White ones, the expensive kind, in a vase that had come from somewhere.

Maya stood in the hall with her paper bag and felt something absurd and enormous move in her chest, and the shameful truth — the thing she would tell exactly two people for the rest of her life — is that for about eleven seconds she was happy.

She thought: he’s been planning something.

She thought: he was scared.

It scared him.

It took a hospital, but something got through.