The Rose Refund Revenge

Chapter 3 The Fallout

It took forty-five minutes for the video to hit the internet.

I didn't post it. Someone else did. A neighbor on the same floor had heard the music through the wall and come out to see what was going on, and they had filmed the wreath on the floor with Elena's name on it and the organ music still playing. They posted it with a caption: Someone just got the world's most dramatic breakup.

The clip went wide by evening. Not viral, not yet, but wide enough that a local blog picked it up and wide enough that Elena Marsh saw it.

She called me at 8:30 that night. I don't know how she got my number. Maybe from the order confirmation, or maybe from the video, which had a clear shot of the ribbon I had lettered.

"Is this Olivia Thorne?" Her voice was steady, but there was a c***k in it, the kind that comes before crying or before breaking something.

"This is Liv."

"I saw the video. The wreath. My name." She paused. "Did you do that?"

"I did."

"Why?"

I took a breath. Then I told her everything. The order. The refund request. The note that said she had died. The three previous refunds under different names, all to the same address, all with the same theatrical grief. I told her about Maren and the refund queue and the two years I had spent letting people take things from me because fighting was expensive and I was tired.

She was quiet for a long time after I finished. I could hear her breathing. Then I heard her set the phone down, and I heard a sound like a drawer opening and closing, and then she came back.

"I'm supposed to meet his family tomorrow," she said. "His parents. The Ashfords. He told me they were ready to accept me. He told me he had a ring."

"Elena."

"He told me he loved me."

I closed my eyes. "He told my shop you were dead so he could get three hundred dollars back."

She made a sound that wasn't quite a laugh. "Three hundred dollars."

"Yeah."

"I paid for our anniversary dinner last month. It was four hundred. He said his card was declined and he would pay me back."

I didn't say anything. There was nothing to say that wouldn't sound like pity, and pity wasn't what she needed.

"I'm going to the dinner," she said finally.

"Elena, you don't have to—"

"I'm going to the dinner," she repeated. "And I'm going to find out what his parents know."

She hung up before I could answer.

I sat in my kitchen with the phone in my hand and the city lights outside my window, and I felt something turn over in my chest. I had started something. I had wanted to embarrass a liar and make him pay for a refund he didn't deserve. But I had also handed a stranger the truth about her relationship, and now she was walking into a house full of people who might have been in on it.

I didn't sleep again that night.