Since they specialized in apologies, they’d rebranded the business as Second Chance Flower Shop, and it had been thriving for the past two years. It was a huge amount of work. They still had to be selective about the orders they accepted since they didn’t have the staff to handle massive numbers. But they were able to raise their prices every six months with no loss of orders, so the money was really coming in now. Pretty soon they’d be able to buy the building the shop had leased from old Mr. Worth since Ria’s parents opened it thirty years ago.
It was one of those flukes. As much luck and timing as skill and talent—as all success was. Ria was still astounded every time a major platform shared one of their arrangements online and they got a new flurry of orders.
She and Madeline were talking about the design for an order they’d accepted yesterday when Skye Devereaux came bounding into the back room.
Skye was barely five feet tall. A tiny, freckled redhead with big eyes and a big smile. Despite her small size, she always seemed to fill a room. Right now her eyes were even huger than normal, and she was gasping loudly. “Big... big news. You’ll never... never... guess.”
“What’s going on?” Ria asked, only mildly interested. Skye was dramatic about everything, so there was no reason to assume something genuinely earth-shattering had occurred.
She was wrong.
It was earth-shattering.
It left her (literally) shaking.
Skye was still trying to catch her breath. She must have run all the way over there from wherever she’d gotten the news. “He’s... he’s... coming back... to town.”
“He?” Madeline asked with a frown. “He who?”
Ria had already frozen. She knew—she knew—what was coming.
Skye turned huge blue eyes onto Ria’s face. “Jacob... Worth. He’s finally coming home.”
JACOB WORTH HAD SPENT the past eight years trying to remake his life away from Azalea, Virginia, and he thought he’d done a pretty good job overall.
He’d left town at eighteen after his grandfather kicked him out, finding odd jobs and gradually moving north until he finally reached Alaska. For several years now, he’d worked as a commercial fisherman, taking on seasonal work as it was available. Salmon. Tuna. King crab. Anything that was high risk, good money, and physically demanding enough to let him sleep at night.
He had friends. He was popular with women who might be looking for a good time with no strings. He’d saved enough money that he could take time off between fishing seasons without worrying about how he would eat and pay rent. He’d done okay for himself, starting with no money, no contacts, and no education beyond high school.
And he’d gotten as far away from Azalea as he possibly could.
He’d never gone back home for a visit. His grandfather—his only living relative—had made it clear he wasn’t welcome. He would have come six months ago after his grandfather’s heart attack, but he’d been out on a job when it happened, and by the time the boat had returned, his grandfather had been out of danger and had told him not to bother.
So he hadn’t set foot in Virginia in almost eight years when he arrived in Azalea on a Friday in May. His grandfather had evidently never really recovered from the heart attack. His health had been declining for months now. The doctors said he probably only had a couple more weeks before his heart simply gave out.
Jacob was currently between jobs and didn’t want to leave something so painful hanging unfinished in his life. So he’d flown into the Norfolk airport and rented a car to drive the forty-five minutes to the small town in eastern Virginia where he’d spent fifteen years of his life.
His grandfather was sleeping when he arrived, and the old man was scarily pale and thin. He’d wasted away from the strong, hard man Jacob remembered from his childhood.
Martha, the woman who’d kept house for his grandfather as long as Jacob could remember, waved him to a chair near the bed and whispered he’d probably wake up soon. So Jacob sat. He looked at his phone for a while and then stared at the man who had raised him ever since he’d been orphaned at three years old.
His stomach twisted. He didn’t like the feeling. It reminded him of day after lonely day when he haunted this big old house all alone. For years now, he’d made sure he was so distracted or exhausted that he didn’t feel the pull of those long-ago emotions.
But he felt them now.
Maybe it was the musty smell of the old house, still as clean as ever but in obvious disrepair. A lot of upkeep had been neglected lately. There was a draft in this room that Jacob could feel from where he sat. After a few minutes, he got up to investigate and found the source of the draft in a warped window frame across from the bed.
He grabbed an old newspaper and carefully fit it into the thin crack to block the draft.
His grandfather had always been so proud of this house. The biggest one in town ever since it had been built ninety years ago. Even if the old man could no longer do the upkeep work himself, Jacob was surprised he hadn’t hired someone to take care of it.
“What are you doing, boy?” a soft, gruff voice came from the bed.
Jacob whirled around. “Hey. Sorry to wake you, Grandpa. Trying to block a draft.”
“You get it?”
“Yeah. I think so.”
“Good. Damn thing has been bugging me for weeks. Come over and let me look at you.”
Jacob had gone through his last growth spurt when he was seventeen, shooting up to just over six feet, but he’d been a lot skinnier as a teenager than he was now. Years’ worth of physical labor had molded his body, bulking it up and marking it with scars, including a thin white slash that ran from his right ear and down his jaw to his throat from where he’d come close to being decapitated by an out-of-control line in a storm three years ago. His hair was still short and medium brown, and his eyes were still hazel. There was still a cleft in his chin. But otherwise he wondered if he was even recognizable from the boy he’d been before.
“You grew up,” his grandfather said, after the sharp eyes ran up and down Jacob’s body from his hair to his worn shoes.
“It’s been eight years.”
“You look like a man now.”
In a different context, this comment might mean any number of things, but Jacob knew exactly how to understand it.
It was self-validation. Confirmation to his grandfather that he’d made the right decision in kicking him out.
After all, the reason he’d done so was because Jacob was too “soft.” Too weak. Not man enough. That was what his grandfather had said. He’d had it too easy, relying on his grandfather to support him, so he needed to learn to make it on his own and toughen up. He’d also kept his feelings too much on the surface, letting the whole world know what he was feeling, and he needed to change that too.
It had hurt. Badly. The shock and betrayal of the sudden declaration—announced immediately after Jacob’s high school graduation and with no warning or preparation—had devastated Jacob, who’d never gotten a lot of warm fuzzies from the old man but who he’d genuinely believed had cared about him.
He’d been so stunned he’d been frozen with it for a long time. And when the reality processed, he couldn’t hide his hurt. His grandfather had used the emotion he’d displayed in response—nearly in tears from the pain of it—as proof that he wasn’t really a man.