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“Hi,” she says, trying it out.

“Hi.”

“Was that okay?”

“That was perfect.”

She kisses me. She tastes like chocolate cake and Marlene’s coffee, and I keep her there in the wind at the bottom of my stairs. Then I take her hand and walk her up to my bed.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

My friend is over it. “Just fucking call her,” Cassia says.

I glare at her.

“What? I’m being supportive. That’s my supportive voice.”

It’s Friday night, and there are four women sitting in my workroom drinking boxed wine out of mason jars.

Cassia is in her station sweatshirt with her feet up on a bag of potting soil. Tara Lund, who teaches second grade at Valley Elementary and has the filthiest mouth I’ve ever heard on a woman who wears cardigans, is sitting cross-legged on my steel table. And Heidi Stokes from the post office brought cheese.

The shoebox is in the middle of the floor. Everybody has read every card. Twice.

“I’m going to call her,” I say. “Tomorrow.”

Heidi snorts. “You told me that at the post office yesterday over a book of stamps. And you were full of crap then too.”

“You told me that right here,” Tara says.

“You bought a fern so you could be nosy.”

“I bought a fern because it was pretty and so I could be nosy.” Tara points at me with her mason jar. “Lindsey. Hon. You have the woman’s phone number and she’s sitting next to her phone right now waiting for it to ring. So what’s the actual problem?”

I look at the shoebox and pick at a rose thorn stuck in my thumb.

“Say it,” Cassia says, nicer this time.

“What if she comes back,” I say, “and I’m different? What if she remembers a seventeen-year-old who wanted to go to Portland and run a flower shop on a street with a coffee place on the corner, and she finds out I never left? That I stayed in Eden forever and took over my grandma’s shop and sing to roses and have never been anywhere?”

My throat closes up tight as a new rosebud. “What if she’s disappointed in me?”

The workroom is quiet.

“Oh my God,” Tara says. “That is the dumbest shit I’ve ever heard.”

“Tara!” Heidi says. “Language. You teach seven-year-olds.”

“And they say worse shit on the playground than I do. I mean it with love, Lindsey. It’s the dumbest shit.”

Tara slides off my table and crouches in front of my bucket in her cardigan. “She sent you a card that said, I hope you’re running the shop. I hope you’re singing. She wrote you a to-do list. And you did everything on it.”

I stare at her. “Well, shit,” I say. “When you put it that way.”

“I always put it that way. Ask my principal.”

Heidi refills my mason jar without being asked, and Tara sits down on the floor next to my bucket with her head against my knee.

“Okay,” Cassia says. “Second thing. And I’m only going to say it once because Rob says I’m pushy.”