As the Roses Bloomed Beneath His Feet, I Buried Our Seven-Year Marriage. novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: After the Gala
On her seventh anniversary Lena watches roses cover her husband's feet when the rescue doctor sits down, and asks for a divorce on the drive home. He tells her to ask again after the gala.
Dr. Carina Maddox walked up to our anniversary table in a plain white dress, and roses came up through the floor around my husband's shoes.
Red ones, dozens of them, climbing the table legs and spreading across the carpet of the restaurant where we'd had our first date.
Nobody else in the room saw them. Nobody ever does.
Flowers grow out of the ground around a person the moment they fall for someone. The deeper the feeling, the thicker and brighter they grow.
I have seen them since I was nine years old.
"Mr. Hatherton," Carina said. "What a coincidence."
Alister stood up with one arm still around my waist and held out his free hand to her.
His face was polite. His voice was steady. His shoes were buried in roses.
The night he proposed, I was twenty-two, and white camellias broke through the pavement and covered the whole street.
They spread wider than the street could hold, and I took that as the size of his love.
His best friend, Briggs Hargrove, stood at the curb with the car keys in his hand. He said congratulations, and a month later he took a job in Colorado.
By our seventh year, the flowers had stopped coming.
Alister said love was supposed to settle into something steadier. He came home on time every night. He kept one day a month just for me.
He had put every asset he owned in my name, and I told myself that was marriage at its best.
Three months ago he flew to Kestrel Ridge, where his company was planning a ski lodge, and an avalanche buried him.
Carina was the rescue doctor on the survey team. She got him down the mountain alive.
Afterward he put four million dollars into a rescue foundation and put her on its board. He said he owed her his life.
I signed where he told me to sign. I sent her a thank-you card.
Now she smiled at me over the candles and the cake with our names on it.
"I'm so sorry, am I interrupting?" She held up her phone. "I was meant to have dinner with a colleague, but he got called into surgery."
Alister didn't even look at me.
"Join us," he said.
He used to complain when a waiter stopped by our table twice. Now he was already pulling out the chair next to his own.
Carina didn't sit. She looked at me first.
"Mrs. Hatherton, you wouldn't mind?"
I watched the roses sway around Alister's ankles and shook my head.
"No."
Alister picked up the menu and ordered without reading it. Pan-seared sea bass, the wild mushroom soup, a chilled celery and apple salad.
"No peanuts in the salad," he told the waiter. "No black pepper in the soup. Her stomach is sensitive."
Carina laughed. "I only said that once, up on the mountain. You remembered?"
"You were sick all night during the rescue," Alister said. "It stuck."
They talked about the stars on Kestrel Ridge, so close you could nearly touch them.
They talked about the snow cave, and the dawn that finally broke over the storm.
I ate my dinner and said nothing, because every story they told started with the words "Do you remember."
Alister still took care of me. He passed the bread. He refilled my water glass before it was half empty.
Under the table, red stems curled up around his ring finger, crossed the gap between the chairs, and wound through Carina's slender fingers.
She never looked down. She couldn't see them.
On the drive home, Alister answered messages at every red light.
A name lit up at the top of his screen. Carina. Under it, a preview: Tell her tonight. You promised.
He saw me reading it and turned the phone face down in the cup holder.
"Something came up at the office, Lena," he said. "Don't read into it."
Streetlights slid across the window and across his hand on the wheel. His wedding ring was half hidden in roses that grew out of the floor of the car.
I thought about the seven years, and the hundred camellias, and the thank-you card I had sent the woman who was texting my husband.
So I said it.
"Alister, I want a divorce."
He kept both hands on the wheel. The roses didn't move.
He didn't ask why.
"Not before the gala on the twenty-eighth," he said. "Ask me again after."
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