I owe Rowan Capello a debt I will never say out loud.
Dear Nazareth,
I've been thinking about the flowers, what they mean. Not what they're supposed to mean—not the official language of flowers or whatever Ian would say if I tried to explain it to him. What they mean to me. What they actually are.
They're the only version of you I get right now. That's what they are.
Six days of silence and then this… this deliberate thing that required you to think about me, to choose a color, to make sure someone was there to bring them to a door in a city you’re not supposed to know I'm in.
Every bouquet is a decision. Every bouquet is you deciding, again, that I'm worth the risk of the gesture.
I don't know if you know what that does to me. Maybe you do, I don’t know.
Sometimes I think the flowers aren't for comfort. I think they're for keeping. Like you’re leaving pieces of yourself somewhere safe while you can't be safe yourself. Like I'm the place you put the things you can't carry.
I'll keep them. Every single one.
7
SOPHIA
The flowers aren't there.
I know it the second my fingers brush the doorknob—like the morning itself has been holding its breath and finally let it out wrong. The hallway stretches empty under the weak Paris light filtering through the stairwell window. No glass vase. No delicate flower heads greeting me, giving me hope.
There’s nothing.
And just like that, fear sinks its teeth in—slow, vicious heavy.
My stomach drops first, a sick, plunging weight that leaves me hollow. Then it crawls upward, wrapping cold fingers around my lungs until every breath feels stolen.
What if they finally broke him completely. Unrepairable?
What if the last thing he did was try to send me those flowers, one final fragile promise that he was still fighting, still thinking of me?
What if right now he’s on his knees somewhere dark and endless, bleeding, broken, while a woman whose name I don’tknow carves away every piece of the man who once looked at me like I was the only light he’d ever been allowed to keep?
My knees threaten to buckle.
The image is so vivid—his scarred face streaked with blood that isn’t his, those winter-blue eyes dimming as they force him to choose between survival and me again—that a soft, broken sound escapes my throat before I can swallow it.
I press my palm hard against the doorframe, nails digging into wood, because if I let go, I might fall apart right here in my socks on this quiet Paris morning.
Reth stayed behind so I could run. He stayed behind. And now the flowers aren’t here, and the silence in this hallway feels exactly like the sound of him being taken from me all over again.
I take a deep breath—in through my nose and out my mouth. Maybe there’s a simple reason for this. Maybe the delivery is running late. Maybe there’s traffic. Maybe they were out of the specific color he ordered and were outsourcing, trying to find the exact ones he wanted me to have today. I tell myself that there are a hundred explanations and none of them mean what the cold feeling in my chest is trying to scream they mean.
I close the door and go make coffee.
I drink it standing at the kitchen window, eyes on the pale rooftops of Paris waking up around me. A pigeon flaps clumsily on the ledge across the street. Somewhere below, a scooter snarls around a corner too fast. Everything looks exactly the way it should. Normal. Cruelly, indifferently normal.
I drink the coffee, and I don’t think about it.
I think about it constantly.
Ian’s door is still closed at half past eight. Through the wood, I can hear the slow, deep rhythm of his snoring—the sleep of a man who’s learned to rest anywhere, without guilt or apology. Three months of sharing this apartment, and I know that rhythm the way I know the exact tilt of his head when he’s lying, the way he says my name when he’s trying not to care, and the particular kind of quiet that means he’s already three steps ahead of me.
Two cups of coffee later and four trips to the front door with still no flowers, I decide to get some fresh air, leaving Ian a note saying I’ll be back in twenty.
