Chapter 2

The Lantern flower shop was something Edgar Delgado and I built together.

Four years ago, I quit my job at a wedding company and turned the little street-front shop my mother left me into a florist's.

Nobody thought it would work.

Terry said fresh flowers had too much waste, that only a woman would mistake sentiment for a business.

My father said I'd get it out of my system and come home, and to stop giving the relatives something to laugh about.

Only Edgar moved his savings into the company account and showed up with a toolbox to knock down the old wall.

He'd just quit his own job then, and his right hand had been through surgery. He couldn't even hold a pair of shears steady.

I pushed the purchasing list at him. "Haggle these prices down for me first."

He looked up. "Not afraid I'll run off with your money?"

"If you're really that good, start by conning back the utility bill."

The first year, we were six months behind on rent.

The second year, the shop booked its first big wedding.

The third year, we started the Farewell Greenhouse, granting terminal patients their last wish for a bouquet.

The project didn't make money, but it gave Lantern something no one else could copy.

Terry never once came to the Farewell Greenhouse.

He said hospitals were bad luck, and Edgar was an eyesore.

Every time he came by the shop, he'd remind me, "A man's mind is never that clean."

Now I finally understand. People who aren't clean see filth in everyone.

Back in the office, I pulled up the shop's contracts from the last three years.

Edgar set a cup of hot water by my hand. "Drink first."

"I'm fine."

"Your hand's shaking."

I looked down. The water was swaying hard in the cup.

He pulled out the chair across from me and sat. "Cry if you want to. We'll settle accounts after."

That line pulled loose something that had been nailed into my chest.

I covered my face, and the tears came all at once.

Not because I couldn't let go of Terry.

Because I ached for the woman who'd spent seven years calling every swallowed hurt "working through our differences."

Edgar didn't try to talk me down.

When I finally lifted my head, he opened his laptop.

"Seven days until the wedding. The shop, the brand, the client files in your name. Which of them has Terry had access to?"

My stomach dropped.

That sentence from the cold storage came back to me.

"Once I've got Evelyn's shop and her clients, she's no use anymore."

So that wedding wasn't just a betrayal.

It was a net, waiting for my signature.

Kathleen is my aunt's daughter.

After she graduated from college, she stayed at our house the whole time.

My aunt said she'd just been through a breakup and couldn't be left alone.

My father gave up the guest room. My mother treated her like half a daughter.

She never held a steady job, but she always managed to fall ill on the days I had something to celebrate.

When I landed my first investment, she cried at the dinner table, saying her résumé got rejected everywhere she sent it.

When I got engaged, she drank too much and cut her wrist, and Terry sat up with her at the hospital all night.

When I picked out my wedding dress, she walked out of the fitting room in one of my sample gowns, and everyone praised how pretty she looked before they said a word to me.

She explained, face flushed, "The clerk handed me the wrong one."

I believed her.

Looking back now, it was never that she didn't compete.

She only had to stand next to me and cry, and someone would always be there to pressure me into giving way.

Early the next morning, my mother called.

"Kathy cried all night. She says you've got her all wrong. Your cousin is fragile, she can't take that kind of stress."

I was in the middle of freezing the client backend Terry could see.

"So?"

My mother paused. "The wedding's almost here. If this blows up, both families look bad. Terry only made the kind of mistake any man makes. Just come home first, and we'll all talk it out."

"When he was kissing Kathleen, was he worried about how the families would look?"

The line went quiet.

My mother lowered her voice. "Evie, you're already thirty. If you really call off the engagement, what will people say?"

"That I couldn't hold on to a man someone else already used?"

"Evelyn!"

She was angry now. "Everything I do is for your good. Kathy lost her father young. What's wrong with us looking out for her a little more? You've never gone without a thing in your life. Why hold it against her?"

I've been hearing that line for twenty years.

Because I never went without, she could take my dress, and I wasn't allowed to hold it against her.

Because both my parents were alive, she could snatch my scholarship spot, and I was supposed to be understanding.

Now she's slept with my fiancé, and I'm still expected to protect her reputation.

I shut the laptop.

"Would giving her the wedding count as looking out for her?"

My mother's breath caught.

"What did you say?"

"I'm stepping aside. Let them get married."

She wasn't upset for me. What she asked was, "Then what happens to the shop, the dowry?"

I laughed.

My father had said long ago that after the wedding he'd formally sign the little shop over to me.

Terry thought it was the dowry.

Kathleen thought so too.

"Don't worry," I said. "Everything they want, I'll hand to them one piece at a time."

Whether they can actually keep it is another matter. That depends on whether they've got what it takes.