Mrs. Bennet raised her glass. “To Longbourne and all the people who love and care for her. May she bloom eternal.”

Hear, hear! we cheered and took our sips of solidarity.

I leaned into Luke, his arm around my waist and a smile on his face. I smiled back up at him.

“Show her,” I said quietly.

With a nod and the briefest of kisses, he let me go to reach into his back pocket. “Mom, I’ve got something you might want to see.”

She looked down at his hands as he unfurled the latest edition of Floral magazine. One gasp, and she was crying, passing her champagne to Mr. Bennet with her eyes locked on the cover.

Longbourne stood tall and proud with that pop of vibrant blue that Luke had painted the door jumping off the page. The installation sang on the cover, the words Love happens in moments across the windows framed the top of the page perfectly. And in the middle stood me and Luke, my arms around his waist and his around my shoulders. We were laughing, as we often were, the candid moment setting my heart skipping in my chest.

Mrs. Bennet couldn’t speak, overwhelmed as she flipped through the pages to the spread for the shop. The article was titled “Coming Up Roses,” next to a full-page picture of Luke and me in the greenhouse, arms full of flowers and smiles boundless.

This was the point when she burst into tears.

Luke pulled her into his side as she turned page after page. The last page of the spread was the entire Bennet family with Mrs. Bennet in the middle, holding a bouquet of roses in shades of fuchsia. At this, she turned into Luke’s chest and cried openly and without an ounce of shame.

The article recounted the history of Longbourne, starting from its establishment and its legacy. Its decline and its resurgence. The work we had all done, the window displays and the innovative arrangements. And at the heart of it all was a theme no one could deny.

Love.

A family’s love. A love of growing and creation. The love Luke and I had found together, our partnership sparking change that tore through Longbourne like wildfire.

The Bennets watched their matriarch, their faces bent with emotion. Ivy and Dean stood off to the side, watching as I did, because the Bennets were their own entity, their own animal, their bond so strong and certain that everything else was left outside without intent. But we watched them with the love in our hearts as fierce as theirs.

And just beyond Ivy was Wendy, eyes shining and smile soft.

We’d had to work to convince her to come work at the shop. I won’t lie—I’d been more than a little worried about having her there. But she had been not only kind and brimming with deference, but eager and excited to learn. The extra set of hands left me more time to design the windows and come up with specialty seasonal bouquets, which had in turn blown up our deliveries.