Not the quiet kind. The full kind, the kind that came from the chest, that sounded ugly and felt worse, that I had been holding back for two days since a dark road and a dahlia on a highway barrier and a kitchen floor at six in the morning.
I cried into my own arms in the mud in the rain.
I felt someone sit down next to me.
I looked up.
Fletcher was sitting in the mud next to me.
His shirt was plastered to him, soaked completely through. His hair was flat with rain. He had no jacket. He looked like he had been standing in it for a while. He was sitting in the mud like it didn’t matter, which it clearly didn’t to him, because he was looking at me and nothing else.
“Go away,” I said. My voice was wrecked. “Fletcher, go away.”
He didn’t go away.
He reached past me and picked up a dahlia from the mud.
He picked up the bucket that had fallen and set it upright. He reached for the other bucket, the one with water still in it, and pulled it close. Then, very slowly, very carefully, he took the dahlia and dipped it in the clean water. He swirled it gently. He lifted it out and looked at it. He dipped it again.
I watched him.
He cleaned the dahlia. Petal by petal, as much as it needed, as gently as anything I had ever seen him do. Then he placed it in the display bucket. He picked up a peony. He cleaned it the same way, and placed it next to the dahlia.
He worked through all of them.
Every stem. Every flower. He took each one from the mud and put it in the water and cleaned it and placed it in the bucket, and he did it without hurrying, without saying anything, just doing it, in the rain, sitting in the mud next to me.
I watched his hands.
His careful hands, working through my flowers one at a time.
I had stopped crying. I didn’t know when exactly. I was just watching him.
When the last stem was in the bucket he picked up the display stand that had fallen and set it back upright.
Then he turned to me.
He was on his knees in the mud. He reached out and touched my arm, very gently, and I flinched before I could stop myself and he withdrew his hand immediately.
He looked at me.
Then he took my hands in both of his.
He bowed his head over them.
His whole body dropped, a heap of a person, folded over my hands in the mud and the rain, and I felt him shake. Not slightly. Not once. He shook.
“You are not a nobody, August.” His voice came out broken from the first word. “You have never been a nobody. Not for one second. Not ever.” He lifted his head. His eyes were red. The rain was running down his face and he didn’t wipe it. “You are the person who hugs strangers on their first market day. You are the person who trims the stems of her flowers before she gives them away every morning so they last longer for children who need them.” He stopped. He looked down at my hands in his. “You are the person I have loved since I was twenty-nine years old. And I have been too afraid of my own history to say so out loud. I have been keeping your name like something I didn’t have the right to say.”
I was crying again. I hadn’t known I had more in me but I did.
“I said terrible things about you on that patio.” He looked up at me. “I said them because Margaux was going to destroy your permits. Your van. Your market. She told me she would and she meant it and I panicked. I chose the words most likely to make her believe you meant nothing to me.” His jaw was working. “And you heard them. But they were not true, August. Not one word. I’m so sorry, August. I am so deeply sorry.”
I held his hands.
I didn’t say anything yet. I just held them.
“I am sorry for five years of almost,” he said. “For every time I walked up to the line and walked away from it. For every Tuesday where I bought your flowers and left because staying felt like too much to ask of myself. For every moment on that porch, on that beach, in that kitchen making salad — every moment I wanted to say something and chose silence instead.” He shook his head. “I am sorry for Margaux. For bringing her. For using her as a wall between us because I thought that having the wrong woman next to me would make it easier to stay away from the right one.” His voice dropped. “It didn’t work. It was never going to work. And she paid for it and you paid for it and I am sorry.”
