It began with a phone call on a slow, golden morning — the kind where the sun drifts lazily across the kitchen tiles and you start to believe, maybe for the first time in years, that your life is edging toward something softer.

I’d just sold my flower shop, Bloom & Blossom, the place that had shaped my adulthood and consumed nearly every heartbeat for fifteen years. The shop had been my livelihood, my refuge after heartbreak, my anchor when everything else felt uncertain. Midnight wedding arrangements. Holidays sacrificed so someone else’s celebration could bloom in photographs.

Selling it wasn’t easy, but I felt something shift the moment the final paperwork was signed — a quiet exhale, a sense that I might finally reclaim the parts of myself I’d long neglected. The money I received wasn’t a windfall, but it was enough to widen my world: travel, classes, time to breathe. I was sitting at my kitchen table, dreaming gently, when my sister Lisa called. Her voice cracked along the edges, carrying a tremor I hadn’t heard since we were kids. “Ivy… can I come over? Please.” That word — please — carved through my chest. I told her to come right away.