Chapter 2

Ross Cade's office was two doors down from the chapel, and it smelled like old carpet and lemon oil. He unlocked a file cabinet, then a metal box inside the cabinet, and took out a nine-by-twelve envelope with my name on it in Sharpie.

Hattie Vance. Not Miss Vance.

Wade followed us. He stood in the doorway with his hands folded, warm and patient, like a man waiting for a cousin at a bus stop.

"Ross," he said. "It's late. She's had a shock."

"Close the door," I said.

Wade didn't move. Ross Cade looked at him, and something passed between them - thirty-two years of it - and then Ross reached past Wade and closed the door himself.

The envelope held three things.

A page of handwriting on Bluebell letterhead. A spiral notebook I recognized. And a photocopy of a delivery slip.

I read the letter twice before I could feel my hands.

Hattie. If you are reading this, you found the corner of the card. That means you are the girl I hired, and you kept what I taught you, and that is the only proof I had left.

The letters in the corner are not a name. They are a tag, the way we tagged accounts at the shop. Look it up in the notebook. I gave it to you the week you left for school. I told you you'd need it before I did.

I did not get to tell you who you are while I was alive. That was not forgetfulness. That was a decision, and I will pay for it.

Find the account. Then find the man.

The notebook was mine. Spiral, blue cover, coffee ring on the front. Eula-May handed it to me the last day I worked at the shop, seventeen years old and headed to community college, and I put it in a box and never once opened it because I couldn't stand to think about that summer.

I opened it now on Ross Cade's desk.

Every account the Bluebell billed had two letters and a line. I'd copied them all that first summer, because Eula-May made me write them out by hand so I'd learn the routing. I can still see her finger moving down the page.

There it was, on the second-to-last sheet.

W.P. - standing account, no card, no name, bill monthly.

I read it out loud. Ross went very still.

"That's an account code," I said. "Not initials. Except in her shop, the tags were the customer's initials."

I turned to the photocopied delivery slip that had been folded behind the letter. It was a monthly billing record, dated and stamped. One arrangement, billed to W.P., delivered on the first of every month, same address, no card attached. Twenty-six years of entries.

The address was 44 Camden Street, Bristol, Tennessee.

I sat down in a chair I hadn't been invited into.

I grew up at 44 Camden Street. Duplex with green shutters, cracked sidewalk, a landlord who never fixed the porch light.

And on the first of every month, a box came.

I remember the box. Small white box with a florist's stamp on it. My mother would open it on the kitchen table, take out one white rose, and set it in a jelly jar. Then she'd take out an envelope, and she'd hold it for a second, and then she'd put it in her purse and her face would do something I never understood.

I asked her once who sent it. She said, "The rent lady."

For twenty-six years, the rent lady was an account at my grandmother's flower shop. And the account was billed to Pruitt Farm & Feed.

Which was Wade Pruitt's business.

I looked up. Wade was still in the hall. He was standing with his back to the frosted glass, holding two paper cups of coffee.

He'd brought me coffee twice already that night.

My hands were shaking, and I made them stop, because I am better than that in a room.

"Ross," I said. "Does the name on an account mean the person paid it, or just that the bill went to them?"

Ross Cade took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose with two fingers, and he didn't answer me for a long time.

"Miss Vance," he finally said. "I think you should ask him that yourself."

The door opened. The paper cups came in first.