He wouldn’t want to know all of me, though, would he? The often anxious, obsessive, now and then depressed and worried person that I am who would find being a hermit to be a pleasant occupation? The woman who had a lot of animals she talked to as if they were people, who slept with three dogs and four cats, who had to be alone a lot to keep her head on straight, and who had a passion for books that was an inch from hoarding? Plus, the other stuff . . . groan.

I wanted to take my blue summer dress off my head and throw it behind my shoulder and jump the man.

Do not do that, Evie, I told myself. No. Keep clothed. No bopping-about nudity.

I longed for Marco.

I wanted to be with him. I wanted to hold him, and kiss him, but I remembered that chilling, bone-rattling premonition that day in the bookstore when he first walked in. I see what happens to him.

I cannot risk it. He cannot risk it.

Chapter 10

“We made a bouquet today in the shape of a pig’s face using pink roses,” my mother said. “It was about three inches tall and twelve inches wide. I used black-eyed Susans for the eyes and red carnations for the bow on her head. We put it right up on Facebook and our web page, and everyone loved it. We had many pig-loving people write in saying they wanted the same bouquet delivered to them or people they knew on the mainland, but you know we only deliver to the islands.”

My mother and Aunt Iris and Aunt Camellia and I were eating four-cheese garlic pizza on the deck of Rose Bloom Cottage, pink and red roses ready to bloom off the trellis, their scent light and sweet. Pizza is part of a healthy diet, so I made sure to have an extra slice. Lord knows I could die tomorrow, perhaps eaten by a whale, and I’d definitely want to make sure I had another piece of four-cheese garlic pizza in me before I headed up the golden staircase.

“I saw it,” I said. “I heard about it from a customer. It was a sweet pig, personable.”

The bouquet was labeled “Check your meat! Make sure you are getting your bacon from farmers who are kind to their pigs! Oink!”

“The other bouquet that was particularly popular,” my mother said, “was the one Iris made. She used a piece of plywood, then glued fake grass over it and spelled out ‘Tina Sorbel Sucks’ with tiny glass vials and daisies. It was exquisite. Inspired!”

“Please tell me that you didn’t put that one on Facebook or your website,” I asked, dreading the answer and the possible defamation. The tulips were blooming, row after row of flower bliss. Iris had been busy photographing them, straight into the petals to that luminescent mystery in the center, from the stems up, in bunches and singles, upside down, at odd angles, and odd designs. They were almost like tulip people.