ONE
MIA
The peonies came in on Tuesday mornings.
Dave from the wholesale truck would pull up at seven-fifteen, back the refrigerated van to the side door, and carry in the flowers while I signed the manifest and pretended I wasn’t already sorting where the stems need to go in my head. The peonies went in the front cooler because they sold fastest. The roses went left. The greenery went on the bottom where nobody ever looked unless I told them to, and I always told them to, because a thirty-dollar arrangement with good greenery outsold a forty-dollar one without it.
Running The Flower Boutique had taught me that. Along with how to strip thorns without bleeding, how to wire a corsage that wouldn’t fall apart during a first dance, and how to smile at someone I’d never met before in a way that made them feel like a regular.
That last one I’d already known. I’d been doing it my whole life, just never for flowers.
Dave left at seven-thirty. I wiped down the counter, adjusted the window display, flipped the sign to OPEN, and stood behind the register with a cup of coffee that was slightly too hot to drink and a morning that stretched ahead of me like all my mornings.Predictable. Ordered. Mine, in the specific way that borrowed things become yours if you hold them long enough.
The shop was small, but it was perfectly sized. One main room with buckets along the walls, a glass-front cooler for the premium stems, a worktable in the back where I did arrangements, and a counter opposite the door where the register sat next to a dish of wrapped candies that Mrs. Alderman’s grandkids emptied every Saturday. The floor was old hardwood that creaked when the temperature dropped. The ceiling was pressed tin that someone had painted white decades ago. A bell hung over the door, and every time it rang I looked up, smiled, and greeted whoever walked through it. I put them into one of two categories.
Known or unknown.
I didn’t think about why I did that. It was reflexive now. Practice had worn the sharp edges off the habit until it felt less like surveillance and more like customer service. The regulars got a wave, a hello, a question about their week. The strangers got a different version of the same warmth, one that included a quick scan of how they looked at me or didn’t. I was good at reading people. I’d had to be.
The first customer that morning was Helen Briggs, who wanted pink tulips for her mother’s birthday. After her came a man I’d never seen, mid-forties, work boots, bought a single red rose and left without making eye contact. A local contractor, maybe. Passing through. He got into a truck with Idaho plates and pulled back onto Main Street. The tension in my shoulders released an inch.
I checked my phone. No missed calls. No texts.
My handler’s last check-in had been eleven days ago. A three-minute conversation on my personal cell, the one the Marshals had set up under the name on my lease. “Everything okay,Macy?” “Everything’s fine.” “Anything to report?” “No.” “Good. I’ll call next week.”
He hadn’t called next week. Or the week after that.
I put the phone back under the counter and told myself it was fine. Inspectors had caseloads. Check-ins stretched sometimes. It didn’t mean anything.
I believed that the way I believed everything about the system that had kept me alive since my placement. With discipline, and without looking too closely at the cracks.
Priest came in at ten-thirty.
The bell rang and I knew it was him before I turned around, the same way I always knew. The sound of boots on old hardwood that carried a particular weight. The pause inside the door, just a beat, a big man conscious of the space he takes up.
I turned. He was standing by the cooler, looking at the arrangements with that familiar deliberation. Like he was making a decision he’d already made.
“Morning,” I said.
“Morning.”
He wore his cut like all of them did, the Forsaken Angels patch across the back, the leather soft from years of wear. Under it, a dark t-shirt, jeans, the slightly dirty boots that left marks on my hardwood that I never minded. His arms were covered in ink, full sleeves that disappeared under his shirt. Short dark hair, with a strong jaw with a few days of stubble. His hands were large and careful, and he touched the flowers like a man handling something that matters to him even if he’d never say so.
He’d been doing this every other Tuesday for almost as long as I’d been in Forsaken. He’d come in, browse the cooler, ask me a question or two about what was fresh, and settle on an arrangement. He carried it out and I knew, because Forsaken was a town where people talked, that he took the flowers to the cemetery. I didn’t know who they were for.
I’d never asked and he’d never offered.
It was the most honest relationship I had, which was a thought I tried not to examine too carefully.
“Peonies came in this morning,” I said. “The blush ones you liked last time.”
He looked up from the cooler. “You ever get those ranunculus in? The ones you said were your favorite.”
I stared at him. I’d mentioned that once. Weeks ago, maybe longer, while I was trimming stems and talking to fill the silence, the way you do in a small shop. A passing comment about the flowers I’d grow if I had a garden, the ones I loved for myself instead of for selling. I hadn’t expected him to hold onto it.
“Not yet,” I said. “They’re hard to source this time of year.”
“Let me know when they come in.”
