Farah canceled at eight fourteen, while Coralie was deciding which jacket suggested she had not spent any time deciding.
I’m so sorry. Child sick, husband already at work. Can’t come. Go without me.
Coralie read the message twice. Then she put both jackets back on their hooks.
Of course. Hope everything’s okay, she typed.
It wasn’t what she meant. What she meant was that she had been looking forward to a morning in which nobody expected her to know whether it was a date. What she meant was that Farah had said she would come, and Coralie wanted one person to do the thing they said they would do.
She knew how unfair that was even while she felt it.
The phone rang.
“You sound cross in writing,” Farah said.
“I used a full stop. That’s all.”
“You never use full stops with me unless you’re cross.”
“I’m not cross.”
A small voice complained in the background. Farah answered it, then came back. “Sorry.”
“It’s fine.”
“It isn’t fun for me either.”
Coralie closed her eyes. There it was, the truth she had carefully avoided imagining: Farah standing in a kitchen with a sick child, not choosing somebody more entertaining.
“I know. I’m being horrible.”
“You haven’t actually been horrible yet. You’re hovering.”
Despite herself, Coralie laughed.
“I wanted you there.”
“I wanted to be there. I wanted a plant I could neglect with professional advice.”
“I know.”
“You can cancel him if you don’t want to go alone.”
“I do want to go.”
“Then go.”
There was another interruption. This time Coralie could hear the child’s misery clearly enough to feel ashamed.
“I’ll let you go. I’m sorry I made that about me.”
“Thank you. Bring me something indestructible.”
“Plastic?”
“Don’t tempt me.”
Coralie took down the blue jacket. She sent Stellan a message explaining that Farah couldn’t come. Then she stood with the phone in her hand, waiting for him to say they should leave it until another time.
Instead he wrote, Still eleven?
She answered yes before she could compose anything less revealing.
The market occupied a square behind the library, with stalls arranged around the old fountain. Coralie could smell wet leaves and coffee before she saw Stellan near the entrance. He was looking at a tray of small plants with the serious expression she now associated with things he liked.
He turned when she approached.
“Morning.”
“Morning.”
“How’s Farah’s child?”
“Unhappy. Nothing dramatic, apparently.”
“Poor thing.”
She liked that he meant the child, though she herself had been much more interested in the inconvenience.
They began walking. At the first stall he asked a question so specific that she understood none of the answer. He caught her expression and stopped himself.
“Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize. Just tell me whether we’re buying a plant or negotiating its release.”
He smiled. “Neither. I’m being nosy.”
She watched him turn a small pot in his hands, careful with the leaves. His fingernails were clean but there was a permanent-looking roughness around them. She imagined those hands on her waist, then turned so abruptly toward a display of garden ornaments that he asked whether she liked pottery frogs.
“Not particularly.”
“You looked very interested.”
“I’m broad-minded.”
He picked up a frog with an expression of mournful dignity. “This one knows something.”
“That one has been to a committee meeting.”
He laughed. She was beginning to want to make him do that again, which felt more dangerous than admiring his hands.
At another stall she found a small plant for Farah. The seller said it was forgiving, and Coralie asked how forgiving. Stellan started to answer, then stopped and let the seller speak. She appreciated that; she didn’t want to feel escorted through the morning by an expert.
She paid, tucked the pot into a paper carrier and took a photograph for Farah. The reply was a single exhausted thumbs-up. Coralie put the phone away without asking for more.
“Are you looking for anything?” she asked him.
“Possibly. I tend to bring home things I haven’t found space for.”
“That sounds unlike your carefully drawn giant hand.”
“The garden plan and my own back yard are different standards.”
“So there’s chaos.”
“Contained chaos. Mostly in pots.”
She wanted to see it. The thought arrived simply, without an argument attached.
At a stall selling old garden tools, a woman greeted Stellan by name and asked after Bryony. She had worked with him on a school project, apparently, and kept up a stream of questions while sorting coins into a tin.
“And who’s this?” she asked, smiling at Coralie.
“Coralie.” He turned slightly toward her. “We met recently.”
The woman waited, plainly hoping for more, but he didn’t provide it. Coralie was grateful not to be introduced as the person doing the wedding dress. She was also unreasonably pleased that he hadn’t rushed to call her a friend.
“Nice to meet you,” the woman said. “You’ll have to tell him to stop buying plants. He’s got enough.”
“I don’t think I have that authority.”
“Nobody does,” Stellan said.
They moved on with a small packet of seeds he hadn’t intended to buy. Coralie glanced back at the woman, who was already talking to somebody else.
“Does everyone know you?”
“No. Only the people who disapprove of my plants.”
“That seemed like a substantial group.”
He smiled, then looked down at the packet. “Was that all right?”
“What?”
“The introduction. I didn’t know how—”
“You used my name. It was a good start.”
His ears colored a little. She found this unexpectedly tender and resisted making a joke that might embarrass him more. Instead she asked what he had bought, and this time she listened to the whole answer.
They bought drinks and sat on the low wall at the edge of the square. Coralie put Farah’s plant between them, then moved it to her other side because it looked like a chaperone.
Stellan noticed but said nothing. She was grateful and annoyed in equal measure.
“Did you have a good week?” he asked.
She looked at the market. There were several possible answers. She could tell him about the dress, the teaching plan, the jacket she had begun drawing in a different color. All of them would be true. None would explain why she had spent Monday evening unable to put away a blue hairdryer.
“I gave my ring back.”
He turned toward her slightly.
“That was Monday.” She rubbed a mark on the paper cup. “Sorry. That’s not a good market conversation.”
“It’s the conversation we’re having.”
He said it without much polish, almost puzzled by the need to classify it. She felt her shoulders loosen.
“I thought returning things would help. It mostly created a bag of things I didn’t want to look at.”
“Yes,” he said, then stopped.
She glanced at him. “Yes?”
“Different circumstances. I wasn’t comparing.”
“I know.”
He looked down at his hands. “After Elspeth died, there was a pair of glasses by the bed. I kept moving them when I dusted. For months. I couldn’t work out why those were harder than anything else.”
Coralie pictured it with painful clarity: the ordinary object requiring no explanation until the person was gone.
“When did she die?”
“Six years ago. Twenty twenty-two.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Thank you.”
The fountain made an uneven splashing sound behind them. She waited, unsure whether he wanted the subject to end.
“She’d been ill,” he added. “It wasn’t sudden. People sometimes think that means you’ve had time to get used to it.”
“Had you?”
“No.” He shook his head. “I’d had time to get tired. That’s different.”
She looked at him. He kept his eyes on the cup, as though he had not meant to say quite so much.
“I’m sorry,” she said again, uselessly.
He nodded. After a moment he lifted his head. “We had good years. We also argued about ordinary things. The back door. Money. Me saying I’d be home in ten minutes when I hadn’t left work.”
“Did you fix that?”
“Not entirely.”
She smiled, picturing him rehearsing his excuse in the car on the way home.
“My ex was seeing somebody else,” she said.
The words came without preparation. Once they were out, she couldn’t bear the thought of taking them back.
Stellan went still.
“He told me last Saturday. No—two Saturdays ago. I’ve lost track.”
“While you were still engaged?”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry, Coralie.”
“He’s in love with her. Apparently.” She hated the brittle sound in her own voice. “I don’t know why I said apparently. He probably is. That doesn’t make it better.”
“No.”
“I keep wondering what I missed.”
Stellan rubbed his thumb along the edge of his cup. “I don’t know what to say to that.”
She breathed out. “That’s better than most of the things people say.”
He looked at her, and something in his face made her eyes sting. Not pity exactly. Anger, restrained because it wasn’t his to spend.
“I don’t need you to hate him,” she said.
“I haven’t met him.”
“Good point.”
“I don’t like what he did.”
“Neither do I.”
For a while they sat without talking. A child dropped a paper windmill into the fountain and was retrieved by an adult before attempting a rescue. Coralie watched the windmill turn once in the water and stop.
“I didn’t want to tell you,” she admitted.
“Why?”
“Because I didn’t want this to be the reason you’re kind to me.”
He put down his empty cup. “I was enjoying the frogs before you told me.”
She looked at him, startled into a laugh.
“I was,” he said.
“I know.”
He seemed about to add something, then reconsidered. She found herself wishing he would be less careful, though she knew she would have resented it ten minutes earlier.
They walked another circuit of the market. Stellan bought a plant with pale leaves and admitted he didn’t have a place for it yet. Coralie suggested the committee frog could hold it, and he said he was trying to reduce his responsibilities, not create a government.
Near the exit a gust caught the paper carrier in her hand. Soil tipped across her sleeve. She made an indignant noise and tried to brush it off without dropping the pot.
“Here.” He took the carrier while she shook her cuff.
“It was meant to be indestructible.”
“It is. You may be the vulnerable part.”
He reached toward her sleeve, then paused. “May I?”
She nodded. He brushed a clump of soil from the fold at her wrist. His fingers touched her skin, briefly, and her entire attention narrowed to that small contact.
He felt it too. She was almost certain he did. He looked up, his hand still near hers, and for a moment the square and the people moving through it seemed to move farther away.
Then someone asked to get past, and they stepped apart.
“Sorry,” he said to the stranger, not to her.
Coralie took the bag back. Her pulse was behaving as though she had run up a flight of stairs.
At her car they stood on opposite sides of the open passenger door while she secured the plant in the footwell.
“Thank you for coming,” he said.
“Thank you for not buying the frog.”
“I might go back.”
“You’ll have to live with the consequences.”
He smiled, then looked at her for long enough that she stopped smiling in return. Not unhappily. She simply couldn’t hold a social expression over what she was feeling.
“I had a good morning,” he said.
“So did I.”
Even with the conversation on the wall. Perhaps partly because of it. She wasn’t ready to untangle that in the parking lot.
He stepped back so she could close the door. “Get Farah her plant before she recovers enough to refuse it.”
“I will.”
Driving away, Coralie kept both hands on the wheel. At the first red light she looked down at the wrist he had touched, irritated with herself for making so much of so little and unable to stop.
She delivered the plant to Farah’s doorstep and sent a message rather than ringing. A moment later her friend appeared through the window, hair falling out of its tie, and lifted a hand.
Coralie waved back.
Her phone vibrated before she reached the car. Farah had sent a photograph of the plant on the kitchen windowsill. Beneath it: How was it?
Coralie stood beside the car with the sun on her face and typed the answer slowly.
I wanted him to kiss me.