Then I stood in the middle of my flower shop, the place I’d built from nothing, the life I’d assembled from instructions, discipline, and a talent I hadn’t known I possessed. All of it, built by Macy. The peonies, the wedding consultations, knowing everyone’s name and letting nobody know mine. Following every rule, trusting every protocol, believing that if I was careful enough and quiet enough and good enough, the system would hold.
The system wasn’t holding one little bit.
I picked up the phone one more time. Dialed my handler’s number. Listened to it ring into silence and then the click of voicemail and his recorded voice, professional, clipped, a man doing a job that apparently no longer included protecting me.
I hung up without leaving a message. There was nothing left to say.
TWO
PRIEST
The cemetery sat on a rise east of town where the pines thinned out and the view opened up across the valley. Forsaken spread below it in miniature, Main Street, the rooftops, the highway cutting through. The mountains beyond. The sky doing what Montana sky always did, stretching until you stopped trying to find the edge of it.
I set the peonies between the headstones and crouched down to pull a few weeds from the base of the granite. Eleanor and William Hale. Married forty-seven years. Buried six months apart because my grandmother had looked at a world without my grandfather in it and decided she’d seen enough.
They’d taken me in when I was four. My mother had left me with a neighbor for two weeks, and the neighbors had finally called someone, and that someone had called my grandparents. They’d driven eleven hours from Montana to collect a boy they’d only met twice. My grandfather carried me to the truck. My grandmother buckled me in and handed me a sandwich she’d gotten from a gas station and I ate it without saying a word because I’d learned, even at four, that talking meant asking for things and asking for things meant being disappointed.
But they’d never disappointed me, not once. I learned eventually that my mother had done me a favor.
My grandfather taught me to fix an engine, read a map, and shake a man’s hand like I meant it. My grandmother taught me to cook, to listen, and that showing up was the thing that mattered most. You showed up for the people you loved. Every day. Even when it was hard, even when you were tired, even when the person you were showing up for didn’t know how to ask for help. You showed up anyway.
I’d been showing up here every two weeks ever since. Fresh flowers on their graves. A few minutes of quiet. The only conversation I still had with the two people who’d made me someone worth being.
The peonies looked good against the granite. Macy had picked the right stems, the ones with tight buds that would open slowly over the next few days. She always picked the right ones. I’d watched her do it enough times to know it wasn’t luck. She had an eye for it, like some people had an ear for music, a feel for which stems would hold and which would drop their petals in two days.
And it was there that the thoughts started to land. Macy.
I’d been thinking about her since I last saw her. Since I went back for my sunglasses. She’d been off. Sharp with me in a way she’d never been, and when I’d come back, the shop was dark in the middle of the afternoon. Her hands were white-knuckled around her phone and she’d looked at me like I was a problem she didn’t have the bandwidth to solve.
That wasn’t Macy. In all the months of walking through her door, she’d never once been anything less than warm. Professional, sure. Boundaried in a way I’d noticed early and respected completely. She gave you exactly enough of herself to make you feel welcome and kept the rest behind a line you couldn’t see until you bumped into it. But the warmth was real.The way she remembered names, asked about people’s families, fussed over arrangements until they were exactly right. That wasn’t performance. That was her.
Except behind that drawn shade, when I’d asked her if everything was ok, it had been performance. And the performance had been fear.
I walked back to my bike and sat on it without starting the engine. It was starting to cool, early enough in the season that hadn’t quite committed to summer yet. Below me, Forsaken was going about its business. A truck on Main Street. The lights on at Rosie’s. The feed store with people going about their business.
And somewhere down there, a flower shop with a bell over the door and a woman behind the counter who hummed when she thought nobody was listening. Who kept a single framed photograph on the wall behind the register, a mountain landscape, no people in it, and who changed the subject with a smile so practiced you’d swear it was genuine every time someone asked where she was from.
I noticed things like this in the way that I’d always noticed things. In the Rangers, it had kept men alive. In the club, it kept operations clean. With Macy, it had become a problem, because the more I noticed, the more I wanted to know, and the more I wanted to know, the harder it became to pretend that buying flowers every two weeks was just about the cemetery.
It wasn’t about the cemetery anymore. It hadn’t been for months.
I’d asked about the ranunculus because she’d said once, while she was trimming stems with her hip against the counter and her focus on the work, that if she ever had a garden of her own she’d fill it with them. “They look like someone crumpled tissue paper into a flower,” she’d said, and then laughed at herself for saying it. I’d carried that laugh out of the shop andonto my bike and halfway to the compound before I realized I was still hearing it and didn’t want to stop.
That was the thing about falling for someone in small pieces. You didn’t feel yourself going. Each visit, each conversation, each detail was light enough to carry. Her quick, sure hands wrapping stems. The tilt of her head when she was deciding between two arrangements, weighing them like they were arguments. The two words, “see you” when I left, enough warmth behind them to keep me until the next visit and enough distance to remind me that warmth was all she was offering.
I could’ve named what I felt if I’d let myself. I hadn’t let myself. Because naming it meant doing something about it, and doing something about it meant crossing a line she’d drawn, and she drew lines for reasons I didn’t understand and respected anyway.
But yesterday she’d drawn the shade in the middle of the afternoon and her voice had cracked when she told me to leave and her eyes had held a fear that makes a man’s hands want to form fists.
I started the engine. I already knew I needed to do something.
The shop wasopen when I pulled up to the curb on Main Street. Sign turned, shade up, the window display rearranged since yesterday. Buckets of fresh stems flanking the door. Normal. Everything looked normal.
I went in. The bell rang. She was behind the counter with a cup of coffee, arranging greens into a vase with the focus of someone who needed their hands busy. She looked up when I walked in and the smile she gave me was the right shape in everyway except the timing. Half a second too late. The delay between seeing me and deciding to be glad about it.
“Twice in two days,” she said. “I’m going to think you’ve got a whole second cemetery you haven’t told me about.”
I almost smiled. “Needed something for the lodge. Angel’s been on a thing about the common room looking like a barracks.”