Bea knelt to her eye level.

“Sometimes the tired ones just need fresh water and a little time, and they stand right back up.”

Wescott stood very still, because he understood that his daughter and the housekeeper had just, between them, said the truest thing anyone had said all night, and neither of them was talking only about the flower. This one looks really tired. Junie had meant the rose, the bent one, the one that had been knocked about in transit and looked ready to give up.

But standing in that suite, watching a woman who had ridden a thousand late buses with sleeping children on her lap kneel down to comfort his own tired child, Wescott heard the larger thing underneath.

Everyone in that lobby had been, in some way, a tired flower.

He was — a widower three years into a grief that still ambushed him, standing exhausted in a building he owned and being told to go find a cheaper motel.