She grins then, bright as sunshine. “I’ll make scallops.”
My favorite. My chest burns even more.
“Grey,” Myra says, thankfully taking my attention away from the ache behind my sternum. “Did you hear about Gus Zimmerman?”
Finley’s ex’s name snags in my mind like fabric catching a hangnail, and it’s just as painful. “What about him?”
He hadn’t wasted any time before moving on after he dumped her in this very coffee shop seven months ago. He’d started dating Eloise Walker, a kindergarten teacher at the elementary school. She’s pretty and kind, and when June was in her class two years ago, she never stopped talking about Ms. Walker. But she doesn’t compare to Finley in the slightest. No one burns as bright as she does. I don’t know how Gus was able to do it. I can barely make it through more than one date with someone without thinking of Finley. Which is why I’ve mostly stopped dating for the last seven months. I’ve spent close to fifteen years trying to find someone who would take my mind off her, and I can’t, so it doesn’t seem fair to keep trying.
“He proposed,” Myra says, her eyes going wide.
All my thoughts come to a crashing halt. The noise of the coffee shop sounds like an incessant buzzing in my ears.
“Hewhat?”
Melissa nods her head enthusiastically, her bottle-dyed auburn curls bouncing with the movement. “They’re engaged.”
I don’t even notice the way my hands have clenched into fists beneath the table. I’ll punch him right in that stupid, pinched face of his. He broke up with herseven months agobecause he said he didn’t want to settle down, that she wanted more from their relationship than he did.
This willcrush her.
My chair screeches against the floor as I stand, and every eye in the place falls heavily on me. But I barely notice. I only have one thought: that I need to get to Finley, tell her before someone else does. Comfort her when she crumples.
“I’ve got to go,” I mumble to Myra and Melissa, not caring if they see everything written on my face.
And then I’m out the door, the summer heat making my hair curl at the ends, and stalking across the street to Unlikely Places, Finley’s flower shop, with only one thought on my mind.
Finley.
Unlikely Places is myhappy place. A little spot I carved out for myself and my flowers. I’ve spent the last four years turning this tiny rental space into my oasis. I painted the walls four times on various Sundays, the day the shop is closed, before finally settling on a warm, muted green for the walls. It smells like soil and the wildflower fields at Misty Grove, the orchard on the edge of town, in spring. It feels like being out in nature, like the flowers are growing up out of the ground, surrounded by hills and trees, instead of clipped and waiting in vases.
Last year, I invested in a graphic designer to update my logos and had Wren’s cousin, Hazel, paint a wildflower mural on the wall behind the counter when she was in town visiting from Nashville.
One day, I pulled out a calculator and a calendar figured out that I’ve spent more time in this shop than I have at my apartment upstairs over the last four years. I’ve given it my everything, knowing it’s the only thing I will always be enough for. Boyfriends, even friends, will come and go, but I’ve poured my sweat, tears, and, on several occasions, blood into this shop,making itmine. It’s my safe place, where I rode out all my overwhelming feelings after the breakup. It’s where I always want to be, no matter how I’m feeling, because I know it will make me feel better.
I can’t imagine finding a more lovely place to spend my days. It always smells good, and there’s always color, even when the weather is gloomy. And on days like today, when the sun is shining through the windows, illuminating the entire space, it makes everything feel even brighter. Incandescent and sparkling.
I should have known that a day as perfect as today, a moment as lovely as this one, would have to be broken up by something.
Or rather, someone.
I’m reading a deliciously romantic scene in my book club pick when the bell above the door to the shop chimes. I look up, expecting to see a customer, but my heart stops dead in my chest when I look into the eyes of none other than Gus Zimmerman. My ex.
The smile he gives me is strained, like he’s trying to appear casual, but even he can’t pretend we left things on a good note. Actually, from his perspective, we probably did. When we sat down in Smokey the Beans seven months ago, he delivered our breakup speech in an entirely logical way. Like we hadn’t been together for almost two years. He laid everything out. How he knew I wanted more from him than he was willing to give and it wasn’t fair to either of us to keep going. I swear he thought he was doing me afavor. He was so rational, almost analytical about the entire relationship, that I wondered if I’d made up everything in my head. Maybe I had. Maybe I’d been so delusionally in love, had romanticized everything as I tend to do, that I hadn’t noticed I was so much more emotionally invested than he was. Maybe I wanted it so much that I saw things that weren’t there, and Ididn’tsee things thatwere.
I don’t think he knew my heart was shattered when he left me at that table in Smokey the Beans. That all my dreams of white picket fences and Saturday morning pancakes with little hands covered in batter had evaporated like morning dew when he told me we were over.
I don’t think he knew at all, becausehewas fine. It was like we’d never even happened, or like we’d been casual, nonexclusive. I’d wondered that too, when he started dating Eloise Walker, June’s kindergarten teacher, a month later. But Myra and Melissa told me they hadn’t even met until after the breakup. That they’d seen her drop her bags coming out of the grocery store and watched as Gus rushed to help her, like a scene in a rom-com movie that, under normal circumstances, I would have devoured.
Except that this wasn’t a rom-com movie, and it was my ex-boyfriend moving on with someone else while I was still in the Ben and Jerry’s and sweatpants stage of our breakup.
So I’ve done my best to avoid both of them since then, which is a feat, considering the size of our town, but somehow, I’ve managed.
I can’t avoid him now, though. Not while he’s standing here in the middle of my shop, staring at me with those soft brown eyes of his, the ones that always made me melt, and his blond hair slicked back to perfection. If he’s here to buy flowers for Eloise, I’m going to lose my mind.
“Hey, Finley,” he says, that dazzling smile lifting the corners of his lips. He’s always been just shy of too pretty, a category most of the men in our sleepy mountain town don’t fit into. Maybe that’s what drew me to him, that he isn’t a rugged country boy like everyone else. That he’s polished and stylish and different. That he wears cologne with names I can’t pronounce and used to order bottles of expensive red wine at dinner that I thought tasted like the boxed wine Nora and I occasionally buy from thegrocery store. Gus Zimmerman is everything I’ve never been, and that caught my attention.
Now I sometimes wonder if, in time, that would have driven a wedge between us. If he would have been okay with little handprint ornaments on the Christmas tree and mismatched sheets on the bed. If all the ways my life is full of chaos and color and family would have clashed with his.
