Chapter 6: The Moretti

Rain had been threatening all afternoon by the time Anastasia decided to close up ten minutes early, gathering the day’s unsold stems into a bucket by the door and pulling her coat tight against the first fat drops beginning to fall. Eleanor had left an hour before for a doctor’s appointment, leaving Anastasia alone to lock up, and she was fumbling with the stubborn old deadbolt—the one that stuck every time the weather turned damp—when the bell above the door chimed behind her.

“We’re closing, I’m sorry, if you—”

She turned, and the rest of the sentence simply left her. The man standing just inside the doorway did not belong on Eighth Street. That was her first, useless thought—not because of his clothes, exactly, though the expensive precision of his coat made her suddenly aware of the flour-dust and stem-sap staining her own apron, but because of the way he occupied space: still and contained, like a held breath that made the small shop feel smaller. He was tall, dark-haired, somewhere in his early thirties, and his eyes—when they found hers—were a grey so pale they looked almost silver in the dim afternoon light, unreadable, assessing, moving over her with a quickness that felt less like appreciation and more like inventory.

“I need flowers,” he said. His voice matched the rest of him—low, controlled, without any particular warmth in it.

“For a funeral. Tomorrow morning.”

“We’re—”

She glanced at the clock, at the rain now streaking properly down the front window.

“We’re technically closed, but I can put something together quickly, if that works.”

“It has to work. There isn’t time for it not to.”

There was something almost amusing in the flat certainty of that, as though the possibility of failure simply hadn’t occurred to him, and Anastasia found the corner of her mouth twitching despite the strange, prickling wariness sitting low in her stomach.

“Right. Well. What kind of arrangement did you have in mind?”

“White. Simple. Nothing that looks like it’s trying too hard.”

“That’s oddly specific for someone who claimed not to have opinions.”

Something flickered across his face—not quite a smile, but adjacent to one, there and gone so fast she might have imagined it.

“I have opinions. I don’t usually share them with florists.”

“Lucky me.”

She moved toward the cooler at the back of the shop, conscious of his gaze and the warmth it brought to the back of her neck despite her wariness. She pulled white roses, a scattering of baby’s breath, a few stems of eucalyptus for the greenery, laying them out along the worktable with quick, practiced movements.

“Who was it? If you don’t mind my asking. Sometimes it helps to know, for the arrangement.”

He was quiet long enough that she glanced up, and found his expression had shifted into something more guarded, more careful.

“An old associate of my father’s,” he said finally.

“Complicated. The kind of man it’s difficult to grieve simply.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. I’m not entirely sure I am, and that troubles me more than the loss itself.”

He said it with a strange, unflinching honesty that caught her off guard—the kind of admission strangers didn’t usually make to florists on rainy afternoons, and she found herself looking up at him again, reassessing.

“That’s an unusually honest thing to say to someone you’ve known for four minutes.”

“I don’t generally waste time pretending things are simpler than they are.”

His eyes moved over the roses she was gathering, and then, almost incidentally, up to her throat, and stopped. Anastasia felt it before she understood what had caught his attention—a stillness in him that went beyond his usual stillness, something sharpening behind those pale grey eyes. Her hand rose instinctively to the pendant resting against her collarbone, an old habit, and she saw him track the movement, saw something pass behind his gaze that looked, for just a moment, like recognition.

“That’s a beautiful piece,” he said, too carefully.

“It was my mother’s.”

The words came out before she’d decided to share them, an old reflex around the pendant that made her offer up the truth of it even to strangers, as though the object demanded honesty on its behalf.

“I don’t remember much about her. But I have this.”

“May I ask—”

He stopped himself, visibly, some careful recalibration happening behind his composed face.

“Never mind. It’s not my business.”

“You can ask. I don’t mind.”

“Where did she get it?”

It was such a strange question, oddly specific for idle conversation, that Anastasia paused in her arranging, studying him properly for the first time—the careful stillness of him, the way his attention had sharpened around the pendant in a way that felt less like curiosity and more like calculation, though she couldn’t have said why she thought so.

“I don’t know,” she said slowly.

“I was very young when I lost her. It’s one of the only things I have.”

Something moved behind his eyes—not guilt or sympathy exactly, but something more complicated than she could name.

“I’m sorry. That was a strange question to ask a stranger.”

“You said you don’t waste time pretending things are simpler than they are.”

She held his gaze, testing him slightly, curious despite herself.

“So why did you really ask?”

For a moment she thought he wouldn’t answer. The rain drummed against the window, and somewhere outside a car horn sounded, distant and unimportant, and the small shop felt very quiet around the two of them, charged with something she couldn’t name.

“It reminded me of something,” he said finally.

“An old piece I saw once, a long time ago. Probably nothing. Family jewelry tends to share certain styles, certain eras. It’s likely coincidence.”

She didn’t entirely believe him. There was a carefulness to the way he said probably and likely, a deliberate softening of certainty that felt performed rather than genuine, and she found herself wondering—not for the first time that week—whether the strange, watchful attention that had followed her these last few days had a face after all, and whether she was looking at it now.

“What’s your name?” she asked, because it seemed suddenly important to have one, to be able to put a name to the unease sitting low in her stomach.

“Lorenzo.”

He said it simply, without embellishment, watching her reaction the way she suspected he watched most people’s reactions—carefully, cataloguing.

“And you?”

“Anastasia.”

Something crossed his face at that—brief, controlled, gone almost before she registered it, but for one unguarded second his composure had genuinely slipped, some deep and private reaction passing behind those pale eyes before he smoothed it away again.

“It’s a beautiful name,” he said, and his voice had gone lower, quieter, something almost careful in it now.

“Thank you.”

She finished tying off the arrangement, wrapping the stems in brown paper, and held it out to him, aware of her own pulse ticking a little faster than it should have for a simple transaction.

“For your associate’s funeral. I hope it brings whatever comfort funerals are supposed to bring.”

He took the flowers from her, and for just a moment their fingers brushed over the paper wrapping, and he did not immediately step back, did not immediately break the contact, his pale eyes holding hers with an intensity that made her breath catch somewhere in her chest.

“Thank you, Anastasia.”

He said her name again, deliberately this time, as though testing the shape of it, committing it to memory.

“I have a feeling we’ll see each other again.”

“Is that a threat or a promise?”

The corner of his mouth curved—the first real almost-smile she’d seen from him, brief and startling in how it changed his whole face.

“I suppose that depends entirely on you.”

He left a folded bill on the counter, more than the arrangement was worth by a significant margin, and was gone before she could argue about the change, the bell above the door chiming once behind him as he stepped out into the rain, unhurried, his dark coat disappearing quickly into the grey evening. Anastasia stood very still for a long moment afterward, staring at the door, her pulse still not quite settled, her hand still resting unconsciously against the pendant at her throat. She did not know, yet, why the stranger’s careful question about her mother’s necklace had left her feeling more unsettled than three days of being watched by faceless men in grey coats. She only knew that something about the encounter had shifted some quiet, submerged thing inside her—recognition, perhaps, or its opposite, the vertiginous sense of standing very close to an answer she hadn’t yet known to look for. Outside, the rain kept falling, and somewhere beyond the fogged glass, a car pulled away from the curb, carrying Lorenzo Moretti back into a world Anastasia did not yet know existed, though she was beginning, in the deepest and least articulate part of herself, to suspect that her own quiet life had just brushed up against the edge of it.