What the Garden Grows
The morning dew still clung to the roses when I heard the crunch of expensive heels on the garden path. I didn’t need to look up. Only one person would wear Louboutins to walk through my father’s garden—as if beauty were a thing to be dominated rather than tended, as if the point of arriving somewhere was to damage it on the way in.
“Meline.” Her voice had that particular quality of sweetness applied like a coat of paint over something that doesn’t want to be covered.
“Still playing in the dirt, I see.”
I continued pruning the white roses. My father had planted them the year I got engaged—his wedding gift to me, before he knew I’d need a different kind of gift entirely.
He had chosen white because he said they represented the future more honestly than any other color: not perfect, not without thorns, but capable of becoming something beautiful if given the right conditions and tended with the right hands. The shears moved through the stems with the clean certainty of something that has been sharpened carefully and kept that way.
My father had taught me to keep tools sharp.
He had taught me a great many things that I was only now, standing in his garden after his death, beginning to fully understand. “Hello, Haley.”
She moved closer. Her shadow fell across the flower bed the way shadows do when someone wants you to feel it.
“You know why I’m here.
The reading is tomorrow, and Holden and I think it’s best if we discuss things civilly.”
I finally turned around. I wiped my soil-covered hands on my gardening apron and looked at the woman my ex-husband had left me for—the woman who had been his secretary for three years before she became his wife, who had spent those three years building herself into my life so carefully that I hadn’t noticed until the architecture was complete and I was standing in the rubble.
“There’s nothing to discuss,” I said. “This is my father’s house.”
“His estate,” Haley corrected.
Her perfectly painted lips curved into something that wasn’t quite a smile.
“And since Holden was like a son to Miles for fifteen years, we believe we’re entitled to our fair share.”
The pruning shears felt heavier in my hand. “The same Holden who cheated on his daughter with his secretary? That Holden?”
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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