I started over from nothing, because fifteen years in a home that was never mine leaves you with no résumé; I made flower arrangements for a neighbor in German Village, then catered small events, and finally leased a little shop in the Short North that I named Resilient Bloom, because beautiful things can come up out of the worst ground.

Linus comes by after school to trim stems and talk to the customers.

Someone asked me once if I was happy now, and I thought about it honestly before I answered: I’ve found peace, I told her, and peace, it turns out, is the highest form of happiness there is.

The woman who built that flower shop was not the woman who wept on the basement floor, and she was not the woman who’d disappeared into fifteen years of Lachlan’s house either.

She was someone new, or maybe someone very old — the competent, perceptive person I’d been before I let a man convince me I was nothing, come back now with everything she’d survived folded into her.

I think about that often, arranging flowers in the early morning light before the shop opens.