Chapter 1 - Five years changes what you think a normal day feels like.
Elena Reyes had learned this the hard way — by building normalcy from scratch, one small habit at a time. The 6:15 AM alarm. The forty-minute subway ride to the flower market in the wholesale district. The specific way she’d learned to carry three buckets of cut stems without stopping to rest. The particular quiet of the shop before the doors opened at eight, when it was just her and the smell of fresh-cut flowers and the sound of her daughter’s breathing on the baby monitor she kept behind the counter.
She’d become someone who knew which mornings were slow and which would be chaotic. She knew the name of every regular customer and what they bought and why. She knew how to speak to grieving people buying sympathy arrangements and to excited people buying engagement bouquets and to exhausted people buying a single bunch of tulips because they wanted something living in their apartment.
She had become, in short, a woman who was entirely herself — which was something she hadn’t been during the four years of her marriage.
Her daughter Sofia was four years old and had never known any other version of her mother. She knew the flower shop on Mulberry Street the way children know the terrain of their whole world — intimately, completely, without realizing how small or how large it was. She slept in the back room in a portable crib until she was old enough for the pack-and-play, then old enough to sit at the little table Elena set up for her with crayons and paper. Now she helped arrange flowers with the focused seriousness of someone for whom this was both work and play, and she knew the names of most of the stock by heart.
She had her mother’s dark hair and her father’s eyes.
Elena had learned to be grateful for the resemblance. It was evidence that the four years hadn’t been entirely a mistake — that something real had existed inside the complicated machinery of Marco Ferretti’s world, even if it had not been enough to survive in it.
She had not told Sofia about her father.
There was no version of that conversation that made sense for a four-year-old. Your father is a man who chose a political marriage over our family to prevent a war between two crime organizations — this was not the kind of sentence that translated into bedtime story language. She planned to tell her eventually. She told herself she was waiting for the right time, and she mostly believed this was true and only sometimes acknowledged that she was also waiting because saying it aloud would make her have to feel it all over again.
The shop was called Estudio Flora. Elena had named it herself, had built it from a market stall she rented by the hour during her first year in the city. It had taken three years to afford the lease on a permanent space, and the space was small — a narrow storefront on the ground floor of a brick building with two apartments above — but it was hers. The flowers were hers. The tired-beautiful exhaustion of it was hers.
This was what she was thinking about on an ordinary Thursday morning in April, when the shop’s glass door opened and a woman walked in who she didn’t recognize.
May you like
She was perhaps forty, well-dressed, with the contained posture of someone who’d spent years around powerful people and absorbed some of their stillness. She wore a light gray coat. She carried nothing. She looked around the shop for a moment without urgency, then met Elena’s eyes.
“You have ranunculus,” the woman said. “The yellow ones. My daughter-in-law loves those.”
