The first thing Nora Bell noticed was that Roman Hale was not crying.
“What did you find?”
Nora should have lied better.
Instead she opened her fingers.
He read the delivery slip.
For the first time since she had met him, Roman Hale looked frightened.
Not of the dead woman’s name.
Of the handwriting.
“Where did you get this?”
“Receiving office.”
“Who saw it?”
“Me. Arthur, maybe. Why?”
Roman took the paper.
His thumb stopped over a small mark near the bottom.
A crooked circle with a line drawn through it.
“You recognize that,” Nora said.
“No.”
“You just forgot how to breathe for the second time today.”
His gaze lifted.
Nora folded her arms.
Roman lowered his voice.
“Go home after work.”
“I usually do.”
“Lock your door.”
“Usually do that too.”
“Nora.”
The way he said her name changed the air.
“This isn’t a suggestion.”
She stepped closer.
“Then you’ve misunderstood me very quickly.”
One of Roman’s men shifted.
Roman did not.
Nora pointed at the paper.
“My dead mother’s name is on flowers that nearly killed you. Whatever you know, start talking.”
Roman studied her.
Then he quietly asked, “What was your mother’s business called?”
Nora opened her palm and showed him the brass tag.
“Bell & Briar.”
All remaining color left his face.
Roman looked toward his men.
“Clear the hallway.”
They moved immediately.
When they were alone, he closed the office door.
“My father used Bell & Briar.”
Nora stared at him.
“For flowers?”
Roman’s silence answered first.
Her stomach tightened.
“For what?”
“Deliveries.”
“What kind of deliveries?”
“Messages. Cash. Documents. Things that needed to move without attracting attention.”
“My mother wasn’t involved in crime.”
“I didn’t say she was.”
“Then why was her shop being used?”
“Because flower vans go everywhere.”
Nora felt suddenly sick.
Hospitals.
Weddings.
Funerals.
Hotels.
Private homes.
Nobody questioned flowers.
Roman looked at the brass tag.
“My father stopped using outside businesses years ago.”
“My mother’s shop burned six years ago.”
“I know.”
Her eyes snapped toward him.
“How?”
“I remember the fire.”
“Why would you remember a flower shop fire?”
Roman didn’t answer quickly enough.
Nora stepped back.
“Oh, God.”
“I didn’t cause it.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“My father was worried after it happened.”
“Worried about my mother?”
“About what might have been lost.”
Nora stared at him.
There are moments when a life does not change loudly.
No gunshot.
No scream.
No collapsing roof.
Just one sentence landing in the wrong place.
Her mother had spent the final eighteen months of her life fighting an insurance company that claimed bad wiring caused the fire.
She had borrowed against the house.
Sold her wedding ring.
Stopped replacing her own prescriptions on schedule.
And eventually died owing money for a business that no longer existed.
Nora had believed poverty killed her in slow pieces.
Now a feared man stood in front of her suggesting somebody might have burned the first piece deliberately.
Roman placed the delivery slip on the desk.
“Nora, listen carefully. I don’t know what happened to Bell & Briar.”
“But you know something.”
“I know that symbol.”
Her eyes dropped to the crossed circle.
“What does it mean?”
“It used to mark controlled routes.”
“Used by your father?”
“Yes.”
“And now?”
Roman looked toward the chapel where his cousin lay dead.
“I haven’t seen it in twelve years.”
A chill moved through Nora.
“So why is it on flowers ordered by my dead mother?”
Roman’s expression hardened.
“I don’t know.”
Nora looked at the lilies.
Then at the slip.
Then at the man who had almost died among them.
“I think somebody wanted you dead.”
Roman said nothing.
“And I think they wanted me to find this.”
Still nothing.
Nora’s voice dropped.
“Why?”
Roman looked at her for a long moment.
Then he said, “That is the question that should scare us both.”
Three days later, Roman Hale walked into Nora’s flower room carrying a loaf of cinnamon bread.
She stared at him.
“No.”
He stopped.
“You don’t know why I’m here.”
“Men like you don’t enter funeral homes carrying baked goods unless somebody is dead or about to be bribed.”
“This is bread.”
“Exactly. Suspicious.”
Roman set it on the worktable.
The bakery stamp made her throat tighten.
Carmichael’s.
Her mother used to buy their cinnamon loaves every Sunday.
“How did you know?”
“I didn’t.”
Nora looked up.
Roman removed his coat.
“Matthew ordered from there every week. They sent too much food to his house after the funeral.”
“So I’m receiving grief leftovers.”
“Yes.”
She smiled despite herself.
“That may be the least romantic gift I’ve ever received.”
Roman’s eyebrow lifted.
Nora immediately regretted the word.
“I said generous.”
“You said romantic.”
“Near-death experiences damage hearing.”
“Apparently.”
She pointed toward the doorway.
“Where are your men?”
“Outside.”
“Why?”
“Because you dislike them watching you work.”
Nora stopped cutting roses.
Roman remembered that?
She hated the tiny warmth it caused.
He glanced around the room.
The lilies were gone.
“You removed them.”
“I don’t enjoy resuscitating customers.”
“I’m not a customer.”
“Good. You’d be difficult.”
He almost smiled.
Then the humor vanished.
Roman placed a thin folder beside the bread.
“We traced the delivery truck.”
Nora wiped her hands.
“And?”
“Stolen plates. Driver wore a hat low enough that the camera caught nothing useful.”
“The wholesaler?”
“Doesn’t exist.”
“Wonderful.”
“The order originated from a prepaid phone.”
“Even more wonderful.”
Roman opened the folder.
Inside were photocopies of old invoices.
Nora recognized the Bell & Briar logo.
Her mother’s handwriting filled several margins.
Her chest tightened.
“Where did you get these?”
“My father’s records.”
“You went through them?”
“Yes.”
“After I told you not to fix my problems?”
“This problem nearly killed me. I consider that partial ownership.”
She glared.
He added, “I didn’t touch your debt.”
Nora hated that she appreciated the distinction.
She turned a page.
Several old flower orders had the crossed-circle symbol.
“These were my mother’s?”
“No. These were placed through her shop.”
“For your father.”
Roman nodded.
“Your mother eventually discovered what the orders meant.”
“How do you know?”
“Because she stopped accepting them.”
Nora turned another page.
There was a handwritten note.
NO MORE PRIVATE NIGHT DELIVERIES.
E.B.
Her mother.
Below it, another note in different handwriting.
SHE HAS SEEN TOO MUCH.
Nora stopped breathing.
Roman said quietly, “That’s why I’m here.”
“Who wrote this?”
“I don’t know.”
“You must.”
“I was twenty-nine when my father died. He kept parts of his business separated even from me.”
Nora laughed bitterly.
“How responsible.”
Roman did not defend him.
That made her angrier somehow.
She flipped through the records until a date caught her eye.
June 14.
Six years earlier.
The night Bell & Briar burned.
A payment had been authorized that morning.
Twenty thousand dollars.
Recipient identified only as M.K.
Purpose blank.
Nora pushed the papers away.
“My mother died because of that fire.”
Roman’s jaw tightened.
“The fire didn’t kill her.”
“No. It just took everything she had first.”
He said nothing.
“She was fifty-eight and working two jobs after it happened. Did your father know that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did you?”
“No.”
“Would it have mattered?”
Roman absorbed the question without flinching.
“I hope so.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“No. It’s the only honest one.”
Nora looked away.
Outside, rain streaked the narrow windows.
She hated him a little in that moment.
Not because he had done anything to her.
Because people with Roman’s kind of power could inherit disasters they had never personally created and still benefit from the ruins.
People like Nora inherited the bill.
Roman quietly said, “I can pay every debt attached to Bell & Briar today.”
She turned.
“No.”
“It’s not charity.”
“Then what is it?”
“Restitution.”
“From you?”
“From the business that profited.”
“No.”
His expression sharpened.
“Nora—”
“My mother spent her last years trying to stand back up. I won’t turn her life into a debt you can erase with a signature.”
“Money created the damage.”
“Money doesn’t undo it.”
“It can return the property.”
“Not her.”
Roman went silent.
Nora’s voice shook now.
“Do you understand? You can buy the burned lot. You can build me a glass shop with gold faucets. You can put my name over the door in ten-foot letters. And on opening day my mother will still be dead.”
Roman lowered his gaze.
“Yes.”
That stopped her.
Most powerful men she had met argued until reality became exhausted.
Roman simply accepted the wound.
After a moment he asked, “Then what do you want?”
“The truth.”
“You may not like it.”
“I already don’t.”
He looked at the old invoices.
“Then I’ll help you find it.”
Not fix it.
Find it.
Nora noticed the difference.
Two weeks passed.
Roman began visiting the flower room almost every day.
Sometimes he brought information.
Sometimes coffee.
Once nothing at all.
That visit lasted longest.
Nora worked while he sat on a ridiculous pink stool she had painted years earlier.
He never asked why she was unmarried.
Never commented on her body.
Never suggested she smile.
He simply watched her hands turn individual stems into something that looked deliberate.
One evening she gave him greenery.
“Strip the lower leaves.”
Roman stared at the stem.
“I employ thirty-seven hundred people.”
“And none of them are here.”
“I don’t arrange flowers.”
“You also didn’t breathe particularly well around them. We’re expanding your skill set.”
He pulled one leaf hard enough to nearly snap the stem.
Nora gasped.
“Good Lord.”
“It’s a plant.”
“It had a future.”
Roman looked genuinely annoyed.
She laughed.
He tried again.
Gentler.
Something changed between them in those small evenings.
Nora stopped seeing his reputation first.
Roman stopped pretending silence protected him from being known.
Then the strange deliveries began again.
A crate of red roses arrived without an invoice.
A wreath appeared for a funeral that did not exist.
Three orchid arrangements were ordered for a private viewing room that had been empty for days.
Nora started keeping notes.
Dates.
Flowers.
Entrances.
Times.
Roman told her to stop.
She told him to remove the leaves more carefully.
Then, one Friday evening, she found an order card tucked beneath her ledger.
The deceased was listed as Thomas Reed.
No such funeral existed.
Twelve white roses.
Five sprigs of rosemary.
Rear chapel.
Delivery 8:30 p.m.
The crossed circle appeared in the corner.
Nora spread every suspicious order across the table.
Roman arrived twenty minutes later with Miles Kessler, the only man he had introduced as an old friend rather than an employee.
Miles was forty-three, silver beginning at his temples, with a pleasant face that made him almost invisible beside Roman’s harder presence.
He had known Roman since childhood.
“He’d take a bullet for me,” Roman once said.
Nora had replied, “People say that much too casually.”
Now Miles examined the orders.
“Could be signals.”
“For what?” Nora asked.
“Movements. Meetings. Deliveries.”
Nora stared at the flowers listed on each card.
“No.”
Miles looked at her.
“No?”
“The flowers mean something too.”
Roman came closer.
Nora arranged the cards by date.
“Look. Roses and ivy always go to the rear chapel. Orchids always go upstairs. Rosemary goes to viewing room two.”
Roman understood first.
“Windows.”
Nora nodded.
“Each room overlooks a different entrance.”
Miles became still.
She counted stems.
“Eight roses. Eight-thirty delivery. Ten orchids. Ten o’clock. Five sprigs, five.”
Roman’s face went cold.
“They’re recording arrivals.”
“Or predicting them,” Nora said.
Miles looked through the older cards.
“Whose?”
Nora picked up the names of the fictional dead.
Thomas Reed.
Adam North.
Peter Hale.
Michael River.
Initials.
T. R.
A. N.
P. H.
M. R.
She rearranged them.
Nothing.
Then she noticed the surnames.
Reed.
North.
Hale.
River.
Places.
Routes.
She looked at Roman.
“These correspond to your warehouses.”
Miles stopped moving.
Roman looked at him.
Just for a second.
Too fast for anyone who wasn’t watching.
Nora was watching.
She said nothing.
Later that night, after Roman left, Nora returned to the funeral home’s basement records.
Old paper ledgers went back fifteen years.
She searched until her back hurt.
Crossed circles appeared again and again.
Fake funerals.
Cash payments.
Rear entrances.
Flowers that encoded time and location.
The scheme had existed before Roman’s cousin died.
Before Roman began visiting.
Before her mother died.
Nora’s fingers trembled as she reached the ledger from six years earlier.
June.
She found June 14.
One fake funeral.
Eleven red roses.
Four branches of ivy.
Viewing room two.
Customer name
Michael Kessler.
Nora stared.
Kessler.
Miles Kessler.
She pulled out her phone.
Before she could call Roman, she heard the basement door close.
Nora froze.
Footsteps came slowly down the stairs.
Miles appeared.
No coat.
No smile.
He looked almost sad.
“You were always going to find that page, weren’t you?”
Nora’s heartbeat hammered.
“You burned Bell & Briar.”
Miles exhaled.
“Not intentionally.”
“That’s an interesting defense.”
“Your mother found a package.”
“What package?”
“Records. Routes. Names.”
“And you set her shop on fire.”
“I sent someone to recover them.”
“By burning the building?”
“The fire was supposed to start after closing.”
“My mother lived above the shop.”
“I didn’t know.”
Nora stared at him.
He meant it.
That was almost worse.
People liked to imagine evil came with pleasure.
Sometimes it came with logistics.
“I didn’t know,” Miles repeated.
“She lost everything.”
“I know.”
“She died believing she had failed.”
“I know.”
“No. You know the sentence. You don’t know what it means.”
Miles’s face tightened.
“Your mother wasn’t the target.”
Nora laughed once.
A terrible sound.
“That’s what powerful men always say when ordinary people get crushed underneath their plans.”
Miles stepped closer.
“Give me the ledger.”
“No.”
“Nora.”
“No.”
He looked toward the stairs.
“Roman cannot see this.”
“Why? Because he’ll kill you?”
“Because he’ll destroy himself.”
Nora said nothing.
Miles continued.
“His father built that network. Roman inherited it. I kept it functioning because enemies were closing in.”
“By spying on him?”
“By controlling what they could learn.”
“The lilies.”
Miles’s silence changed everything.
Nora went cold.
“You knew about his allergy.”
“I needed him frightened.”
“You tried to kill him.”
“No.”
“You filled a chapel with something that stops him breathing.”
“I knew he carried medication.”
Nora stared at him.
“You gambled his life to teach him caution.”
Miles’s calm cracked.
“He was changing!”
The shout echoed through the basement.
Miles lowered his voice.
“He stopped checking every room. He stopped changing routes. He canceled meetings to come here. He laughed.”
Nora almost couldn’t believe what she was hearing.
“That offended you?”
“It terrified me.”
“Why?”
“Because men like Roman don’t get to become ordinary.”
Nora’s anger sharpened.
“Maybe that’s the cruelest thing you’ve done.”
Miles shook his head.
“You don’t understand.”
“No. I understand perfectly. You confused his fear with his strength.”
“He survived because I made sure he stayed afraid.”
“And now?”
Miles looked at her.
“Now he trusts you.”
Nora understood.
“You think I’m making him weak.”
“I think you’re giving him something enemies can take.”
“That’s not weakness.”
“In our world it is.”
“This is not my world.”
“It became your world the moment you pulled him out of that chapel.”
Miles held out his hand.
“The ledger.”
Nora stepped backward.
“No.”
His expression hardened.
“I’m sorry.”
“So am I.”
The basement lights went out.
Miles cursed.
Nora ran.
She had switched off the breaker herself ten minutes earlier after hearing him upstairs.
Her mother had taught her something useful while raising a daughter above a flower shop.
Know every exit in a building that can burn.
Nora moved through darkness toward the old service corridor.
Miles followed.
She reached the loading room and slammed the fire door behind her.
A shot cracked through metal.
Nora screamed and dropped.
The bullet did not hit her.
Footsteps thundered from the front hallway.
Then Roman’s voice.
“Nora!”
Miles stopped.
Nora had sent Roman one message before entering the basement.
MICHAEL KESSLER. JUNE 14. COME ALONE ONLY IF YOU WANT THE TRUTH.
Roman had not come alone.
For once, Nora was grateful he ignored instructions.
The next thirty seconds happened too quickly to understand.
Shouting.
A crash.
Another shot.
Then silence.
Nora opened the fire door.
Miles stood near the flower room with his weapon on the floor.
Two of Roman’s men held him.
Roman stood six feet away.
He was staring at Miles as if someone had opened his chest and removed something essential.
“How long?” Roman asked.
Miles looked at him.
“Roman—”
“How long?”
“Your father started the routes.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
Miles’s face folded.
“Twelve years.”
Roman looked almost physically struck.
“My father trusted you.”
“I protected you.”
“You poisoned a funeral.”
“I knew you’d survive.”
“You burned her mother’s shop.”
“That wasn’t supposed to happen.”
Roman stepped forward.
Nora called his name.
He stopped.
The room went very quiet.
She saw what everyone else feared in him then.
Not anger.
Permission.
Roman could decide that Miles did not leave the building alive, and every man present would understand.
Nora walked between them.
Roman’s eyes snapped to her.
“Move.”
“No.”
“Nora.”
“If you kill him, the truth dies with him.”
“I don’t care.”
“I do.”
Miles looked at her in surprise.
She didn’t look back.
Roman’s voice broke lower.
“He almost killed you.”
“And if you murder him for me, then I become another excuse men use for doing what they already wanted.”
Roman stared.
Nora’s eyes filled.
“I won’t be that.”
For several seconds, nobody moved.
Then Roman looked at Miles.
The rage did not disappear.
It became something harder.
A decision.
“Call the authorities.”
One of his men hesitated.
Roman turned.
“I said call them.”
Miles closed his eyes.
Roman walked into the flower room.
Nora followed several minutes later.
He stood over a bucket of white roses.
His hands were shaking.
Nora had never seen that before.
Not when he couldn’t breathe.
Not when a gun fired.
Now.
After surviving his oldest friend.
She stood beside him.
Roman whispered, “My father knew about the fire.”
Nora looked at him.
He pulled a folded document from his coat.
“I found it this afternoon.”
She opened it.
An insurance memorandum.
A payment.
A request to dispute the Bell & Briar claim because the property owner had “failed to document electrical repairs.”
The payment was approved by Roman’s father.
Nora felt her knees weaken.
Roman caught her elbow, then immediately loosened his hand, giving her the choice to pull away.
She didn’t.
“He made sure she got nothing,” Nora whispered.
“Yes.”
“Did you know?”
“No.”
She believed him.
That was painful too.
Roman’s voice became rough.
“My family destroyed your mother’s life.”
“Your father did.”
“I inherited what he built.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“I spent fourteen years benefiting from it.”
Nora could not argue with that.
Roman looked at her.
“I love you.”
The words arrived so abruptly she almost laughed.
Instead she cried.
Roman seemed furious at himself.
“Terrible timing,” Nora whispered.
“I know.”
“Possibly the worst I’ve ever seen.”
“I know.”
She wiped her cheek.
“Don’t say it because you think you almost lost me.”
“I thought that before tonight.”
“When?”
“The pink stool.”
Despite everything, Nora laughed.
Roman’s mouth trembled.
She touched his face.
“I love you too.”
He closed his eyes.
For one minute, standing in a damaged funeral-home flower room surrounded by broken stems, police sirens approaching outside, they allowed themselves to believe love might be enough.
It wasn’t.
Real life rarely respected beautiful moments.
Miles Kessler survived to testify.
His testimony exposed the fake funeral network, the surveillance routes, the Bell & Briar fire, insurance fraud, extortion, bribery, and several crimes Roman had inherited but had also knowingly continued.
Roman could have protected himself.
His attorneys certainly tried.
Instead, he turned over everything.
Warehouses.
Ledgers.
Accounts.
Names.
Including his own.
“Don’t make yourself a martyr,” Nora told him the night before he signed the agreement.
They were sitting in her kitchen.
Her old radiator clicked every few minutes.
Roman looked strangely large at the tiny table.
“I’m not.”
“It looks like it.”
“I’m responsible for things too.”
“Not my mother’s fire.”
“No.”
“Not the lilies.”
“No.”
“Then don’t confess to somebody else’s sins because guilt feels cleaner than grief.”
Roman studied her.
“Where did you learn to say things like that?”
“My mother.”
“I wish I’d met her.”
“She wouldn’t have liked you.”
“I assumed.”
Nora smiled sadly.
“She might have eventually.”
Roman reached across the table.
“That’s more than I deserve.”
“Stop deciding what you deserve. It’s irritating.”
His thumb moved across her knuckles.
The next morning, Roman Hale surrendered himself.
There was no dramatic escape.
No bribed official.
No secret plane.
No empire saving its king.
The man who had spent most of his adult life making consequences disappear finally stood still long enough for one to reach him.
The legal fight lasted almost a year.
Several charges collapsed.
Others didn’t.
Roman accepted a sentence that took him away for four years.
Before he left, he sold three river properties and created a restitution fund for businesses harmed by his father’s old network.
Bell & Briar qualified.
Nora refused her individual payment.
Roman was furious.
She refused again.
Then she discovered he had changed the fund rules so descendants could claim documented losses without accepting gifts from any specific donor.
She called him from the prison visitation room.
“That was sneaky.”
Roman sat behind the glass.
“I had good legal advice.”
“You found a technical way around my no.”
“I created a system available to everyone.”
“Annoyingly ethical.”
“I’ve had time to improve.”
She looked at him for a long moment.
Prison had changed his face.
Not dramatically.
No cinematic transformation.
He simply looked more tired.
More human.
Nora placed her palm against the glass.
Roman lifted his hand to meet it.
They did not promise forever.
That surprised people.
They promised next Thursday.
Then the Thursday after that.
Sometimes love survived best when nobody demanded it predict the future.
Nora reopened Bell & Briar eighteen months later.
Not with Roman’s money.
Not entirely.
She used the restitution her mother’s estate was legally owed, her own savings, a small business loan, and the sale of the faded brick house she had inherited.
The new shop stood on the same market corner where the old one had burned.
Nora preserved one blackened beam.
People told her it looked ugly.
She kept it anyway.
Some damage deserved witnesses.
Above the door hung her mother’s original wooden sign.
The blue paint was cracked.
At sunset, the warm lights made it look gold.
Roman first saw the rebuilt shop through a photograph.
Nora mailed it to him without a note.
His reply arrived five days later.
Three words.
You did it.
She cried in the stockroom.
Four years is a long time.
Long enough for restaurants to close.
Children to become teenagers.
Friendships to fade.
Flowers to bloom, die, return, and bloom again.
Nora visited less during the final year.
Not because she stopped loving him.
Because she had finally built a life large enough that waiting was only one room inside it.
Roman understood.
That mattered more than promises.
On the morning of his release, Nora did not drive to the gate.
She had a wedding order.
Six hundred white roses, two hundred stems of eucalyptus, and a bride who had changed her mind about table arrangements three times before breakfast.
At 9:17 a.m., the bell above Bell & Briar’s door rang.
Nora was standing on a ladder, fighting with a hanging vine.
“Give me a minute!”
A familiar voice answered.
“You always say that when you’re doing something unsafe.”
Her hands stopped.
She climbed down slowly.
Roman Hale stood beneath the old blue sign.
He wore a simple dark coat.
No guards.
No driver waiting outside.
No expensive watch.
His hair had silver at the temples now.
For the first time since Nora had known him, he looked like a man arriving somewhere instead of taking possession of it.
Neither spoke immediately.
Roman glanced at the shop.
The wooden counter.
Buckets of tulips.
Shelves of ribbon.
The old blackened beam.
A photograph of Evelyn Bell beside the register.
“You kept it,” he said.
“The beam?”
“The sign.”
Nora looked up.
“In the evening it turns gold.”
Roman smiled.
“I remember.”
She swallowed.
“What are you going to do now?”
“I don’t know.”
That was perhaps the bravest answer he had ever given her.
Nora nodded toward six unopened boxes of roses.
“Can you still strip leaves?”
Roman stared at them.
“I’ve been out nine minutes.”
“And already making excuses.”
“Nora.”
“You’ve had four years to practice patience.”
“I was in prison, not floral school.”
She handed him scissors.
Roman looked down at them.
Then at her.
“Is this how you welcome everyone?”
“No.”
He waited.
Nora smiled.
“Only men I love.”
Something crossed his face.
Not relief exactly.
Relief expected certainty.
This was gratitude for possibility.
Roman stepped behind the counter.
Nora showed him the first stem.
Outside, the city continued without caring whether their story had reached a happy ending.
Miles Kessler remained in prison.
Matthew Hale remained dead.
Evelyn Bell never walked through the rebuilt shop.
Roman could not return four lost years to Nora, and Nora could not pretend the man she loved had never profited from an ugly inheritance.
Some wounds did not close.
Some debts were not meant to be paid off and forgotten.
They were meant to change the way you lived afterward.
At sunset, warm bulbs came on beneath the old Bell & Briar sign.
The cracked blue paint turned gold.
Roman noticed.
Nora noticed him noticing.
Neither said anything.
They still had hundreds of roses left to prepare before morning.
So they stood side by side beneath her mother’s old sign, cutting away damaged leaves and keeping what could still bloom.
THE END
