Ben choked on his coffee, and something twitched at the corner of my mouth. The kid had a point. “It’s currently under review by the stewards.”
Olivia nodded sagely, apparently satisfied with this explanation, and returned to her fruit-based automotive design.
“Eat up, sweetheart,” Margaret said, setting another pancake on Olivia’s plate. “You’ve got a dentist appointment before school, remember? I’ll take you, then drop you off so your mom doesn’t have to close the shop.”
Olivia perked up. “Can I show Dr. Novak my racecar first?”
“If you brush the blueberries off your teeth,” Margaret replied, earning a giggle.
The walls were closing in again. Every surface in the kitchen displayed framed evidence of the Sage family happiness—Christmas mornings, birthday parties, graduations. Decades of joy documented and displayed like trophies. Each smiling face felt like an accusation. This is what normal looks like. This is what you never had.
“I’m going for a walk.” I drained the coffee, ignoring how it scalded my throat. Pain was easier than this suffocating contentment.
“Oh, wonderful idea!” Margaret beamed like I’d announced a cure for world hunger. “Get some of that lovely autumn air. It’s so good for the soul.”
Ben just gave me a look that said try not to break anything.
I escaped through the back door into a crisp September morning. The air was clean and sharp, carrying hints of woodsmoke and damp earth. The kind of air that was supposed to clear your head and put things in perspective. Mine just felt more cluttered than ever.
Autumn Grove was exactly as advertised—aggressively, relentlessly charming. Main Street, which some optimist had actually named Happily Ever After Lane, looked like someone had ordered small-town charm from a catalog and assembled it with obsessive attention to detail. Historic brick buildings lined the street, their windows already dressed for fall with scarecrows in flannel shirts, artful pyramids of pumpkins, and cornucopias spilling silk leaves in perfect autumn shades.
It was a movie set, and I was walking through it in the wrong costume. People I passed offered genuine smiles and friendly nods. Real warmth, not the calculated charm I was used to from sponsors and journalists. It should have been refreshing. Instead, it was deeply unsettling. In my world, a smile like that usually came with an agenda.
I pulled my hood up and kept my head down, moving with purpose down the sidewalk. A bakery window displayed pies cooling on wire racks, their crusts golden and perfect. A bookstore had a fat orange cat sunning itself on a stack of novels in the window display. A hardware store’s front porch was decorated with cornstalks and a scarecrow that looked suspiciously like it was winking at passersby.
Each business radiated an aura of wholesome contentment that felt like a personal challenge. Everything here was exactly what it appeared to be—no hidden agendas, no corporate sponsors, no calculated image management. Just honest small-town life in all its relentless pleasantness.
Then I spotted salvation. A corner shop with a simple, hand-painted sign: Sage & Bloom.
Ben had mentioned his sister owned the town flower shop. From the outside, it looked like the quietest place on the entire street. The large front windows were filled with an explosion of fall colors—deep burgundy mums, brilliant orange sunflowers, delicate branches of bittersweet with tiny orange berries. It looked peaceful. Professional. A place where I could buy something for Margaret, make polite conversation, and escape without getting trapped in extended small-town social protocols.
The bell above the door announced my entrance with a cheerful tinkle that immediately shattered my illusion of quiet anonymity. The air inside hit me like a humid wall—thick, almost tropical, saturated with competing fragrances. Sweet roses battled sharp eucalyptus while the damp, earthy smell of potting soil anchored everything with an organic heaviness. It wasn’t unpleasant exactly, but it was overwhelming. Like walking into a greenhouse designed by someone with no concept of restraint.
And then there was the visual chaos. The shop was an organized disaster, a barely controlled creative explosion. Metal buckets overflowing with flowers lined every available floor space. Ribbons in every color imaginable spooled off shelves and dangled from hooks like festive octopus tentacles. A half-finished bouquet lay abandoned on a scarred metal worktable, surrounded by the carnage of snipped stems, discarded leaves, and scattered tools.
In the eye of this floral hurricane stood Ben’s sister, Lily Sage.
She was Ben’s sister, no doubt about it. I’d seen her before—at Ben’s graduation, standing in the family cluster with that same determined tilt to her chin. I’d half expected some flicker of recognition when her eyes landed on me, but there was nothing. Just polite blankness.
A small, unexpected sting hit low in my chest. Funny—I’d spent my whole career being recognized everywhere, and now the one person who didn’t see me at all was the one who made me feel like I’d just been benched.
I hadn’t seen her in person since Ben’s college graduation, maybe four years ago. She looked different—older, obviously, but more herself somehow. Like she’d grown into her own skin. Her long chestnut hair was twisted up in what optimists might call a bun, held together by what appeared to be sheer determination and a single pencil that looked like it was plotting its escape. A stray carnation petal was stuck to her left cheek like a pink beauty mark. She wore a faded band t-shirt that had seen better decades, jeans with actual dirt stains on the knees, and a forest-green canvas apron that looked like it had survived several wars with various plant materials.
She was also locked in mortal combat with her cash register.
It was an epic battle between human determination and mechanical stubbornness. The register was a beige monstrosity that looked like it had been salvaged from a 1990s office supply warehouse and forced into service well beyond its intended lifespan. Lily stood before it like a general facing a particularly defiant enemy fortification, her jaw set with the kind of determination usually reserved for siege warfare.
“Come on, you stubborn piece of junk,” she muttered, pressing what appeared to be a random sequence of buttons. The machine responded with the electronic equivalent of a shrug—nothing. Not even a beep of acknowledgment.
I stood frozen by the door, an unwilling witness to this technological standoff. Every instinct told me to turn around and walk back out into the safely predictable chaos of Happily Ever After Lane. But something kept me rooted in place—morbid curiosity, maybe, or the same fascination that made people slow down to look at car crashes.
She pressed the buttons again, this time with more force, as if volume could overcome the machine’s stubborn refusal to cooperate. Still nothing. With a frustrated sigh that seemed to come from her toes, she picked up a roll of floral tape from the counter and gave the side of the register a firm whack.
The machine responded with a sad, strangled whirring sound before falling silent again, like a wounded animal giving up the fight.
This was painful to watch. In racing, mechanical problems got diagnosed and fixed with surgical precision. Teams of engineers would strip down an engine to find a single faulty component. This... this was just violence. Inefficient, illogical violence against a machine that clearly had a simple mechanical problem, not a spiritual deficiency that could be cured by percussive maintenance.
“Work, you miserable tin can!” She gave it another whack, harder this time, and the entire counter shook. A small vase of daisies wobbled dangerously.
