Page 6 of April Flowers

Margot felt claustrophobic. She also felt like she couldn’t move.

She hated that he had a point, kind of.

“I don’t know what you want me to say,” she offered. “We’re here together. I just told you stuff about my family. I never tell people stuff about my family.”

“You gave me a list of your siblings’ names. That’s it.”

“Yeah?” Margot’s head throbbed.

“Yeah? I need more from you.” Pete dropped his head back and drank the rest of the wine in his glass.

Margot thought that maybe Pete was too tipsy for this conversation. With a sigh, she said, “Why don’t we talk about this tomorrow?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know.” Pete continued into the hallway. “I suddenly feel like I don’t know you at all.”

“That’s because you don’t,” Margot said.

Margot regretted it as soon as she’d said it. But it was true, wasn’t it? She’d designed their relationship that way. She was Margot Earnheart—florist extraordinaire. She was single and thirty-eight years old. She was from the glittering island of Nantucket. What else was there to know?

“You’re cold, aren’t you?” Pete muttered. “My brother told me you were cold. But I told him you were just shy. I told him you really liked me. I thought you really liked me.”

Margot closed her eyes. She couldn’t do this anymore. But it felt as though Pete was actually breaking up with her, which was a nice change of pace. Usually, the men in her life didn’t catch on that she wasn’t giving them anything of herself until she abruptly ended it.

“You’re incapable of getting close to people,” Pete continued. “You’re like a robot.”

Margot let out an ironic laugh. Suddenly, Pete disappeared into the kitchen. There was the sound of his wineglass landing with a clank on the counter. She could hear a rustling that meant he was putting on his coat and his hat. Gosh, he was handsome. What if he left, and she never saw him again? She would miss his smell. She would miss his smile a little. But she knew in her heart she wouldn’t miss him because she’d never missed anyone she’d ever dated after it was over. Did that make her a psychopath?

Bye, Pete, she might have said if she weren’t cuddled up in bed by herself.

As soon as the door slammed shut and whisked Pete out of her life for good, Margot used her phone to Google “am I a psychopath?” and read the signs—recklessness, impulsivity, lack of empathy, manipulation, and deceit. Had she been deceiving Pete by dating him without really liking him? She didn’t think so. People dated people they only sort of liked all the time. Once or twice, Margot had thought that maybe her feelings would grow! That kind of thing happened. And it wasn’t that she had no empathy for him. She was pretty sure she felt everything he was currently feeling: rage that she couldn’t love him and annoyance at himself that he’d let it go on so long. Had she been manipulating him? No. She’d never lied to him.

In fact, Pete had talked about himself, his friends, his job, his family, and his plans for the future so much that he hadn’t noticed she barely talked at all. Wasn’t that his fault? Didn’t that make him inherently selfish? Or was she just terrible at forming human relationships?

She didn’t know. Probably all of it was true at once.

Margot got out of bed and went to the kitchen to find all the dishes in the sink and plenty more pasta in the pot. She filled aplate with another helping and went back to her room, where she put on her pajamas and poured more wine. But as she scooped pasta into her mouth, feeling bad for herself, she remembered Samantha.

Maybe Samantha was safe to contact, but Sam and Daniel were divorced, after all.

Within a few seconds, the phone was ringing. Margot gripped the edge of her plate hard and winced.

But when Sam’s voice came on the line, she breathed a sigh of relief.

“Margot?”

It was the first Nantucket voice she’d heard in twenty years.

There was a thick silence. Margot thought she might faint.

“Are you there?” Samantha asked.

“Um. Hi.” Margot put her plate to the side and rubbed her chest with her fist.

“I’m sorry to call you like this,” Sam said. “I know it must be strange.”

“Yeah.” Margot suddenly felt very young. “It’s been a long time.”

“Eighteen years?”

---