Page 24 of What August Heard
She steered him gently toward standing and he stood, and she slipped her arm around his waist.
He put his arm around her.
I was stacking the empty toast plates because it gave me something to look at that wasn’t them.
I looked up once. Just once.
Fletcher was looking at me.
Margaux was talking about something, turned slightly away, and Fletcher was looking across the patio at me. His arm was around Margaux’s waist. His eyes were on me.
I looked back down at the toast plates.
I stacked them carefully. One on top of the other.
Maybe I had been wrong this whole time. Maybe I had been building something out of things that didn’t add up to what I thought they added up to. Maybe he looked at me the way he did because I was Callie’s friend and he was a good man who looked out for people he cared about. Maybe that was the whole story and I had been adding chapters that weren’t there.
I picked up the plates and carried them inside.
***
Chapter 8
Fletcher
August found the flower stall the way she found most things — by accident, and then completely on purpose.
We were on the main strip of Sable Cove town, the five of us walking slow in the evening light. The shops were lit up, the restaurants spilling music out onto the pavement, the smell of fried food and salt air mixing into something that belonged entirely to summer. Poppy was reading every shop sign out loud. Callie had an ice cream. Margaux had her arm through mine and was telling me about an antique store she’d read about in a travel blog.
Then August stopped.
She stopped so suddenly that Callie almost walked into her. There was a flower stall set up against the wall of a small grocery, buckets of cut stems arranged on a wooden cart, a hand-painted chalkboard sign propped against the wheel. The man running it was older, maybe fifty, with an apron and an unhurried look.
August looked at the stall the way Poppy looked at trivia books.
She went straight over.
“These dahlias,” she said to the man, before she’d even said hello. She was already crouching down to look at the bucket.“Where do you source these? They’re so fresh. How long ago were these cut?”
The man smiled. “This morning. I grow them myself. My plot is about ten minutes from here.”
“You grow them yourself.” August stood back up. Her whole face was doing the thing it did. “What variety is this one? The coral one in the back.”
“Café au Lait.”
“I knew it. I knew it as soon as I saw it. I’ve been trying to get a reliable Café au Lait supplier in Millhaven for two years and nobody carries them consistently.” She shook her head. “These are incredible.”
The man looked at her the way Cliff had looked at her at the Millhaven market. Like he’d been sitting at a table alone and someone had just pulled up a chair.
Margaux steered me a step closer. We stopped right behind August.
“I love flowers too,” Margaux said. She said it to the group, to the stall, to the air. The man nodded politely.
“If we were back in Millhaven,” Margaux said, her arm tightening slightly through mine, “Fletcher would have bought flowers for me from your stall, August. Wouldn’t you, babe.”
“Probably,” I said.
August glanced back at us. Then she looked at me. “You should buy the dahlias,” she said. “The Café au Lait ones. They’re the best thing on this cart.” She straightened and stepped back from the stall. “These are just as fresh as anything from my van, honestly. Better, actually.” She nodded at the man. “Thank you.”
