—flowers in a vase, why should they make her so furious, but they do. Flowers in a vase and the vase is also from the florist, heavy pineconed glass like a fairytale prom. The fancy flowers are wrong for it, so fancy they’re hardly flowers at all, just spiky showpieces on nearly wooden stems. “It just seemed time,” the Vic is saying.

“Because they told you it was time,” Padgett says, her fingers on one of the thistly parts. Somewhere there was a wild field full of these, an underpaid someone picking them for a reason they couldn’t guess, while she, also insensibly, is picking an argument.

“Stop saying they,” the Vic says. “I thought you could use some flowers today.”

“And what would I use them for?”

“For being happy,” her boyfriend says instantly, and opens his arms in the kitchen, too wide, slightly vaudeville.

“I don’t like that you have a thing on a machine that tells you flowers, no-reason emails, what is it called?”

“No-reason emails is right.”

“No, the notice system.”

Vic looks away like a marble fell off the table, and they both wait for it to rattle into a lost corner. “Happy Couple,” he admits. “Look, I’m taking a shower. I don’t want to get into it. Throw away the flowers or treasure them forever.”

“A treasure not from you,” Padgett says. “It’s from them. It’s from your system.”

“You are throwing rocks at a wasp’s nest,” he says, the phrase just a mess of hissing. “I. Am not. Getting into it.”

“I want to talk about it,” Padgett insists, although she does not appear, she notices, to be standing up as he walks away, already down the hall. There’s an envelope of organics, to pour into the vase with the water, to keep them alive. “Vic—”

“Not getting into it,” he calls back, cheerfully, and she hears the water run. She can tear open the envelope at least, roughly. She can spill it out, into the sink, over the trash, and then take down her own glass of wine while he gets clean. How many couples, a lot she guesses, are kept up by just not getting into it?—

—and she sees all these remembered scenes as if in a film montage interlaced with circling clocks and pattering calendars, and when she fades out of it the Vic is waiting for her line.

“Yes,” she says.

He gives her a look. “What?”

“Yes,” she says. “Yes, I will marry you.”

His delight is immediate, yelping and profound. “You will?”

“Yes.”

“When?”