by Lucy Kevin
“I’m sorry, Mom,” she said at last. “I shouldn’t have brought up Dad.”
“Well,” her mother said softly, “I’ve never been the best of role models when it comes to relationships, have I?”
Perhaps she hadn’t, but Phoebe finally understood that love didn’t follow a strict list of rules and regulations.
It happened whether you wanted it or not.
“You did your best,” Phoebe said.
“We both still got hurt, though, didn’t we?”
Phoebe was only starting to realize that sometimes you couldn’t help hurting people, even when you didn’t want to. Even when you cared about them.
Especially when you cared about them.
“I’m sorry,” she said again.
“I know. So am I.” Her mother put an arm around her. “You see, making up with someone isn’t all that bad, is it?”
Phoebe shook her head. Her mother was one thing, but Patrick was another. Her mother was family. She had a feeling it wouldn’t be quite as easy with Patrick.
He wasn’t tied to her by blood, so what was to stop him walking away the way her father had? The way so many of the men her mother had dated had?
Yet wasn’t there something almost brave about that? Just as Patrick had once said, “Sometimes the rewards are worth the risk. And even if the odds aren’t great, they’re still so much better than if we never take a risk at all.”
Patrick had been perfectly honest with her from the start about the way he felt, and his belief that love was something to be cherished. It had seemed like such a foolish way to look at life, but now she finally understood that the alternatives weren’t much better.
Phoebe looked up, out of her mother’s window. It was getting dark, but for a moment or two, it seemed like she could see things more clearly than she had for a long time. She impulsively hugged her mother.
“Thanks, Mom.”
“For what?”
“For everything. For being there for me whenever I’ve needed you. For teaching me to love beauty and cherish it.”
“You’re welcome, honey,” her mother said. Phoebe thought she heard something catch in her mother’s voice as she said it. “Are you going to stay tonight?”
“Thanks, but I need to get back home.”
“You’re sure?”
Phoebe nodded. “There’s something I have to do.”
Chapter Seventeen
By the time Phoebe arrived at the Rose Chalet early the next morning, things were well in motion for Marge Banning’s wedding that evening. RJ was setting out furniture. Tyce was running through a last minute sound check, though Phoebe didn’t remember much punk being on Marge Banning’s set list last time around. Rose was bustling around, fetching the linen for the tables, rushing over to the kitchens to make sure that the food was going well, and looking like she was absolutely convinced that the whole thing was going to fall apart any second. She was behaving exactly like she normally did on the morning of a wedding, in other words.
Rose looked around as Phoebe walked in. “Where were you yesterday? I thought you’d be here in the afternoon getting ready. Did you get my text messages?”
Phoebe was too tired to come up with a good answer to that. “Sacramento.”
“Sacramento? What were you doing in Sacramento?” Rose shook her head. “No, there’s no time. Are you okay? You look like you’ve been up all night.”
“I have.” Which was probably not the best thing to admit to her boss right then. Even if it was Rose. But Phoebe wasn’t able to keep the separation between work and personal life any longer. She wasn’t frankly sure that she wanted to anymore.
She expected Rose to read her the riot act. Instead, her boss simply put a hand on her arm. “I hope everything’s okay.”
Phoebe felt those darn tears spring back up. She swallowed hard. “I hope it will be, too.” She forced a trembling smile. “I’ve got a lot of work to do on the arrangements. Because Marge deserves the best wedding ever, don’t you think?”
Surprise gave way to a smile on Rose’s face. “Yes,” the other woman said, “she definitely does.”
Phoebe headed off to her work room, where the flowers were waiting for her thanks to RJ and her suppliers. She put her laptop down on the workbench, determined to concentrate on her centerpieces, but her heart wasn’t in it. Not when she still hadn’t managed to make any headway on her plan from the previous day. After she’d returned home from her mother’s house, she’d spent hours making calls and sending out dozens of email queries to locate what she was looking for. But she hadn’t found it yet. Even her friend Lisa hadn’t been able to help.
“I’m sorry, Phoebe,” Lisa had said, “can’t we substitute something else?”
“No,” Phoebe had insisted, “there’s a message in that particular flower.”
Turning away from the flowers in her chalet workroom, Phoebe opened her laptop back up and started scouring for florists she hadn’t approached yet. Although at this point, even if she could find the flower, could anyone possibly deliver it on time?
Finally, a man she was speaking to on the phone named Brian said, “I’m sure someone mentioned something to me about them recently. The trouble is I’m not sure if I can remember exactly who.”
“This is really important, and you’re the first glimmer of hope I’ve had so far,” she told him. “Please, if you could try your hardest to remember, it would mean so much to me.”
“I’ve got your number, so if I think of it, I promise to let you know.”
“Thank you. Thank you so much.” Phoebe put the phone down and looked up just as Rose walked into the room with RJ.
“Phoebe, I just wanted to check to make sure you had everything…oh my God. You’ve barely even started. What have you been doing?” Rose was clearly working hard to keep it together in the face of all the work Phoebe obviously hadn’t done on the centerpieces.
“What’s going on with you?” Frustration morphed to worry on Rose’s face. “I’ve never seen you like this. You’ve always been so reliable. So steady. If something’s wrong, you can tell me.”
But Phoebe didn’t know how she could possibly explain about what had happened with Patrick. Not with RJ right there behind Rose. Besides, she knew what everyone thought of her.
Phoebe, who didn’t have relationships.
Phoebe, who never let herself be hurt by anyone or anything.
And why did they think that? Because she’d worked very hard at making it true.
Except that right now it wasn’t.
“How about if I help out with the arrangements?” RJ suggested. “Tyce can take care of any issues with Tara. It’ll be nice to see him do something other than strum that guitar of his on the day of a wedding.” He turned to Rose and added, “Phoebe covered for me when it came to the work on your house. The least I can do is help her out today.”
Rose finally nodded, although she clearly looked reluctant to leave Phoebe in such a state. “Just let me know if you need anything today, okay? Anything at all.”
Phoebe had to swallow past the lump in her throat. “Okay. Thanks, Rose.”
Her boss hurried out, leaving Phoebe alone with RJ. He started picking out the flowers, looking them over.
“Do you have a design I can follow?”
She nodded and passed it over silently, not daring to speak. Not when all she wanted was to ask how Patrick was doing since he’d gone back to Chicago.
“So,” RJ asked, “is this about what happened with Patrick?”
Her mouth opened in shock. “You know about that?”
“Of course I know. He’s my brother. Even if he doesn’t tell me everything, I still know how he felt about you.”
She hesitated for a moment or two before asking, “And you’re still helping me? I mean, shouldn’t you hate me?”
“Of course not, Phoebe.” He shot a glance towards the door Rose had walked out through. “The truth is, we don’t always get what we want, and no one
can force two people to be happy together.”
She didn’t know what to say to that, not when Patrick was the one she should be talking to about this, not his brother. Fortunately, RJ seemed to understood as he changed the subject.
“We’d better get going with these arrangements, should we? At this rate, it will be a miracle if everything is ready for the wedding.”
Miracles. They seemed to need a lot of them at the moment. It was definitely what they’d need to get the arrangements for the wedding finished on time. And a miracle was almost certainly what it would take to fix things with Patrick after the way they’d argued. Unfortunately, as for the miracle of finding what she was looking for, the odds on that seemed to be getting longer by the second.
The hours passed by in a blur as she and RJ worked as fast their fingers would let them. And then, suddenly, her phone rang causing her to drop a handful of roses onto the floor.
She recognized the number, because it was the last one she’d called before Rose and RJ had walked in. She picked it up in breathless anticipation.
“Brian?”
“Hello, Phoebe. I think I have just remembered where to find what you were looking for. Actually, it’s slightly embarrassing that I didn’t realize where I’d seen them before now. My sister grows them. Only, she doesn’t sell them, so I’m not sure if it’s really any help to you. I guess that’s why it slipped my mind.”
On any other day, Phoebe might have left it there and kept looking, but today…well, if today wasn’t a day for taking chances, then when was?
“Could you give me her number? And if I can convince her to say yes, could you deal with the delivery side of things right away?”
“I guess so, though I really must warn you that the odds of Jane handing over one of her precious blooms aren’t good.”
“I’d like to try anyway,” Phoebe told him before hanging up then dialing the number she’d just been given. She introduced herself to the woman who answered and explained exactly what it was she wanted.
“I’m sorry,” Jane said on the other end of the phone, “but my brother’s right. I’m not a florist, and if I sell you one, then hundreds of other people will want them. Soon, I won’t have much of a garden left.”
“Please,” Phoebe said, offering the woman the bulk of the contents of her last paycheck, enough that RJ’s eyes widened from across the worktable.
“Please, I can’t take your money. Especially not that much,” Jane said. “They really aren’t for sale. You sound like a perfectly nice young woman, but I’m not here to fill flower orders for your customers.”
“This isn’t for one of my customers,” Phoebe pleaded. “This is for me. Please, I’m running out of options, and this is the only way to make things right with a man that I—” She took a deep breath, feeling RJ’s eyes on her. “—that I love.”
The other woman sighed. “If you had said anything else, anything other than this flower being about love...let’s call it fifty dollars, just to cover my brother’s trouble.”
“I can have the flower?” Phoebe felt hope finally spring to life inside of her, light breaking through the darkness, at last. “Oh, thank you. Thank you so much.”
“You’re welcome. Good luck with that man of yours. I hope he’s worth it.”
Phoebe had never been more sure of anything in her life. “He is.”
Chapter Eighteen
Patrick’s office was halfway up a block of buildings he had helped to design, giving him a view out over the Chicago skyline that was hard to match, as well as an address that attracted high end clients. The office itself was spacious and open, with models of previous buildings placed strategically around the room on stands, and a desk in the middle big enough for Patrick to work on blueprints by hand. A laptop sat on it, along with his phone and the papers relating to his upcoming project.
He was walking a slow circuit around the office, making his way around the models he’d built, looking for inspiration. Lord knew he needed it considering he hadn’t been able to start work on the changes he needed to put in place for his new client’s house. It should have been a simple matter of moving a couple of rooms, but he couldn’t quite find the balance of the space.
What, he wondered every few minutes, was Phoebe doing? She’d be working on the flowers for Marge Banning’s wedding by now, wouldn’t she?
Patrick could easily picture her sorting through the blooms with a deft touch, frowning just slightly as she concentrated on making it as beautiful, and meaningful, a display as anyone could. Tyce and RJ would be there, too, all three of them joking around to lighten the mood despite the pressure to put on another perfect wedding at Rose’s chalet.
For what had to be the hundredth time, Patrick pulled his phone out of his pocket and scanned through the address book for Phoebe’s name...but his finger stopped short of making the call.
She’d been so clear that they were over.
And that she didn’t want anything else from him.
Patrick put the phone down, even though his instincts said that he shouldn’t, that he should phone her...and that he shouldn’t give up until she saw how good what they’d had was.
Only, the unassailable truth was that a relationship took two people. However much he wanted what they could have had, it only worked if Phoebe wanted it as well. That thought was frustrating enough that Patrick barely realized he had a stack of papers crushed in his fist moments before he destroyed them.
He forced himself to turn back to figuring out a way to make his new clients’ requirements work. He’d done it plenty of times before. It was just a case of focusing in on the kind of couple that his new clients were.
And what about the kind of couple you and Phoebe would have made?
Patrick tried with all his might to ignore that thought. But, again and again, every time he tried to start work on the plans, all that came to mind were visions of Phoebe.
Playing miniature golf blindfolded.
Leading him through the labyrinth at Grace Cathedral.
Kissing him for the very first time.
Her softness as she lay against him, when he’d told her that he loved her.
And then the way she’d all but kicked him out of her apartment the next morning as soon as he’d mentioned needing to work on a long-distance project.
Knowing he had to think about something else if he was ever going to get any work done, he moved over to the window, looking out at Chicago. With any luck the sight of the city would inspire him. It generally did, even if it was occasionally just by reminding him of what he’d done before. After all, he’d been part of the architectural team on several of the newer buildings.
He let his gaze drift along the city’s skyline, determined to come up with an answer this time. Briefly, his eyes flicked down to take in a restaurant just across the street from his office, a fancy French place that even he’d had trouble getting into. Patrick winced as he remembered that date. The woman he’d been with had been nice enough, he guessed, but the whole occasion had been so stilted and formal that they’d never gotten to know a thing about one another. That relationship hadn’t lasted long.
Patrick shifted his gaze to where Wrigley Field sat farther away, but easily visible from so high up. That date had been even more disastrous with a woman he’d met at an architectural awards show. It had just seemed so obvious at the time that they should date, since they were about the same age, working in the same field, and at least a little attracted to one another at the awards. Patrick had surprised her with two tickets to a Cubs game. It had turned out that she didn’t like baseball, or any sports at all, come to that. She hadn’t liked nachos, or any of the other snacks that had seemed like such an essential part of the experience to Patrick. She’d even spent most of the game complaining that in a world that valued architects, they’d be allowed to pull down places like this and re-design them “properly.” They hadn’t gone on a second date.
More memories of dating disasters came
back to haunt him one by one. There had been the one where he had suggested indoor rock climbing, and his date had pulled out. And then another where it had been obvious from the moment they sat down together at a restaurant that they simply weren’t right for one another. There had been others where things had started all right, then simply petered out. Where the woman he’d been dating had seemed nice enough, but they simply hadn’t clicked well enough to want to go to the next level.
Whereas, in the short time he’d been with Phoebe, Patrick had gotten closer to her than to anyone else before. She loved doing crazy, offbeat things as much as he did. She was smart, and strong, and caring enough that she’d been able to cope with her mother and the demands of her job at the chalet.
If only she didn’t build up all those walls around herself to keep people out, they could…
A knock came at his office door. He went over to open it and found a man in his fifties holding a long, slender box.
“Mr. Knight?”
“Yes, that’s me.”
“Oh, good,” the man said, sounding incredibly relieved. “If you wouldn’t mind signing to say that you received it, that would be very helpful.”
He pulled out a small notepad from his jacket pocket and Patrick signed as he looked at the box, trying to work out what might be inside the plain white container.
“Do you know what this is?”
“I’m sorry, but the young lady asked me not to say anything. She did send a note though.” The man handed over a small envelope. “I can tell you that she went to a great deal of trouble over this, though. My sister normally doesn’t let anyone have her…well, that would spoil the surprise, wouldn’t it? I suppose that there has to be some kind of confidentiality for florists.”
Florists? That word was enough that Patrick almost ripped the box open there and then.
“Enjoy,” the man said, turning and leaving Patrick holding the box as he walked away.
