“I can’t believe it,” Ivy stuttered. “I’ve been working five minutes away from them for, what? Eighteen years? And I’ve never had this!”
“It’s crazy how Bluebell Cove can keep surprising you,” Elliot said.
What he said felt heavy with meaning. Ivy dotted a napkin across her chin and tried and failed to maintain eye contact. Did he mean her? Did he mean them?
Don’t get your hopes up, Ivy. You know better.
Again, Elliot showed her the plans and explained how simple it would be to fix everything up “before Valentine’s Day, even. I know how many orders you’ll get for that.”
Ivy knew better than to explain to him how few orders she got these days. Elliot walked around the space with his measuring tape, making little notes to himself in his book about the materials he needed to bring and how much of each. When he stepped behind the counter and into her office, Ivy felt a jolt of fear. The pile of bills on the desk was unmistakable, many of them red and yellow, with WARNING written across them in big black letters. But it was too late to stop Elliot now. He stood in front of her desk and let the measuring tape snap back into its holder.
Did she want him to confirm what he saw? Did she want him to say that no amount of refurbishment could fix all that? She wavered in the doorway between the office and the rest of the flower shop.
But just then, her phone rang. It was Lily, calling from campus.
“I have to take this,” Ivy explained, waving her cell.
“Of course,” he said, offering a smile. He hadn’t moved away from her desk, but it looked as though he was analyzing the corner, where the wallpaper had begun to peel.
Ivy bolted away from him, unable to concentrate on her daughter when Elliot was in her office. “Hi, honey! How was it?” Ivy knew that Lily had just finished with her first-ever college class—a biology course that specialized in coastline critters.
“Ugh, it was a lot.” Lily laughed. “I felt out of my depths. It felt like everyone already knew everything. Like we were speaking a different language.”
Blustery winds went past her receiver, and Ivy prayed that her daughter was bundled up enough to handle them. Ivy’s heart softened at her daughter’s fear.
Lily had never really opened up to Ivy like this. Ivy wondered what had changed.
“The thing I always remember,” Ivy said, raising her chin, “is that everyone’s faking it, all the time. Everyone you heard in that classroom was trying to impress everyone else. They probably know less than half of what they say.”
Lily groaned. “I don’t know.”
But Ivy rejected this. “You got into that university because you’re brilliant. You’re driven, intellectual, and focused on what you want. The first day of anything is a doozy, but you can’t let that fear block you from achieving what you set out to do.”
Lily was quiet for a moment. Ivy pictured her walking across campus, maybe gripping a coffee cup in the hand not holding her phone. In Ivy’s mind's eye, she looked sort of like Rory in Gilmore Girls. She looked like her brilliant little girl.
“How was your first weekend away?” Ivy asked because she wanted to hear as much as she could before Lily escaped her again.
“It was fun,” Lily said. “Flora and I went to a party in the dorms. We met a ton of other people who just transferred in from other schools.” There was a brightness to her voice. “I have to run, though. My next class starts in ten.”
Ivy filled her lungs. “Good luck, sweet girl. I love you.”
“I love you, too, Mom.”
Lily hung up and left Ivy in the silence of her moldering flower shop, her phone pressed against her chest. It wasn’t for another moment that she remembered she wasn’t alone. She spun around to see Elliot through the doorway into her office, slipping a pencil behind his ear. Her eyes slid down to the stack of red and yellow letters on the desk.
“Sorry about that,” she said.
“You said your daughter’s at school?” Elliot asked. “How’s it going?”
Ivy set her forearms on the counter. “She’s freaking out a little bit. I can’t blame her. I never moved away from home, you know? I graduated, worked at the inn, got married, and had kids.”
And then, I opened the flower shop, and my husband died.
That was the story of Ivy’s life.
“It was wild to live in Boston.” Elliot stepped out from the shadows of her office to join her in the brighter light of the front room. “Every person I met through my ex-wife was the smartest person I’d ever met. They used language that mystified me. Up until then, I’d only known the folks in Bluebell Cove. You know what it’s like around here. Unpretentious. Kind-hearted. Suddenly, I was at dinner parties where intellectuals were trying to get the better of one another based on some academic paper some other intellectual guy had written, like, twenty years ago. It felt hollow to me. I wondered what it was all for.”
Ivy pictured the twenty-year-old Elliot Rhodes in an ornate Victorian home somewhere outside of Boston, sipping a glass of wine and dreaming of returning to Bluebell Cove.
