“You’ll be here in a few days, just in time for peak chaos.”
“And then it’s off to Italy for you,” she says.
I grin into my coffee lid. Even if I can’t afford it right now, the plane ticket is booked, and so is my rental. “Portofino,” I remind her.
“Try to sound less smug when you say it.”
It’s going to be my post-wedding decompression trip—sun, pasta, and absolutely no one needing a seating chart from me. It’s my first real break in over three years.
Just me, a journal, a few sundresses, and the Italian coast. No clients. No deadlines.
I can hardly wait.
“Ugh, I hate you.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Not today. But if you send me another picture of a cappuccino next to your color-coded planner, that could change.”
I glance down at the photo I just took—a quiet little street, pink hydrangeas, a linen blanket folded just so, and peeking out of my bag like it’s auditioning for a lifestyle shoot.
“I don’t know,” I say softly. “This place is so… easy. I kind of wish I had more time.”
CeCe is quiet for a moment. “Yeah. But you need a reset. Italy will be good for you. And if the Hudson Valley just happens to throw in some brooding lawyer eye candy while you’re there… that’s not a crime.”
“He isnoteye candy.”
“Uh-huh.”
***
The next town over is smaller but just as charming.
I park in front of a little white cottage with a lavender mailbox. I haven’t seen my aunt Gloria in more than a year, but we always pick up right where we left off.
Gloria never planned to become a florist.
She was a fashion editor in Manhattan for twenty-five years—glamorous, sharp-tongued, and always three seasons ahead of everyone else. Then one day, she walked out of a Condé Nast meeting, took a train upstate, bought a little white cottage with peeling shutters, and started filling vases with whatever she could yank out of the soil.
She says it was burnout. I think it was freedom.
Now she’s the Hudson Valley’s unofficial flower witch—part artist, part chaos agent, part therapist with pruning shears. Her arrangements are wild, emotional, and deeply impractical—”Like me,” she once said with a wink. She creates them when she feels like it, for clients she finds interesting.
And, apparently, for me.
Well, for Ivy. But only because I asked.
“I’ll do it,” she’d said when I called. “But I have two conditions. No burlap and no one tells me where to put the peonies.”
Deal.
So now, here I am, pulling into the gravel driveway of her wildly unofficial floral “studio.”
A wind chime made of silver teaspoons dances in the breeze.
I step out of the car and inhale.
The smell hits me instantly—roses, soil, something herbal and expensive—Gloria.
