Daniel told him the precise coordinates of where he’d had to tie up his boat during the storm. He explained the shack where he’d taken refuge. James still looked irate, as though he’d decided that he wasn’t sure he believed him but didn’t know how to prove that Daniel was lying.
At that moment, Lily began to cry upstairs, and Ivy excused herself. Wren hustled behind her, following like a shadow. Ivy sat on the daybed in the nursery with her baby in her arms, feeling Wren’s gaze on her. Wren was six years younger than she was, sixteen years old, and no longer a child. She saw the animosity between their father and Daniel. She saw everything.
“Do you think Daniel’s lying about where he was when you went into labor?” Wren asked, crossing her arms hesitantly.
“What?” Ivy scowled at her little sister, even as her heart thumped. “No. Don’t let Dad get to you. He never trusts anyone.”
Wren remained in the nursery as Ivy nursed the baby. Ivy wanted to tell her to go, to leave Ivy alone in her sorrow and loneliness. But Wren seemed unwilling to give this up.
“Do you think Daniel wanted to be a dad so soon?” Wren asked.
Ivy scowled at Wren. “What do you mean by ‘so soon’? We’ve been married for a couple of years. Plenty of people have kids at twenty-two.”
“Sure. Yeah.” Wren scratched the back of her neck. “I hope he’s helping you enough? I mean, I know you said you’re going to go back to the inn soon. I know you need the money.”
“He’s helping,” Ivy said, although the truth was she hadn’t ever seen Daniel change one of Lily’s diapers, and he’d never woken up to help get her to sleep. “But his main priority is his job. It had to be.”
Wren made a face that indicated she couldn’t possibly understand the dramas of adults.
“You’ll understand when you have kids,” Ivy said, using an expression that countless people had said to her when she was younger. She’d always resented it.
She saw that Wren resented it, too. But as Wren traipsed back downstairs to escape her, Ivy’s heart throbbed with sorrow that she couldn’t communicate what was really on her mind. She wondered if her own mother had gone through these feelings of loneliness when she’d raised her four daughters. She wondered if James had been any help at all.
A benefit of giving birth at the end of May was that Maine was simply gorgeous during the late spring and summertime. During the months that Ivy wasn’t yet needed back at the inn, she’d set her baby in the stroller and go for long, sunny walks, making note of every changing tree, every blossoming flower, and every new development across Bluebell Cove. Bluebell Covers were pleased to see her out and about and were always eager to hold baby Lily. “Aren’t you both gorgeous! Aren’t you looking so well!” Plenty of people were fine to comment on Ivy’s body, which Ivy resented without knowing how to ask them to stop.
But Ivy let them hold Lily, feeling a tug at her heartstrings, anxious about handing her baby away to so many others. Lily took kindly to them. She was a social baby, curious and eager to be in the world. Maybe she was already more social than Ivy ever had been.
When Lily was six weeks old, Ivy turned down a street she often didn’t walk down and found a curious sight. Standing at the corner was an older woman Ivy wasn’t familiar with, with bright white hair and an old-fashioned dress. She swept her stoop and adjusted what looked to be a FOR SALE sign in the front window. As Ivy drew closer, she realized the shop for sale was a flower shop. Its interior was lined with gorgeous flower arrangements and plants for private gardens. An intoxicating scent wafted from the door.
Something forced Ivy to stop in front of the flower shop. The older woman stopped sweeping and smiled at Ivy and her baby.
“Hello,” she said. “Would you like to buy some flowers?”
Ivy nodded. “I would love to.”
Ivy pushed the stroller into the soft darkness of the flower shop, where she set the stroller up in the corner and inspected the numerous bouquets. Lily was fast asleep. The older woman peered at the baby before whispering, “I haven’t seen a baby that small in a long time. Look at how tiny she is. She hardly knows a thing about the world.”
Ivy smiled gently. She waited for the woman to ask to hold her and was grateful when she didn’t. She selected a bouquet of lilies and roses and baby’s breath, marveling that she’d never bought flowers for herself before. She adored them. And it wasn’t like Daniel made it a habit to buy flowers for her. She couldn’t remember the last time he had.
“Why are you selling the flower shop?” Ivy asked as she paid for the bouquet.
The older woman smiled sadly. “I opened this place when I was a young widow,” she said. “I poured my life into it. My life after my husband passed, I mean. It saved my life. I’ve made what feels like millions of bouquets. I saw Bluebell Covers through birthdays, weddings, and funerals. I saw people through the textures of time. Oh, but I’m old now. I can’t stand for very long without giving in to the pain. I hate it! But my sister’s in Florida and invited me to come live with her. I suppose it’ll be a good chance to change my life. Maybe I’ll be the kind of woman who reads magazines on the beach. Perhaps I’ll go on one of those long Florida boats that take you through the swamp! I’ll take a picture of an alligator.” The woman laughed.
Ivy couldn’t help but feel pleased with the woman, with her humor and her wit. “My family owns the Bluebell Cove Inn,” she explained. “I understand how stressful it is to own your own business. Well, I’ve always known what it’s like to watch as someone else takes on the brunt of the stress.” She didn’t point out that often, her father tried to shove that stress onto her.
“You would do things differently at the inn?” the woman asked. “If it were yours and yours alone?”
Ivy considered this, surprised that the woman had gleaned that from what she’d said. “I suppose so, yes. A part of me has always dreamed of opening my own place.”
The woman’s eyes glinted. “You like this flower shop, don’t you?”
Ivy laughed. “I do. It’s really beautiful. It makes me daydream in a way I haven’t in a long time. Having a child means I barely dream at all.”
“That won’t do!” the woman said. “Now is the time to dream as much as you possibly can. You have to have doubly big dreams now that your daughter’s here. She has to feel how big your dreams are so that she can invent some of her own.”
Ivy’s heart filled. For the first time, she wondered what her mother had dreamed of before her death. She wondered if she’d really wanted to manage an inn with an angry man named James—or if she’d yearned for something else, some other story that Ivy couldn’t have fathomed.
Ivy wondered if her mother had felt backed into a corner by her own decisions, by all the children she’d chosen to have and love. It often felt like the worst curse of humanity that you were only allowed to live one version of your life.
