Chapter 1: The Flower Girl

The silver rose at Anastasia’s throat belonged to a life she could not remember. Before the street outside had fully woken, The Bloom House smelled of damp soil, crushed stems, and the green sweetness of water left too long in metal buckets. Anastasia loved that smell. It belonged to the life she understood: steady work, Eleanor’s familiar complaints, Isabella’s quiet care. That morning, she kept touching the pendant, as if the metal might finally tell her why.

She had loved the shop since her first week there, four years ago, when Eleanor Hayes handed her a pair of pruning shears and told her not to be precious about it. Flowers did not bruise as easily as people thought, Eleanor had said. Anastasia had never decided whether the advice was about flowers or people.

“You’re doing that thing again,” Eleanor said from behind the counter, not looking up from the ledger she was frowning at.

“What thing?”

“The staring-into-space-while-your-hands-keep-working thing. It’s unsettling. Makes you look possessed.”

Anastasia huffed a laugh and set the rose down with the others, a dozen of them now stripped and arranged, water beading along their stems.

“I was thinking about the Whitfield order. Do we have enough peonies, or do I need to call the wholesaler again?”

“We have enough peonies. What you were actually thinking about,” Eleanor said, closing the ledger with a soft thump, “is none of my business, apparently, since you won’t tell me.”

“There’s nothing to tell.”

“Mm.”

Eleanor’s eyes—sharp despite the reading glasses perched on her nose—lingered on Anastasia before she let the subject go. She pushed, but never too far, one of the things Anastasia loved about her. At fifty-two, Eleanor had the patience of someone twice her age, except when a delivery was late; then she had the patience of no one at all.

The bell over the door chimed, and Isabella came in wearing her grey wool coat, a paper bag of pastries in one hand and her cheeks pink from the cold.

“You didn’t need to do that,” Anastasia said, though she was already crossing the room to take the bag from her, already smiling.

“I wanted to.”

Isabella pressed a kiss to her temple, the way she’d done since Anastasia was small enough to be lifted onto a countertop.

“You skip breakfast when you’re working the early shift. I’ve told you a hundred times.”

“You’ve told me a thousand times.”

“And you’ve listened zero times, so clearly I need to keep coming.”

Eleanor accepted a croissant without being asked, already tearing into it.

“Isabella. You’re a saint among the living.”

“I’m a woman who worries too much,” Isabella said, warmth softening the words. She settled into the wicker chair by the window, unofficially hers after all these years, and watched Anastasia work with the easy attention of someone soothed by the ritual. Here, among the stems and the scent of river water, Isabella seemed to relax in a way she rarely managed elsewhere.

Anastasia touched the pendant at her throat. It was a small white rose wrought in silver, twined with a shape that might have been a vine or a letter. Years of handling had worn the details smooth. She could not remember a time without it. Isabella said it had belonged to her mother. Anastasia could not remember her mother either—not clearly, only the impression of warmth and a voice she could never quite reconstruct, like a dream slipping away after waking.

“You’re doing the necklace thing now too,” Eleanor said around a mouthful of croissant.

“I don’t have a necklace thing.”

“You have several things. I’ve been keeping a list.”

Isabella laughed, and the sound eased something in Anastasia’s chest. The ache she had carried for as long as she could remember—a sense of an unopened room inside her—always quieted when Isabella laughed like that.

The morning settled into its familiar rhythm. The peony order was confirmed; Mrs. Calloway came for her weekly arrangement of white lisianthus and, as always, offered no explanation for the choice. Anastasia never asked. Some silences deserved to be left alone.

She lost herself in the work: stripping stems, checking water levels, arranging colour against colour until the display seemed to hold its breath.

Near noon, a prickle stirred at the back of her neck, faint as a draft. She looked up.

A man stood across the street, half-hidden beneath the awning of the shuttered bakery. He was looking at his phone—or seemed to be. His dark coat was unremarkable, but his stillness did not fit the movement around him. People hurried past with their collars turned up and their breath clouding in the cold. He simply stood there.

Anastasia held a ranunculus between two fingers and watched him longer than she meant to. Just before turning away, he lifted his phone—not toward his face, but toward the shop window. The movement was quick enough to deny and easy enough to dismiss. She couldn’t tell whether he had taken a photograph.

He disappeared into the crowd at the corner, and she told herself he was only checking his phone or waiting for someone.

Valoria was full of strangers who had no reason to care about her. It was foolish to let a passing man unsettle her. Still, her hand drifted to the pendant again, and this time she noticed Isabella watching.

“What?” Anastasia asked.

“Nothing.”

Isabella’s face had gone carefully blank, a look Anastasia remembered from childhood: the particular stillness she wore when she was worried and did not want anyone to know.

“You looked like you saw something.”

“I don’t know. A man across the street. Probably nothing.”

“Probably,” Isabella echoed too quickly. She began folding the pastry bag into smaller and smaller squares.

Anastasia let the subject drop. That was how it worked with Isabella: when her voice took on that careful evenness, you let it go and waited for the moment to pass.

The day continued. Anastasia returned to the ranunculus, finished the Whitfield order early, and teased Eleanor about the ledger until Eleanor threatened to dock her pay for insubordination. By four, the light through the front window had turned amber, making even the chipped gold paint look worth keeping.

But on her walk home, Anastasia glanced over her shoulder more than once. Her hand kept rising to the silver rose at her collarbone.

She told herself it was nothing.

She had no way of knowing how soon that ordinary life would begin to unravel.