling the Silk Road. “Besides, I’d rather invest in you than any bank.”
It helped that I already knew I loved floristry. I’d been doing weekend courses for a few years, probably because some subconscious part of me wanted the life Nana had lived. On one of those courses, I met Christina.
Christina, with her loud laugh and bigger dreams, who joked about opening a shop of her own one day, “somewhere pretty, but with decent broadband”.
When Nana made her offer, I told Christina half as a fantasy, half as a panic.
Christina didn’t panic.
She said, “Right. We’re doing it. I’ll go halves with you.”
The idea of not doing it on my own made the whole thing feel possible. I could hide in the back and make things look pretty. She could handle actual humans. It all sounded perfect.
Except that our families did not take the news well.
My mother was horrified when I told her I was leaving my well-paid job to run “a little flower shop in a village no one has ever heard of”. She didn’t even try to hide the disappointment. Beinga lawyer was the only thing about me she had ever approved of. Everything else is too much, not enough, or wrong.
Christina’s mum was less horrified and more baffled. She came to London from the Caribbean before Christina was born and has never wanted to live anywhere else since. London was her dream, her badge of having made it. Why anyone would leave it voluntarily is beyond her.
Christina’s life in London was very different from mine, but we both understood the same thing: we were tired. Tired of noise and pressure and trains that cost a fortune and still made you stand under someone’s armpit for two hours.
So we did it anyway.
Three months ago, we packed our lives into boxes and moved north. Now we each have a tiny cottage for less than the cost of a London broom cupboard. Despite my old salary being respectable, I spent years house sharing, squeezed between other people’s laundry and late-night arguments. Now I can sit in my own living room—naked if I were so inclined—put my feet up, and get lost in a book without worrying about a flatmate crashing in at two in the morning.
Christina’s commute is ten minutes. Mine is two. I definitely won the commuter jackpot.
We have divided the work in a way that suits us both. I handle the spreadsheets, stock orders and suppliers. I even secretly enjoy the bookkeeping. Columns of numbers that actually addup and match reality. No one tries to hide anything in a flower shop ledger.
Christina handles the front of house. She is the one who can talk a husband out of buying three limp supermarket roses and into a proper bouquet for his anniversary. She shimmers when she moves, always with a streak of colour in her dark curls. At the moment, it is lilac. Last month it was teal.
She fills a room without suffocating it. People gravitate towards her.
Me, on the other hand… I am all curves in all the wrong places, as my mother likes to remind me. I hide my body in dark, loose clothes and pretend I don’t care. I have blonde hair that falls in soft waves if I bully it into doing what it’s told. I’m taller than Christina, which just makes me feel even bigger when we stand side by side like some sort of cruel cautionary tale.
I don’t like being seen. I prefer the back room. The quiet. The flowers. Here, I can focus. Think. Be useful without being judged.
Of course, when Christina is out on deliveries or taking a day off, I have to take my turn on the shop floor. Those days always leave me feeling wrung out, even when everyone has been perfectly nice.
“Listen,” Christina calls from the front now, dragging me from my thoughts. “We’ve been in this village three months and wehaven’t even been to the pub. This is a crime. I refuse to flirt with only pensioners for the rest of my life.”
I snort, still wiring stems. “I’m sure Mr Burgess is devastated to hear that.”
Mr Burgess is in his sixties and comes in once a week to buy his wife flowers. Christina flirted lightly with him the first time and he left so red-faced and flustered he accidentally spent twice what he meant to. He still blushes when he walks in, but now he also brings us biscuits, so everyone wins.
“You’ve never had a problem going out on the pull alone,” I shout back, placing the last rose into the arrangement I’m working on.
Not that I ever go out on the pull. I am more… the friend who holds the handbags while everyone else gets hit on. The one who ends up sat on the edge of the dance floor with the coats while her friends text to say they’ve gone home with so-and-so.
Christina appears in the doorway, hands on her hips. “Firstly, who said anything about pulling? I am talking about flirting. Harmless. Recreational.” She pauses. “If more comes of it, that’s a bonus, not the goal.”
She steps into the back room and narrows her eyes at me. “Secondly, when did you last go on a date?”
