Author:
The Florist's Almanac
Romance Literary Fiction Slow Burn Slow Burn Literary Fiction Romance
The first time Lila met Jonah, she was buying flowers for someone else's wedding. He was the only employee in the shop and he had dirt on his left cheekbone and he was very serious about peonies, specifically about which peonies held up under sustained heat, which she found both charming and slightly overwhelming at seven-thirty on a Tuesday morning. She left with flowers that were, she later admitted, significantly better than the ones she'd planned to buy. She did not think about him again until February, at a funeral.
They kept meeting at the wrong times. This was something they both came to recognize and then to not mention and then, eventually, to mention sideways, in the way that people mention things they are afraid to say directly. At the baby shower in March she had a boyfriend she was three weeks from leaving. At the gallery opening in August he had just gotten a piece of news he was not ready to talk about. At Christmas she was home, wherever home was that year, and he was somewhere she didn't know.
She started keeping track in the back of her planner, because she was the kind of person who kept track of things, because it felt important to have evidence of something she couldn't explain. The entries got longer over time. Not dramatic — just more particular. The way he laughed. The specific look he got when he was thinking about something he wasn't saying. She wrote 'wrong time again' after each one, and told herself she was documenting a pattern, and did not examine too closely what she was hoping the pattern would eventually become.
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