Rosemary Danger holds the mailbox over her head with both chubby green fists and shrieks with delight.
She's twenty-two months old. Thirty-one pounds. Moss-skinned with my curls and her father's jaw and a laugh that sounds like a garbage disposal eating silverware.
"Rosie. Baby. Put Daddy's mailbox down."
She looks at me with enormous brown eyes. My eyes. Full of chaos and zero remorse.
"No."
Her favorite word. Her only word, technically, unless you count the guttural Orcish war-cry she picked up from Flynn's old training videos, which I absolutely do count because it made my mother cry on a video call last Tuesday.
"Rosemary Danger, I will count to three."
She throws the mailbox into the flowerbed.
The impact detonates a cluster of my spell-grafted snapdragons, which immediately begin snapping. Actual tiny jaws, actual tiny teeth, chomping at the air in panicked self-defense. Rosie claps. The snapdragons hiss. A passing jogger screams and crosses the street.
This is my Tuesday morning.
I scoop Rosie onto my hip. She grabs a fistful of my overalls and yanks with Orcish enthusiasm, popping two buttons clean off. The warm air hits my collarbone. Potting soil cascades from my front pocket onto her head. She eats some of it.
"Dirt," she says.
"That's two words now. Flynn is going to lose his mind."
The greenhouse catches the morning sun behind me. Steel frame. Tempered glass. Reinforced foundation that Flynn poured over three consecutive weekends while I handed him tools and tried not to combust watching the way his forearms flexed when he worked the trowel. It stands exactly on the ghost of the old property line, twelve feet tall at the ridge beam, packed so dense with growing things that the glass sweats green from the inside.
Fourteen wholesale accounts. Three restaurant contracts. A waiting list for my custom spell-bouquets that stretches into next spring.
The business sign hangs crooked from the front gate because Rosie headbutted the post last week. DANGER BLOOMS. Flynn picked the name. He pretended it was practical. I caught him grinning at it in the dark the night we hung it.
A black SUV rounds the corner. Official. Polished. The HOA logo on the door, newly redesigned because the old one featured Valerius's face and Flynn took a belt sander to every sign in the neighborhood his first week as president.
Flynn parks. Climbs out.
Cargo shorts. Faded t-shirt, the same thrift store relic he's worn to a transparency that borders on indecent. Clipboard in one massive green hand. Reading glasses perched on his broad nose because he refuses to admit he needs them for anything other than "fine print review."
Rosie sees him and goes rigid with excitement on my hip. Her whole body vibrates. The air around her fingertips shimmers with that purple-gold static that means her magic is surging, which means something nearby is about to grow very fast in a direction nobody planned.
"DAAAA."
"Three words," I whisper.
Flynn crosses the yard in four strides. He takes Rosie from me with one arm, tucks her against him like a football, and kisses her dirt-crusted head. His other hand finds my waist. Pulls me in. His lips press against my temple, warm and firm, and he is full of fresh-cut grass and bureaucratic authority.
"She pulled up the mailbox."
"I saw the crater." His jaw tightens. Relaxes. Tightens again. "I'll re-pour it tonight."
"That's the fourth time."
"I'll add rebar."
"You added rebar last time."
"I'll add more rebar."
Rosie grabs his reading glasses off his face and snaps them in half. Flynn closes his eyes. Breathes through his nose. Opens them.
