I had anticipated Julian's desperation. What I hadn't anticipated was its utter lack of originality.
The first bouquet arrived on Tuesday. It was a monstrous thing—two dozen long-stemmed red roses, the kind of generic, thoughtless gesture one makes when they can't remember the recipient's favorite flower. Mine were peonies, a fact I’d mentioned at least a dozen times over three years. He’d never been listening.
The bouquet was accompanied by a card written in his familiar, arrogant scrawl. *'For my Serena. Let's go back to the beginning.'*
Evelyn, my executive assistant, had it brought to my office with the kind of cautious trepidation one might use to handle a live explosive. She placed it on the far corner of my vast rosewood desk, as if its sentimentality might be contagious.
I didn
