She gave a sharp nod and two-fingered salute to Ellis as he let her out and locked the door behind her. He looked at me and then back out the door as if he could still see her. “Your sister.” A pause. “She’s a good cook.”
“Yep.” I rolled my eyes, wondering when he’d get to the next question that I assumed he wanted to ask. Everyone always wanted to ask it.
“She single?”
That wasn’t the question I thought he was going to go with. “Yeah.” Looking at him with new consideration, I thought of him dating my sister. “You were in the service then?”
He shuffled his feet a little. “Yeah. Served with Rhodes.”
Wow. A conversationalist, but he hadn’t asked how we could be sisters because we didn’t look alike. I hated when people did that. Every time it happened, it felt like my skin was two sizes too small, or I was wearing an Edgar suit that was too loose. It wasn’t that I was embarrassed by our circumstances. It was the opposite. I was proud to be in a family like the Holts, but most of the time, the question was driven by only one thing… how we looked on the outside. And I hated that. We were a family by choice, and not by blood, but it shouldn’t matter if we looked different.
“Well, good luck.” Smiling at the thought of him asking her out, I only wished he’d done it while she was here so I could watch. He frowned slightly at me. “You can try asking her out tonight at book club since I’ll be going then.”
“Maybe.” He gave me a chin nod. “I’m going to get back to installing that system.”
As the morning progressed, I opened up the shop, and a few early customers trickled in. Mrs. Helmgard, the elderly widow from down the street, stopped by for her weekly flowers. "Sage, dear, these always brighten my kitchen," she said, her voice quavering with age. We chatted about the unseasonably warm weather we were having for late March. I winced a little as she questioned, “You helping with the greenhouses there?"
"Just volunteering," I said, wrapping her flowers in brown paper. "Rhodes is going to start restoring them." She paid withexact change, as always, and left with a wave. Next was a young couple picking up a bouquet for his parents’ anniversary, giggling over the card options. The variety of people who might come into the shop was part of what kept my days interesting, and I was immediately immersed in helping them decide on their flowers.
My phone buzzed again mid-morning.
Rhodes
Still at the shop? I'm coming by. We need to finish this conversation face-to-face.
Fine.
I wasn’t quite sure how to reconcile my feelings about him. He was larger than life, and I was already half in love with his daughter, but… the ex? That was a hard no. That rule was set for a reason. I’d had a relationship a few years earlier that ended with a guy having an ex-girlfriend who turned out to be more of a not-so-ex. It all ended amicably, but the drama and stress involved made me so physically ill and caused so much anxiety that I had to start therapy again because of it. If there was a hint that they were still involved with their ex, then it was a red flag for me.
Of course, I’d never dated anyone before who had been previously married or had children, so the problem was that there was no escaping the history. Catherine would be forever tied to Rhodes and Opal. I needed to really think about whether I could handle that.
Rhodes
Catherine doesn't matter. You do.
Grinding my teeth together, I didn’t bother replying. This wasn’t really about Rhodes or his ex-wife. It was about me more than anything else. The whole thing was that I believed him, and what we sharedwasspecial. But I knew better than to fall into bed with someone like that without having “the talk” about their past. My knowledge of his background and the relationship he’d had with his ex-wife could fill a thimble, and that wasn’t right.
Around 10 a.m., the door chimed again. Ellis was instantly alert, prowling from the back of the shop. My heart sank when I saw it was another delivery.
“Hmmm,” he looked uneasily at Ellis as he tried to shuffle the plain white box in his arms, his eyes flicking from me to the other man. "Special delivery for Sage Holt.”
“You can put it right there.” Ellis pointed at the table in the center. “Don’t move,” he ordered the courier. Surely he wasn’t going to just shoot the guy in the middle of my flower shop? “I’ll open it,” he said, voice low.
"It's probably nothing." The words tumbled out of my mouth, but I didn’t mean them in the traditional sense. Already, the box felt like it was carrying a bomb that could explode at any second.
Ellis examined it as if he believed those things were true, leaning down to carefully inspect the lid’s seams before sliding his fingers along the edges. “Tell me everything you know about this order,” he demanded of the delivery person.
“Umm,” the poor kid tapped his phone desperately, eyeballs pinging from Ellis to me as if somehow I was going to save him from whatever was happening. “Nothing. We’re a courier service. I pick stuff up and bring it. That’s it.”
Inside was a bouquet of forget-me-nots tied with a simple white ribbon. This was a departure from the other flowers that were sent. They were the typical sky-blue variety you could find anywhere, with delicate petals that looked beautiful against a plain sheet of tissue paper placed in the box and tied with a plain ribbon. They looked almost stark and sterile, wrapped the way they were.
Ellis lifted the flowers for a minute, bruising them as he moved the tissue paper around until he retrieved the card and set it on the wood table.
You may have forgotten, but I never will.
It felt personal and intimate, as if the sender knew something about my life that I didn’t. There were very few people who would even come to mind who wouldn’t come right up to me on the street to chat or invite me for a coffee. All of the people in my life, even my exes, were amicable. I was even friendly with the asshole who had made me the other woman.
Ellis snapped a photo of the note and flowers, already texting Rhodes. "Boss will want to see it."
