Hours later, I trotted down the stairs of my childhood home, smiling to myself, just like I’d been all day, the ghost of my memories replaying on a loop. Lila naked in my greenhouse. The smell of wet earth and sunshine. Her words and her way and the ineffable happiness she gave me.

Everything else, particularly anything regarding our permanence, I ignored like it was my duty.

I just rounded the staircase to the second floor when I heard Mom’s voice floating up the stairwell.

“I will not sign for that. I’ve told your kind before, and I’ll do it again—I refuse to accept that sanctimonious scrap of paper, and you can’t make me,” she said, ironically sanctimonious.

I sped up, wondering whose face I needed to turn inside out.

“Ma’am,” the weary voice on the porch said as I hurried into the entryway, “you can’t avoid this, so just do us all a favor and take the damn letter.”

“I won’t!” she said petulantly as I approached. “Now, if you’ll excuse me—” She started to shut the door, but the courier stuck her boot in the doorjamb.

“Take the letter, Mrs. Bennet, for God’s sake!”

I stepped in front of my mother to open the door, glaring down at the sullen girl who looked just as unhappy as my mother did.

“What’s this all about?” I asked the girl, ignoring my mother, who tugged uselessly at my arm.

“Kassius, it’s nothing. Come, come, it’s almost dinner. Aren’t you hungry? Jett is making a nice—”

I shot her a look over my shoulder. “Mom …”

She flushed. “I’m not taking that letter!” she spouted. “I’m not!”

“What is it, and why won’t you take it?”

“Because,” the courier said, “it’s from Bower Bouquets.”

The blood in my veins went cold at the mention of their name.

“Marcus,” I called into the house. Then, to my mother, I said, “Sign for that letter. Now.”

“B-but—”

“Mother. You cannot run away from whatever this is. So sign the letter, let this poor girl go, and let’s see what’s inside.”

She pursed her lips, shaking her head emphatically as she took a step back.

“Ah, ah, ah,” Marcus said, hands on her shoulders as he steered her toward the door. “Sign it.”

Her unadulterated fury at being handled was matched only by our insistence. But it was her knowledge that there was no way in hell she was getting out of it that finally broke her.

With an illegible sweep of the pen, she practically threw said pen at the courier. “There. Are you quite happy now?”

“Yes, thank you,” the girl said flatly, extending her hand with the letter in it.

Mom reached out to take it, but I snatched it first.