NEVER MEANT FOR A KING BUT HIS TO CLAIM

FLORA

Kendal Pov

Flora arrives at five past seven carrying a pot of rice and stew still warm through the cloth, a bulging bag of things I never asked for but will definitely need by Thursday, and the particular energy of a woman who has already decided tonight will not be spent pretending everything is fine.

I open the door, and she looks at me for one second, that single, practiced second. Flora needs to read the slump in my shoulders, the tightness around my eyes, the way my hand still rests on the door like I might close it again. Then she steps past me without waiting for an invitation.

“Sit down,” she says.

“It’s my flat.”

“Sit down in your flat.”

I sit.

She moves into the kitchen like she owns the place, which she practically does after eleven years of this. Drawers open and close with more noise than strictly necessary, her way of announcing she’s here and she’s not leaving until she’s fed me and said what she came to say. She finds the plates without asking because she knows exactly where everything lives in this small, overworked space.

She comes back with two full plates and that look. The one that says she’s been turning something over on the bus the whole way here, and now it’s coming out.

But she doesn’t say it yet.

She sets the plate in front of me. Sits. Picks up her fork. Eats.

This is how Flora loves: she feeds you first. Always. Her mother taught her, and her grandmother taught her mother — generations of Black women who understood that a person running on empty cannot receive comfort, truth, or even a proper telling-off. You fill the stomach before you touch the heart.

So I eat.

And it’s good. It’s always good. The rice is soft but not mushy, and the stew is rich with that deep, slow-cooked flavor that tastes like someone actually cared while making it. I can taste the care in every bite. That is not a small thing when your days are mostly made of corners cut and things endured.

We talk the way we always talk, fast then slow, funny then honest, circling the hard parts without ever naming them too soon. She tells me about the colleague at work who is not bad enough to report but bad enough that Flora replays the micro-aggressions on the night bus like a bad song she can’t get out of her head. I tell her about the calculations that have been running in my head all day. The boiler that my mum needed money for. The other four things that need sorting, and which three I’ve already decided will get done first this week.

She listens the way only Flora listens, fully present, not drafting her reply while I’m still speaking. Her eyes stay on me. Her fork moves, but her attention doesn’t waver.

“And also Dan,” she says when I finish, casual as anything.

I look at my plate. “What about him?”

“You said four things. You only told me three. Is that the fourth thing?”

Flora has known me for eleven years. She can still count better than I can sometimes.

“He sent money,” I say, pushing rice around with my fork. “For Milton. First time in four months. No message. Just the amount sitting there like that’s supposed to mean something.”

She is quiet. Not the quiet of someone who doesn’t know what to say, Flora always knows—the quiet of someone deciding exactly how sharp the knife needs to be.

“How do you feel about it?” she asks.

“It’s for Milton. It’s not about how I feel.”

“Kenda.”

“I know that’s not what you asked.”

I put the fork down. Stare at the wall behind her. Remember standing on the bus this morning, seeing his name in the transaction, waiting for the old familiar punch of anger, exhaustion, that complicated ache that used to live in my chest like a tenant who refused to leave. Nothing came. Just a flat, ringing silence where something noisy used to be.

“Nothing,” I say finally. “I felt nothing. Like a signal that finally went quiet.”

Flora watches me for a long moment. Then she nods once, slowly. “People like Dan always feel it when a woman stops needing them. Eventually, it frightens them. They come back performing — some version of I’ve been thinking, some version of I want to be better.”

“I know.”

“And you’ll handle it the same way you handle everything else.”

“Which is how?”

She picks her fork back up. “By being exactly who you are. Which is the most inconvenient thing in the world for men like Dan?”

I almost smile. She’s not wrong. She’s rarely wrong about me, which is both the best and occasionally the most annoying thing about Flora.

Later, when the plates are empty and we’ve moved on to tea, she says, “How’s your sweetheart?”

I raise an eyebrow. “Who’s my sweetheart?”

“You know who.”

I can’t help the small, tired laugh that escapes. “Your sweetheart sent me a voice note yesterday. Do you wanna hear his voice?”

I get my phone. Find Milton’s voice note from last night, the one I’ve already played three times, standing at the kitchen window this morning, and press play.

Flora sits very still, mug balanced on her knee, listening like the rest of the world has gone quiet. When it ends, she doesn’t speak right away. She wraps both hands around the mug and lets something move across her face that she doesn’t quite catch in time.

“He negotiated the boy out of the crisps,” she says softly.

“With logic.”

“He’s eight, Kendal.”

“I know.”

“Play it again.”

I play it again. She listens with the same complete attention. When it finishes, she looks at me.

“He sounds like you,” she says. “The way he thinks. The way he handles things. That’s you.”

I don’t say anything. I look at my tea and feel the familiar ache rise, the one that lives somewhere between pride and guilt, and missing him so much it feels like a bruise that never quite heals.

“When did you last see him?” she asks gently.

“Six weeks ago. I’m going in three weeks.”

She nods. She doesn’t push. She knows what it costs me to say six weeks out loud, and she knows I don’t want to talk about the cost. So she sits with me in the quiet of it for a moment. That’s Flora—eleven years of knowing exactly what I need without making me beg for it.

We gushed on and on after that about nothing and everything, the way we always do when the night feels safe enough to stretch. She tells me another work story that makes me laugh despite myself. I complain about the boiler again, and she offers to come over next weekend to look at it with me. Thirty minutes slip by without either of us noticing, the kind of easy time that only happens with someone who has seen every version of you and stayed anyway.

Eventually, she glances at her phone and sighs. “Alright, I should call it a night.” She stands up, stretching her back with a small groan, and I walk her to the door.

She puts her coat on at the door just after half past nine.

We hug the way we always hug a beat longer than polite, her chin resting on top of my head, my arms tight around her middle. I let myself stay there for the seconds she gives me. I breathe her in. She smells like rice and stew and the particular perfume she’s worn since we met.

When she pulls back, she looks at me properly. “Are you alright?” Not the casual version. The real one.

I think about the man on the pavement outside my office today. The way the air changed when he was near. The strange, steady warmth from the bracelet on my wrist that I keep telling myself is nothing. I think about all of it and do what I always do: I file it. I put it in the crowded drawer where I keep things I cannot afford to feel right now.

“Yes,” I say. “I’m alright.”

She studies me for one more second. Then she nods, says goodnight, and turns toward the stairs. I watch her until she disappears around the corner before I close the door.

The flat feels different after she leaves. Smaller. Quieter in a way that makes the walls press in. I tidy up. Wash the plates. Do the small evening rituals that aren’t really about tonight, they’re about making tomorrow morning have one less thing waiting to bite me.

Ryan stays in his room. He came home earlier, read the flat's mood instantly, and gave us space without being asked. That’s Ryan. He’s learned to move gently in small spaces.

I go to my bedroom. Sit on the edge of the bed. The day is finally done.

I open my laptop to check the account one last time, not because anything will have changed, but because I need the number in front of me before sleep so I can wake up already knowing where I stand.

I check it. Close the laptop.

Then I see the email.

It’s sitting at the bottom of my inbox, under three work messages and a newsletter I’ve been meaning to unsubscribe from for months. Sender is a random string of letters and numbers—no subject line.

One sentence.

I see you.

I read it once. Read it again.

My thumb hovers over delete.

Instead, I close the laptop. Turn off the light. Lie in the dark and tell myself, firmly, sensibly, that it is nothing. A wrong address. Spam. Random noise.

Tomorrow I will wake up, do the adding up, sort the three things that can be sorted, and none of this will have changed anything about my life.

I tell myself this.

I almost believe it.

Almost.