I Don't Need Your Blue Roses Anymore novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Dye Comes Off

Anneliese goes to cancel the pink roses and meets Nate, the florist who has dyed her blue roses for six years. His order cards are in Mallory's handwriting, not Dean's, and he says Mallory once told him she was Anneliese's sister.

Frances would only tell me one thing about the cottage before bed.

"Don't ask your father about it tonight," she said. "Ask him in front of people."

I slept in my mother's old room under a quilt that smelled of lavender.

In the morning I found an email in my inbox that I had never read properly.

It was an order confirmation, copied to me as "the bride."

*Three hundred pink roses, delivered Friday to the upstairs room. Hensley & Stem, Altadena. Paid in full.*

Mallory had put my name on it so I would stop opening the vendor emails.

It had worked for months.

I drove down to Altadena and found the shop between a laundromat and a bakery.

The sign said *Hensley & Stem* in small gold letters, and the window was full of hydrangeas.

A bell rang when I pushed the door.

Inside, a man was standing at a long steel table with a rose in one hand and a knife in the other.

He was about my age, tall, with dark hair and gray eyes.

His forearms were stained blue-green up to the elbow.

"Be right with you," he said, and trimmed the stem.

"I'm here to cancel an order," I said. "Three hundred pink roses. For Friday."

He set the knife down and wiped his hands.

"That one's under Mallory Stafford," he said.

"I'm the one the party is for."

"Then you're the bride," he said. "Anneliese Wardell."

"How do you know my name?"

"Your name's on every card I've written for six years."

He went to a filing box under the counter and came back with a stack of cards held together by a rubber band.

I did not understand what I was looking at until he fanned them out.

There was one for each year in March.

*One dozen blue roses, delivered to Anneliese Wardell. Card to read: "Because you're my favorite color."*

"Dean sent you those," he said.

"Dean told me he had a florist who did something special every year," I said. "He said it took him weeks to find the right shade."

"There's no right shade," the man said. "Blue roses don't grow. I dye white ones."

He held up his stained forearm. The dye had gone into the skin.

"It comes off on your hands," he said. "I told Mallory to warn him."

"It came off on mine every time," I said.

I had washed my hands in the bathroom at every birthday dinner and thought nothing of it.

He looked at me for a moment, and he didn't say he was sorry in a rehearsed way.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I should have said something."

"You didn't know."

"I knew who ordered them," he said. "I never knew whether you knew."

He turned over the top card.

The order slip was clipped to it.

It was written in a looping hand that I had seen on every birthday present since seventh grade, and on every note she ever left for me on my fridge.

*Dean's card. Sincere, no jokes. Don't let T see it's a template. Charge his card ending 8812.*

That was Mallory's handwriting.

I read it twice.

The man waited without speaking.

"Seven years of blue roses," I said. "And he never wrote a word of it."

"Six years of roses," he said. "He didn't write the card, either."

He put the cards back in the box and did not hurry.

"Do you want the pink order canceled?" he asked.

"Yes."

"Then I'll cancel it and refund it to the card it was paid on."

"That's my grandmother's money," I said. "I'd rather have it in my account."

"Then it'll go to your account," he said.

He tapped something into the register.

"Name's Nate Hensley," he said. "It'll take a day to clear."

"Anneliese," I said, and then laughed at myself, because he already knew.

I turned to go.

"Anneliese."

I stopped at the door.

"Dean has never come into this shop," Nate said. "Not once. In six years, you're the first person on that card I've ever seen in person."

"Mallory ordered everything by phone?"

"By phone, and sometimes in the shop," he said. "She stood right where you're standing."

He looked down at the rose in his hand.

"Last year she told me she was your sister," he said.

The bell rang over my head as I went out, and I sat in my car for a long time with the engine off.

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