“I’ll be there in a minute. There’s something I need to do.” Clare hung up her coat, retrieved the letter from the pocket and walked into the living room where a fire was blazing. In the evenings the whole family gathered here to talk, play games or watch TV. Charmingly old-fashioned, Becca had called it in that same ambiguous tone she used for compliments and mockery.

Clare paused for a moment, thinking about her friend and the times they’d sat in this very room and laughed together.

Then she took a deep breath and dropped the letter into the fire, watching as the edges turned black and curled under the heated lick of the flames.

Becca was dead, and the letter and its contents should die with her.

That was her decision, and she’d learn to live with it.

1

Flora

The first time she saw him, he was standing outside the store staring at the flowers in the window. His hands were thrust into the pockets of his coat, the collar turned up against the savage bite of a New York winter. It was the type of raw, freezing day that turned each breath into a white puffy cloud, the sky moody and heavy with menace. People scurried past, heads down, going about their business with grim determination.

Not this man. He didn’t push open the door and seek refuge from the cold as so many had done before him that morning. Instead he lingered, a blank expression on his face as he scanned the array of blooms that splashed color over the monochrome of winter.

“Guilt flowers.” Julia plucked twelve long-stemmed roses from the bucket and placed them on the workstation. “He’s going to buy guilt flowers. I bet you ten dollars he’s had an affair, and he’s looking at those flowers trying to figure out which of them says sorry in a way that isn’t going to get him kicked out of the house.”

Flora didn’t take the bet, and not only because she knew Julia didn’t have ten dollars to throw away. Maybe the man hadn’t had an affair, but he certainly wasn’t celebrating anything. His features were strained, and the fixed line of his mouth suggested he’d forgotten how to smile.

“Why does it have to be an affair? Maybe he’s in love, and she doesn’t return his feelings. Maybe he’s going to buy love flowers. He’s going to put them in every room.”

It was an exchange they had all the time, a to-and-fro about the motivation of the buyer.

When it came to explanations Julia veered toward the dark, which Flora never understood because her colleague and friend was happily married to a firefighter and was the mother of three loving, if demanding, teenagers.