I leaned a hip on the worktable, folding my arms with pride as Lila wandered around with her mouth open and eyes wide.

She reached out to touch an orange flower head. She’d picked one of my favorite breeds, with clusters of orange that made a trio of perfect petals that reached up to the sunlight as if in prayer. “I’ve never seen a flower like this before. What is it?”

“Astragalus. That one is a hybrid of a buffalo plum and Russian milk vetch. See,” I said, pushing off the table to stride to her side, “one of its parents is this one.” I thumbed the leaf of the peach flowers, which also had three petals, but less blossoms on each cluster. “And this one is its grandparent.” I pointed to the next one, which was closer to pink but had only two petals. “And this is its great-grandparent. I’ve been breeding this one for a few years. See the other side?”

She glanced to the space on the other side of the plant where we’d started. “Look at that. It’s yellow, and its petals look like … pistachio shells.”

I chuckled. “That’s the milk vetch.”

“This is wild. How … how did you learn how to do this?”

I rolled a shoulder. “Just messing around really. Dad showed me how once, and I just sort of…ran with it. All you need is a paintbrush and the knowledge of flower genitalia.”

“You make these flowers have sex? So you’re basically a flower pimp?”

“Think I should put that on my business cards?”

I was rewarded with a laugh as she turned her attention back to the flowers. “These are incredible. Have you thought about selling them?”

“Oh, yeah—I sell them all the time. Over the years, I’ve met enough enthusiasts that I have a good, solid customer base.”

“How much do you charge?”

“Why, need me to make you a new strain of flower?”

“Just curious, is all.”

“I don’t charge, just tell them they can tip me. Marcus set me up on some app thing they pay me on and it goes straight into my bank account. But I don’t think about it all that much, to be honest—I’d do it for free, if they didn’t insist on paying. And if Marcus would let me get away with it. He set it up as a business and everything, said I had to or I’d get thrown in jail for tax evasion.”

“That’s an overstatement, but I see the point,” she said on a chuckle.

“Sometimes I wonder how much is in the account, but I figured if it was substantial, Marcus would be hounding me about investing it or something.”

Lila made a face I wasn’t sure how to read. “You don’t know how much is in your business account?”

“No. Why?”