His boots squeaked on the carpet.

“It’s getting bad out there,” he said, wiping rain from a ruddy cheek. “No more deliveries.”

“Your shop is across the street,” Susan said.

He handed her the wet bouquet he was holding. There had been more ceremony the first few times he’d come.

Susan looked down at the bouquet. It was prettily arranged in a square glass vase. Purple calla lilies, red berries, surrounding a few fist-sized balls of leaves. For a guy with fingers like sausages, he had a way with floral design. “Is that cabbage?” she asked.

“Decorative winter kale,” he said with a sigh.

“Oh.”

“Seriously,” he said. “Tell your admirer to take a break until after the rain stops. The governor declared a state of emergency today.” He looked around at their sad, empty office. “Don’t you watch TV?” he said.

“I read the Herald,” Susan said pointedly. Someone had to.

He shook his head and trudged off toward the elevator, leaving a wet spot on the carpet where he’d been standing.

Derek rolled his task chair next to Susan’s. The musk of his aftershave was overpowering. Stetson. He was the only guy in his twenties Susan knew who even used aftershave. “Leo Reynolds is bad news,” he said, pumping a finger toward the flowers.

True, she thought. But I bet he doesn’t use Stetson.

Leo Reynolds had sent Susan a bouquet at work every week for six months. The cards all said the same thing: To Susan, From Leo. A real formalist. The flower shop guy said that Leo placed the order by phone. He probably had an account at every flower shop in town. Leo’s family money had been made importing massive amounts of drugs into the West Coast, but Susan had to admit she liked the attention.

“You never sent me flowers,” she said to Derek.

“He’s rich,” Derek said. He lowered his voice and glanced around at the twenty or so people still in the office, all wearing headphones and staring blankly at their computer screens. “I make thirty-two thousand dollars a year,” he said.

“Oh,” Susan said.

“Oh?”

“Just, oh.”

Derek squinted at her. “How much do you make?”

Susan made forty-two thousand. And the advance for her soon-to-be-released book about weird ways people die had been a hundred thousand. She shrugged. No point making him feel bad. “About that,” she said.

“How’s the Gretchen Lowell book?” he asked. Susan’s skin prickled. He knew she’d given up on the Beauty Killer book. He was just being catty.

“I’m kicking a new idea around,” she said.

“About?”

“Fighting crime in Portland, Oregon.”

“So, true crime?”

Susan felt a twinge of embarrassment. “More like a detective story.”

He blinked at her. He’d played college football. And those concussions add up. “So, fiction?” he said.

“Creative nonfiction,” she said.

He narrowed his eyes. “Who are the main characters?”