A pause.
“Can I tell you something,” he says.
“Yeah.”
• • •
“The first blue daisy I ever left you.”
His voice quiet now.
Different.
“I didn’t pick it.”
I turn my head.
“What.”
“Your mom gave it to me,” he says. “I was maybe nine or eight. I was leaving one afternoon and she came out to the garden and cut one and just — handed it to me. Didn’t explain. Just said —”
He stops.
Something thick in his voice.
“Give this to Ro,” he says softly.
The room is very quiet.
“She knew,” I say.
“She knew everything,” he says. “She always knew everything.”
I stare at the ceiling.
We were kids.
My mom in her garden.
Cutting a blue daisy.
Pressing it into the hands of the broken boy next door.
• • •
Already seeing it.
Before either of us had a word for it.
“She never said anything to me,” I say.
“She didn’t have to,” he says softly. “She just kept planting them. And I started giving them to you on my own.”
His hand tightens around mine.
Outside —
her garden moves in the dark.
