“I can just get mine,” Truman said, head already buzzing with how he would set up Ash’s website to make ordering easy.

“Really?” Ash asked.

“Yeah, no problem. I’ll be back soon.”

“Oh, here.” Ash fumbled in his coat pocket. “Take the van. It’s cold.”

He tossed Truman the keys, which fell through Truman’s fingers and clanked on the floor. Bruce was happy to participate in this new game, and when Truman got the keys, they were distinctly slimier than they had been.

“You’re gonna just give me the keys to your van?” he asked. “You barely know me.”

Ash raised an eyebrow. “Where are you gonna go, the far side of the island?”

Truman supposed that car theft wasn’t a big problem on an island with only three ferries a day.

***

Truman returned with his laptop, a notebook, markers, and Post-its, delighted to have a project.

“Okay,” he said when he was set up at the counter. “What’s the website?”

Ash had returned to stripping roses of their thorns, a task Truman had never before contemplated. “For what?”

“For Thorn.”

“Oh. Well. I don’t…it’s not… It’s a work in progress,” Ash concluded.

“Okay, well, lemme take a look.”

Ash grumbled something.

“What’s that?”

Ash walked over and typed something into Truman’s computer. He’d navigated to the Owl Island Chamber of Commerce website, which had a listing of local businesses. There, in tiny letters, was THORN (FLOWER SHOP). When he clicked on the hyperlink, all that came up was a phone number.

“Ummm…”

“Yeah, well, the progress is…preliminary?”

Truman blinked. “Do you not have a website?”

“You don’t have to say it like I don’t have a soul,” Ash grumbled.

“No, no, no, this won’t do. I’m going to make you a website. You have to have a website.” Truman began looking up domains. “Okay, how about thornflowershop dot com?”

“Sure, that’s—look, you really don’t have to…”

“Do you not want me to?”

“No, it’s just… It’s… You don’t have to go to all this trouble.”

“Okay, then I’m doing it. You’ll just need to buy the domain.”

If Truman hadn’t been looking directly at Ash’s face, he would’ve missed the wince. He clicked on buy domain to check the price.

“No worries. It’s, like, sixteen bucks a month. That okay?”

Ash nodded and let out a breath. “Yeah. Thanks.”

At first, Truman asked Ash question after question about how he wanted the site to look, what fonts he wanted, et cetera. But it soon became clear that Ash hadn’t thought about it, nor did he have strong opinions about it, at least not at the moment, so Truman stopped asking him and decided he’d be doing him a favor if he just made all the decisions and offered to change things later.