GIDEON
It started with a question from Petra.
“The dinner reservation is confirmed for tomorrow. Should I arrange flowers for the table?”
I had said yes without thinking. Then I had spent the next thirty seconds not thinking about it, and the thirty seconds after that thinking about it too much, and then I had pulled up a supplier contact and started looking at arrangements before I’d properly decided to.
That was an hour ago.
I was still looking.
Not at arrangements. At a specific flower that had no business being this difficult to source in the Pacific Northwest in late autumn and that I was now apparently committed to finding because I had noticed weeks ago, in passing, in the way I noticed everything about her, that Isla was scrolling on her phone and looked at the peonies for a
