But it isn't true. She put down the flowers. She turned to face me. And for the first time that evening, she looked me directly in the eye. I've had feelings for you since before Chelsea left.
Since the first year the two of you were married, every time I came to your apartment and saw how she treated you, how she looked past you when you were sitting right there, I told myself it was concern. A mother worrying about her son-in-law. That's what I called it. But it wasn't. My throat closed.
I said nothing. And after you came back to Greenville, I couldn't stay away. I told myself I was being kind. Every time I came over with something, the soup you didn't ask for, the shelf that didn't need fixing, the paint colors I didn't need advice on, that was me trying to be near you without ruining everything. I knew it wasn't right.
I did it anyway. I'm not proud of it," she drew a slow breath. "And the lavender," she said, and her voice dropped almost to a whisper. "It was never left over. I've been growing a separate row in the back greenhouse since the year you moved into that house.
Two years every week just for you. I looked at her and I looked through her at 2 years of Tuesdays and Fridays arranged in my mind like a line of dominoes finally falling in order. The coffee she never finished. The way she asked how my day was and waited for the answer. The way the bundles on my steps kept growing.
Three sprigs, then five, then seven, wrapped in brown paper, folded at the corners with more care than any leftover ever deserved. I had spent 10 years being trained to read the smallest signals in the dark. I had read a thousand of them, footprints, wires, the shape of a shadow, and I had never once read the clearest signal of my life, sitting right in front of me every single week, wrapped in brown paper. The lavender was never left over, I said slowly. Was it?
No, Janet said. I grew it for you. Neither of us moved. The petals lay in a small drift near her feet. Outside, a car passed and its headlights swept across the ceiling and were gone.
I didn't say I loved her. Not yet. I wasn't sure I knew how to say that word anymore, and I didn't want to hand her something I hadn't earned. But I stepped forward and I took the broom out of her hand and leaned it against the counter, and I said what I did know. I'm not going anywhere, I said.
And I'm asking you not to either. She looked at me. For 10 years, I went everywhere I was ordered. Every country, every checkpoint, every road they told me to walk. I never once chose to stay anywhere.