The Starving Heart

Chapter Two: The Succulent Dies (And So Does Something Else)

The succulent died on Day Three, which Maya took as a sign.

She was not a superstitious person. She did not avoid ladders or black cats or the number thirteen. She walked under scaffolding without a second thought and had once opened an umbrella indoors just to prove a point to her college roommate, who had screamed as if Maya had summoned a demon.

But the succulent's death felt different. It felt deliberate.

She had placed it on her kitchen windowsill, next to the aloe plant that had survived her neglect for three years and the basil that she watered so aggressively it had developed a martyr complex. The succulent had been fine on Day One. Plump. Green. Unremarkable but alive. On Day Two, one of its leaves had turned brown at the edge. On Day Three, it had collapsed into itself like a small, defeated animal.

Maya stood over it with a spray bottle in one hand and a growing sense of existential dread in the other.

"You killed it," said her roommate, Lena, who had appeared in the doorway wearing pajamas covered in cartoon avocados. Lena was a PhD student in marine biology and the least judgmental person Maya had ever met, which was fortunate because Maya was a constant source of material.

"I didn't kill it," Maya said. "It was already dying when I brought it home."

"You brought it home from a funeral."

"So?"

"So funerals are where things go to die. You brought a funeral succulent into our apartment. What did you expect?"

Maya had no answer to this. She threw the succulent in the compost bin and spent the rest of the morning avoiding Lena's knowing looks.

The problem was not the succulent. The problem was that Maya could not stop thinking about Sam.

She had not expected to think about him at all. He was a stranger. A man with a crooked tie and a practiced smile and a mother who had died five years ago. He had sat next to her for forty-five minutes, made her laugh during a eulogy, and then disappeared into the gray afternoon without asking for her number or her last name or anything else.

He had left the succulent. That was all.

But Maya had replayed their conversation so many times in her head that the words had started to feel memorized rather than remembered. *You must be the niece. I brought this. Is that weird? And yet, here we both are.*

She had told no one about him. Not Lena. Not her mother, who called every Sunday to ask if Maya was "putting herself out there." Not her best friend, Jules, who had appointed herself Maya's romantic advisor after a disastrous situationship with a man named Kevin who had cried during s*x and then blamed it on the music.

This was her secret. A strange man at a funeral. A succulent that had died. A feeling she could not name.

On Day Four, Maya did something uncharacteristic: she googled the funeral home.

The website was aggressively beige. Photos of smiling staff members in sensible blazers. Testimonials from families who had apparently enjoyed their loved ones' memorial services. A list of upcoming events that included a grief support group and a seminar on "Pre-Planning Your Legacy (It's Never Too Early!)."

Nothing about Sam. No mention of a man with a crooked tie.

She tried searching for his name instead. But she didn't know his last name. She didn't know anything about him except that his mother had died five years ago and that he attended funerals for strangers.

This was, Maya realized, an extremely strange thing to do.

She closed her laptop and went to work.

---

Maya Okada was a graphic designer at a small branding agency called Fathom Creative. She had been there for four years, which meant she was no longer the new girl but also not yet the person anyone remembered when layoffs came around. She designed logos. She chose fonts. She made PowerPoint presentations look less like PowerPoint presentations. It was not the career she had imagined when she was twenty-two and full of dreams about album covers and gallery openings, but it paid the rent and came with health insurance, which were two things that album covers had never promised her.

Her desk was in the corner of an open-plan office, next to a window that faced a brick wall. She had decorated it with a small collection of ceramic animals — a fox, a hedgehog, a rabbit with a chipped ear — and a framed print of a Hokusai wave. It was the kind of desk that said *I have a personality* without saying anything too specific.

Her coworker, Derek, leaned over the cubicle wall. "You look terrible."

"Thank you, Derek."

"Rough night?"

"I killed a succulent."

Derek blinked. "Is that... a euphemism?"

"No. I literally killed a succulent. It was a gift from a stranger at a funeral."

"See, this is why I don't go to funerals." Derek disappeared back behind the wall, then reappeared a moment later with a bag of pretzels. "People give you plants, and then you have to keep them alive, and then you fail, and then you feel bad. It's a trap."

Maya took a pretzel. "It wasn't really a gift. He left it behind. I took it."

"Who left it behind?"

"The stranger."

Derek chewed thoughtfully. "So let me get this straight. You went to a funeral for someone you didn't know. You met a stranger. He left a plant. You took the plant. The plant died. And now you're sad about the plant?"

"I'm not sad about the plant."

"Then what are you sad about?"

Maya didn't answer. Because the truth was too complicated and too stupid to say out loud. She wasn't sad. She was *haunted*. Not by the succulent, but by the possibility that Sam existed — that there were people in the world who attended funerals for strangers, who carried succulents as shields, who smiled without their eyes — and that she would never see him again.

That was the part that bothered her. Not the loss. The *almost*.

---

At lunch, she called Jules.

Jules answered on the second ring, which meant she was between clients. She was a physical therapist with the energy of a golden retriever and the romantic history of a telenovela. "Maya! I was just thinking about you! I had a dream last night that you married a man who made artisanal pickles. Is that something you're considering? Because I support it."

"I went to a funeral," Maya said.

"Who died?"

"My great-aunt. I never met her."

"Oh, honey. That's the worst kind of funeral. You have to cry but you don't know why, so you just stand there feeling guilty about not feeling guilty enough." Jules paused. "Wait. Why are you calling me about this? You hate funerals. You cried at a pigeon funeral when we were twelve."

"The pigeon had a name, Jules. His name was Gerald."

"Gerald was a pest who pooped on my mother's car."

Maya took a breath. "There was a man there."

The line went silent. Then Jules said, very slowly, "A man."

"At the funeral. A stranger. He sat next to me."

"Maya Okada. Did you meet a man at a funeral?"

"It's not like that."

"What was he wearing?"

"A crooked tie."

"Oh my God. A crooked tie. That's adorable. That's the most adorable thing I've ever heard. Did you get his number?"

"He left a succulent. It died."

"Maya. Focus. The succulent is not the point. The man is the point. What was his name?"

"Sam."

"Sam. Just Sam? No last name?"

"He didn't offer one."

"Then you should have asked." Jules's voice took on the tone she used when explaining why Maya needed to stop dating men who played the ukulele. "Listen to me. You met a mysterious man at a funeral. He wore a crooked tie. He left you a plant. This is not a coincidence. This is the beginning of a story."

"It's not a story. It's a Tuesday."

"Every story starts on a Tuesday. What are you doing tomorrow night?"

"Nothing."

"Good. We're going to that new wine bar on Fourth Street. You're going to tell me everything. And then we're going to find this Sam person if it kills us."

"It won't kill us. I don't even know his last name."

"Details, Maya. Details."

Jules hung up before Maya could argue. She stared at her phone for a long moment, then put it down and returned to the logo she had been designing for a client who wanted something "vibrant but professional, modern but timeless, you know?"

She did not know. She never knew.

---

That evening, Maya walked home through the park instead of taking her usual route. The sun was setting, and the sky was the color of a bruise — purple and yellow and something softer. Children were playing on the swings. An old man was feeding pigeons. A couple was arguing quietly on a bench, their voices too low for Maya to hear the words but not too low to feel the tension.

She sat on a different bench and watched them.

She had never been in a real fight. Not the kind where two people said things they couldn't take back. Her last relationship — with Kevin, the ukulele player — had ended in a kind of slow, polite erosion. They had stopped calling each other. They had stopped texting. They had stopped noticing when the other person left the room. And then one day, Kevin had moved out while she was at work, leaving behind a single sock and a note that said, *This isn't working for me.*

No fight. No yelling. No succulent left behind.

Maya wondered what it would be like to argue with someone who cared enough to stay. To say something sharp and true and have it matter. To be seen clearly enough to be hurt.

She pulled out her phone and opened i********:. She didn't post much — a photo of her aloe plant here, a blurry picture of a sunset there — but she liked to scroll. It was a way of watching other people's lives without having to participate in her own.

And then she saw it.

A post from a local grief support group. A photo of a flyer taped to a lamppost. The text read:

*Grief Doesn't Have to Be Lonely*

*Weekly Support Group*

*Wednesdays at 7 PM*

*St. Mark's Community Center*

*All are welcome. No registration required.*

At the bottom of the flyer, in handwriting that looked like it had been added as an afterthought: *Bring something that reminds you of who you've lost.*

Maya stared at the post for a long time.

She was not grieving. Not really. Her great-aunt had been a stranger. Her grandfather had died when she was seven, and she remembered him only as a smell — tobacco and menthol and something sweet. Her goldfish had been named Gerald II, and she had flushed him down the toilet without ceremony.

But Sam was grieving. Sam, who had come to a stranger's funeral because her name was the same as his mother's. Sam, who smiled without his eyes. Sam, who carried succulents like shields.

If she wanted to find him — if she wanted to see him again — she needed to go where the grieving people went.

It was manipulative. She knew that. It was strange and maybe a little desperate, and if she told Jules, Jules would probably high-five her and call it "initiative."

But Maya didn't tell Jules. She saved the post to her phone. And on Wednesday at 6:45 PM, she put on a black sweater and walked to St. Mark's Community Center, carrying nothing but her phone and a small ceramic fox she had stolen from her desk.

The fox reminded her of nothing. But she needed something to hold.

---

The community center was a beige building with a cracked sidewalk and a sign that flickered. The grief support group met in the basement, in a room that smelled like coffee and dust and the particular sadness of folding chairs arranged in a circle.

Maya was the first to arrive.

She sat in the corner chair, the one closest to the door, and clutched her ceramic fox like a talisman. The room had a whiteboard with the word *WELCOME* written in dry-erase marker, the letters slightly smudged. A pot of coffee sat on a folding table, next to a box of stale-looking donuts.

At 6:58, the others began to trickle in.

First came a woman in her sixties with a beaded purse and eyes that looked like they had been crying for years. Then a man in a baseball cap who sat as far from everyone else as possible. Then a teenager with purple hair and headphones around her neck, accompanied by a woman who was clearly her mother.

And then, at 7:03, Sam walked through the door.

He was wearing a different tie — this one straight, navy blue, almost professional — but the rest of him was the same. The same guarded posture. The same careful way of looking at a room before entering it. The same face that Maya had been unable to forget for four days.

He saw her.

His step faltered. Just for a moment. Then he recovered, walked to the coffee table, poured himself a cup, and sat down in the chair directly across from hers.

The facilitator — a kind-faced woman named Deirdre with a clipboard and a voice like warm milk — began the meeting. "Welcome, everyone. Thank you for being here. Tonight, I'd like us to go around the circle and share something about the person we're grieving. It can be a memory, a feeling, a question. Anything at all."

The woman with the beaded purse went first. She spoke about her husband of forty-two years, who had died of cancer in the spring. She had brought a photograph of him holding a fish. The man in the baseball cap spoke about his brother, who had died by suicide. He did not bring anything. He just sat there with his hands in his lap, staring at the floor.

The teenager spoke about her grandmother. The mother spoke about her father.

Then it was Sam's turn.

He set down his coffee cup. He looked at the ceiling for a moment, then at his hands, then at Maya. "My mother died five years ago," he said. "Her name was Eleanor. She loved succulents. She had thirty-seven of them on her porch, and she named every single one after characters from *The Golden Girls*."

A few people laughed. Sam did not.

"I came to this group for the first time last week," he continued. "Before that, I didn't talk about her. I didn't tell anyone anything. I went to funerals instead. Strangers' funerals. Because at a funeral, you can cry without explaining why."

Deirdre nodded slowly. "And how does that feel? Going to funerals?"

"It felt like hiding," Sam said. "And I'm tired of hiding."

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small, smooth stone — gray, unremarkable, the kind you might pick up from a riverbed. "This was hers. She carried it everywhere. It's not special. It's just a rock. But when I hold it, I remember that she was real. That she existed. That someone loved me enough to name a succulent after Sophia Petrillo."

The room was quiet. Maya felt something crack open in her chest — not painfully, but like ice breaking on a river in spring.

Then Deirdre turned to her. "And you? Would you like to share?"

Maya looked at Sam. Sam looked back.

She held up the ceramic fox. "I brought this," she said. "It doesn't remind me of anyone. I stole it from my desk because I didn't know what else to bring." She paused. "I came here because I met a stranger at a funeral last week, and I haven't been able to stop thinking about him. And I thought — if I want to understand him, I need to understand grief. And I don't. I've never lost anyone. Not really."

She set the fox on her lap. "I'm sorry. That's probably not why people come here."

Deirdre smiled. "People come here for all kinds of reasons. There's no wrong reason."

The meeting continued. Others shared. The coffee grew cold. The donuts remained uneaten.

And when the meeting ended, when the chairs were being folded and put away, Sam walked over to Maya and stood in front of her.

"You came," he said.

"You left a succulent," she said.

"It died, didn't it?"

"How did you know?"

"Because they always do." He smiled — a real smile this time, small and tired and honest. "I'm Sam, by the way. Sam Granger. I should have told you at the funeral."

"Maya Okada. I should have asked."

They stood there in the fluorescent light of the basement, surrounded by folding chairs and the ghost of bad coffee.

"I'm not looking for anything," Sam said quietly. "I just want you to know that. I'm not ready for — whatever this is. I don't even know what this is."

"I don't either," Maya said.

"Then maybe we can not know together."

It was not a love confession. It was not a promise. It was just two people in a beige basement, holding a rock and a ceramic fox, agreeing to be confused in the same direction.

Maya nodded. "Okay."

Sam nodded back. "Okay."

He walked her to the door. Outside, the sky was dark and the stars were beginning to appear, one by one, like small holes poked in the fabric of the night.

She did not kiss him. She did not hug him. She did not take his number.

But when she got home, she found a new succulent on her windowsill — small, green, alive — with a note tucked under the pot.

*This one is named Blanche. Try not to kill her.*

*— S*

Maya laughed until she cried.