He plucked a little purple flower and turned it over in his fingers. How he adored the way she’d always tucked a little sprig behind one ear—elfin, it had seemed. Lovely. She’d woven these longer sprigs into her waist-length hair. He wished he could do so for her now—or that he’d stopped to do it then. So much that had seemed small and unimportant then was now all he valued. It felt as though they’d been spinning in a chaotic waltz, and when it came time to dip her back, he’d dropped her.

He ambled through the garden, carefully selecting blooms one by one, lingering over the feel and scent of them to be sure he had the right flower each time. In honor of you, Dolly. They were, after all, her flowers. She’d convinced him that gardens would be a grand idea, a taste of what she’d left behind in their little hamlet. “Perhaps they won’t even grow here,” she’d said as she threw handfuls of seeds about the marshy soil. No one else had bothered to tend the yard before, but she had insisted the patients be allowed to grow something so the work of their hands might bring about life. She had an insatiable hunger for beauty, for flowers, as if she were at home among her own when around them. “How lovely it’ll be to wake up in the springtime and see what has chosen to grow. It will be a most wonderful surprise.”

He looked toward the bed of azaleas, and he could see her. See her crouched before the dirt, turning her hands in the soil, toiling over flowers she wouldn’t live to enjoy.

He left a long sprig of wisteria on her grave just outside the gardens, then he carried the rest up to the third floor. It had become a Friday ritual, a calm spot in his week and the joy of the patients’. I think you’d approve.

Up in the long-stay ward where he reigned over his tiny kingdom, Mitchell walked into the dayroom to the sound of happy chittering and excitement over the bundle in his arms, and he made a great show of delivering each flower to the right woman. A daisy for the quietest one, a complexly petaled rose for another. Anna received a sweet little viola, which she tucked with a pleased smile beside the others inside her music box. “That’s nice, that’s nice,” she mumbled absently, then drifted back to wherever she’d lost herself.

On down the rows he went, saving the hardest for last. He then handed the bright and open zinnia to the silent patient huddled to one side in the wheeled chair, hoping the flower would inspire her to resemble it. “Good morning, Violet. You should sit by the window and have some sunshine.”