He stops short. Blinks.
He was probably coming to find me. The trash should have taken two minutes, and I have been gone much longer.
His eyes drop to my hand, then back to my face.
“This,” I say, before I can overthink it, before the moment slips away, “is my favourite flower.”
Kieran’s face softens when he sees the flower in my hand. “Dandelion.” A soft laugh escapes him. “Of course.”
“You know what it means?”
He nods, the corners of his mouth lifting. “Dandelions have many meanings,” he says. “In the language of flowers, they represent the sun, power, and the fulfillment of wishes. Some traditions say that if you blow the seeds into the wind, your deepest wish will come true.”
He pauses, his eyes still on the flower in my hand. “But there’s another meaning, too. Persistence,” he says. “Resilience. Growing wherever you land. Making a home out of cracks in the pavement.”
He stops there, holding my gaze. When he speaks again, his words come softer. “Refusing to die just because the ground isn’t kind.”
My throat tightens.
“It suits you,” he adds quietly.
I look down at the flower again. I run my thumb gently over the cluster of petals, feeling their soft, stubborn texture. Then I hold it out to him.
His eyes widen. “You’re… giving it to me?”
I meet his eyes. “You’re the reason I found it.”
He takes it carefully, his fingers brushing mine, holding it like a fragile treasure, a thing worth protecting.
I step past him, the corners of my mouth lifting in a smile I don’t try to hide.
I pick up the mop.
And I get back to work. But the smile doesn’t leave my face. It stays there, small and stubborn, like a dandelion growing in a crack in the pavement.
Refusing to die just because the ground isn’t kind.
Chapter Eighteen: Kieran
It was supposed to be just a month.
That was the deal I made with myself.
I had been good at deals. Deals with myself, deals with deadlines, deals with the quiet voice that saidjust get through this and then you can rest. I had made them for years, in offices with glass walls and people with glass smiles, in meetings that stretched past dinner, in the small, suffocating hours of the morning when I was too tired to sleep and too empty to move.
One month away from a job I used to like before it started draining me so quietly I only noticed the void when there was nothing left.
I had been good at that job. Or at least, I had been good at pretending to be. I showed up on time, met my deadlines, smiled at the right people, and nodded at the right moments. But somewhere along the way, the work had stopped meaning anything.
The job hadn’t changed. I had. Or maybe I had simply stopped changing—stopped growing, stopped being the person who could find meaning in spreadsheets and quarterly projections. I had become a machine that produced work, and machines don’t ask themselves whether they’re happy.
The first week after leaving the job was a relief. I slept late, watched movies, cooked meals that took hours. By thesecond week, the relief had begun to curdle. The third brought restlessness. The fourth found me lost.
Too much time. Too much quiet. Too much empty space to think. I didn’t know what I wanted, where I was going, or who I was when I wasn’t performing competence for a paycheck.
The questions were not new. I had asked them before, in the dark, in the shower, in the moments between sleep and waking. But I had always had somewhere to be, something to do, someone to distract me from the discomfort of not knowing. Now there was nothing. Just the ticking of the clock and the growing certainty that I had been running for so long I had forgotten how to stand still.
That was when Maeve stepped in.
