Last night was Hannah’s last event ever for Heart’s Desire. It was a fifteenth-anniversary party for Tom and Delia Ohara, parents of dimpled Blake and Aubrey-slash-Scarlett. Owen and I stuck around and drank champagne and ate fancy hors d’oeuvres off silver trays, and even danced a little bit. When Tom and Delia each stood up and made little speeches about how much they still loved each other after twenty years together and fifteen years of marriage, I may have gotten a little misty-eyed. (Owen for sure did because he’s such a sappy puffball.) It was the way they smiled at each other that did it. It was definitely real.

Em smiles and says, “Maybe that’ll be you and Owen in twenty years.”

“Maybe not,” I say. “I may have adjusted my opinion, but that doesn’t make me a whole new person.”

“Okay, well, maybe that’ll be you and Owen at prom next year.”

“Maybe don’t even talk about next year.”

“We’ll all probably have plans for college by then,” she muses.

“Okay, really. Stop now, please. I’ve already got my mom breathing down my neck about SATs and college counselors. I have a meeting with one this week, in fact.” I shudder. I am not looking forward to it.

“But now you can put STORM on your like, list of accomplishments.”

“You mean my list of accomplishment? Because it’s just the one.”

Em rolls her eyes.

“Plus, the school board doesn’t even vote until after I meet with this counselor guy, so it’s not like I can say we succeeded.”

“CJ!”

She’s so easy to fool. “I kid, I kid. I’m proud of us no matter how they vote. I bet I could even get Trey to write me a letter of . . .” I’m not sure he’d recommend me for anything, to be honest. I don’t even know what he’s decided yet. “A letter of something, anyway. He could talk about how I disrupted the nonprofit fund-raising model. That would be cool, right?”

“And there’s your flower-magic business.”

“Yeah. Though I prefer to call it a youth-oriented independent floral design enterprise.” It’s defunct now that Heart’s Desire has closed, but I’m hopeful I’ll get work somewhere, somehow.

I’ve seen the architect’s plans for the transformation of Heart’s Desire into McAllister Venture Capital Startup Incubator. Our comfortable little painted brick store is going to become a sleek modern space with lots of stainless steel and glass. It will be completely unrecognizable. But, as Hannah pointed out, it will still be a place to increase the odds of people finding happiness. Or as Mom put it once before I told her to speak English, a place to actuate the future and improve quality of life. I like to think of it as a place where people focus on possibility.