Page 88 of The Floral Arrangement

Roz bent down and inspected the roses suspiciously.

“Don’t worry, I de-thorned them already.”

“Thank god.” Roz let out a sound somewhere between a huff and a chuckle and then bent down, picked a large pink rose out of the bucket and tenderly threaded it into the wire. She tugged at it gently. “It seems stable enough. Is that okay?”

“Perfect.” The lump was still there, bobbing as I spoke.

I selected another dusty-pink rose and inserted it into the arch. The silence felt heavy. Perhaps talking about something that wasn’t related to our non-existent relationship would help.

I asked the first thing that jumped into my mind, something I’d been wondering for weeks. “Why do you hate flowers so much?”

Roz went very still. Had I hit a nerve? After a moment, she peered around the arch to look at me, her lips pressed together, as if she was trying to decide whether or not to let me in on her flower-hating secret. “Have you ever gotten sick after eating something and never wanted to eat that thing again?”

I tilted my head and stared at her. “Is this about quark again? If you really don’t want to try it, I won’t force you to.”

Roz let out a small chuckle. “No, it’s not about the quark. But something similar happened to me with flowers.”

I frowned. “You ate flowers and got sick? Um, you do know most flowers aren’t edible.” I thought Roz was smarter than that. “I mean, you can eat pansies, violas, lavender and even roses, but I personally think flowers are better admired for their looks rather than consumed.”

Roz snorted. “No, I didn’t eat flowers.”

I stared, waiting. “Okay…”

Roz turned her attention back to the red rose she was holding, pushing it slowly into the greenery. “I dated women when I was at college, but after that, work really became my life. When you’re working fifteen-hour days, it’s hard enough to fit in exercise and sleep, let alone see people.”

My stomach sank. The whole point of this conversation was to steer clear of discussing our relationship. Why was Roz talking about dating?

“I can imagine,” I said, plucking a gorgeous deep-purple rose from the bucket. “I found dating tricky enough in between hanging out with friends, doing all the things I love—like kayaking, hiking and reading—and work, and I don’t even work long hours.” Although, I had managed to fit fake dating Roz into my life quite easily… so perhaps the issue wasn’t that I hadn’t had time before, but that I just wasn’t that interested in it.

Roz paused, staring into the distance. “When I was twenty-seven, I met a woman, Sadie, at my parents’ holiday party. She was a couple of years older than me and worked at my dad’s law firm. Things got intense, quickly… She wanted to see me all the time, showered me with compliments, bought me expensive watches and told me she loved me after only a few weeks. We moved into her apartment after six weeks.”

My heart clenched. I really didn’t want to hear about Roz’s amazing love story right now. Could I change the subject, or would that be rude? It felt rude. And I was still curious about the genesis story for Roz’s disdain of flowers, even if she seemed to have gone off on a tangent.

I held back a sigh. “Oh wow. That does sound intense.”

“Yeah. I think deep down I knew something was off?—”

Off? Okay. Maybe this wasn’t the amazing love story I’d first assumed.

“But Sadie was so into me and she seemed like the perfect partner on paper—attractive, successful, smart, outgoing and wanted a family like me.”

I nearly dropped the rose I was holding. Roz wanted a family?

“And”—Roz cleared her throat—“I think I was flattered by her attention. She proposed to me after three months, and I said yes.”

My eyebrows shot up. Roz getting engaged after three months did not compute. She was so measured and sensible.

Roz sighed. “After that, things went rapidly downhill. Instead of giving me over-the-top compliments all the time, she started constantly criticizing my appearance, making comments about how socially awkward I was, that sort of thing. I rarely socialized, but the few times I did go out, she’d get furious if I didn’t respond to her messages or calls immediately. She even accused me of cheating on her with a straight friend once. I was devastated. I couldn’t work out what I’d done.”

Heat shot through my veins. What an awful way to treat someone. “It doesn’t sound like you’d done anything wrong at all. So, what did you do?”

“I felt trapped. We’d announced the engagement. I’d given up my apartment lease. My parents were thrilled their daughter was dating an eligible woman who was on the partnership track. We’d moved so quickly; we had our future all planned out—buying a house, having kids, getting a dog. Leaving her seemed like such a huge step. And my job was so busy—you have to work to the bone in management consulting firms, especially if you’re trying to make partner—so I barely had time to myself to figure out what to do. Every time I started seriously considering leaving her, she’d get better again, for a period, and I’d think maybe things weren’t so bad after all.”

I grimaced. “It sounds like she was a master manipulator.”

“Yeah. That’s what Matt said when he finally pulled me aside at a family lunch, told me I looked like shit and asked what was going on. I’d never heard the term ‘love-bombing’ before, but when Matt sent me an article about it afterward, it all started to fit into place. Matt also raised the possibility that she might be pursuing me partly to advance her own career, given she worked at the same law firm as my dad and he was a senior partner with a lot of influence. He was convinced—and still is—that she was a psychopath.” Roz pressed another flower into the arch.

“Jeez!” I’d stopped trying to work now and was just standing still, listening intently.

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