Three days before Jake’s conference in Austin, Emma made a simple request.
“Bring me flowers. Just because. No Valentine’s, no birthday. Just… me.”
Jake, an engineer to his bone marrow, frowned at his laptop. “Flowers die, Em. You get four days of drooping petals and then guilt.”
“I don’t want logic. I want romance.”
He came home from the hardware store with a twenty-pound bag of organic potting soil, a packet of sunflower seeds, and a skeptical expression. “See? Long-term romance. We’ll plant them together. That’s a garden, not a funeral.”
She stared at the bag of mulch. He’d even chosen the expensive kind with worm castings.
“You bought me dirt.”
“I bought you possibility.”
“Jake, I am this close to smothering you with possibility.”
“That’s just gardening aggression. I read an article.”
She didn’t speak to him for two days. He packed for Texas wondering why she was upset. The bag of soil sat in the entryway like a taunt.
He flew out on a Wednesday. Emma watched his car back down the driveway and felt something heavy settle in her chest. Two kids, a yellow lab named Scout, a dishwasher that sounded like a helicopter, and a husband who thought romance was a compost pile.
The first text came three hours later.
**Jake:** In Austin. Hotel room smells like bleach and ambition. View of a parking garage.
**Emma:** Scout ate a sock. Vet visit tomorrow.
**Jake:** Who’s the real victim here?
**Emma:** The sock.
Day two.
**Jake:** *photo of sad eggs and greasy bacon*
**Jake:** Breakfast of champions. Tim from accounting is snoring in the next room. I can hear him through the wall.
**Emma:** The ceiling in the laundry room is leaking. Scout is terrified of the bucket I put down.
**Jake:** Call a plumber.
**Emma:** I did. He can come between noon and Tuesday. Also, you forgot the kids’ dentist appointments on Thursday.
**Jake:** …I’m in Austin.
**Emma:** I noticed.
Day three.
**Jake:** How are the kids?
**Emma:** Mia got a C in math and claims numbers are a conspiracy. Leo won’t eat anything that isn’t shaped like a dinosaur.
**Jake:** Hang in there.
**Emma:** I’m not hanging. I’m grimly clinging to the edge of a counter while the dog barks at a leaky ceiling.
He didn’t respond for four hours. Then, at eleven p.m. Central Time, a long text.
**Jake:** I walked past a bin of giant stuffed otters at a gift shop today. Almost bought one for Mia, but the thing was the size of a Labrador and I chickened out because of the plane. That’s me. Too cheap to check a bag for my daughter.
**Emma:** You’ve never been cheap. You just weigh emotions like they’re cargo.
**Jake:** You’ve been saying that since our third date when I asked the waiter to split the check.
**Emma:** You asked to split an eight-dollar pizza.
**Jake:** It was ten. And I tipped well.
**Emma:** You’re a romantic.
**Jake:** I’m an accountant with a fear of financial inefficiency.
**Emma:** Same thing.
Day four. 2:14 a.m.
**Jake:** Can’t sleep. The air conditioner makes a sound like a dying pterodactyl. I have a night light shaped like a cactus. I brought it from home.
**Emma:** You’re forty-three and scared of the dark in a hotel room.
**Jake:** In my defense, the dark in Austin feels personal. I miss our stupid bedroom with the curtains that don’t close all the way. I miss your cold feet on my legs at three a.m. I miss how you take exactly forty-seven seconds to open a cereal box because you refuse to destroy the cardboard.
She read the message three times. She could hear him saying it in his flat, practical voice—the voice that announced the soil had a pH of 6.8—but the words were soaked in something else entirely. She sat on the edge of the leaking laundry room and cried.
**Emma:** Are you drunk?
**Jake:** I’m allergic to tequila. You know that. I’m just… alone. The hotel is full of colleagues who think I’m the guy who brings spreadsheets to happy hour. None of them know I floss obsessively or that I ate a crayon in second grade.
**Emma:** You ate a crayon?
**Jake:** It was magenta. I thought it was a carrot stick.
**Emma:** You’re an idiot.
**Jake:** Your idiot.
Day five. He sent a selfie at the Austin Zoo, standing in front of a lemur exhibit. He’d captioned it: *My people.* Then another text.
**Jake:** I remember the first time you smiled at me. You were wearing a green sweater with a coffee stain on the sleeve, and you said my laptop background photo of a rock formation was “unreasonably sad.” You made me feel like I’d been skimming the surface of my own life.
She wrote back immediately.
**Emma:** You remember my sweater?
**Jake:** I remember the coffee stain. It was shaped like Nebraska. I thought, “This woman spills things and isn’t embarrassed. I need that in my life.”
**Emma:** You’re almost poetic when you’re sleep-deprived.
**Jake:** I’m sleep-deprived because I keep thinking about the way you laugh at your own jokes before you get to the punchline. And how you cry at dog food commercials. And how you called the bag of soil “possibility” even though you wanted to throw it at my head.
She didn’t tell him that she had, in fact, considered throwing it.
Day six. He went silent until evening. She found herself refreshing her texts every forty seconds, stomach tight. Then, at 9:53 p.m., a single line.
**Jake:** I bought you a scarf. It’s not pink. It’s the color of the sky over Town Lake right before the sun disappears. Tim said it looked like a bruise. Tim is an idiot.
**Emma:** You’re comparing a scarf to a sunset?
**Jake:** I’m comparing it to a sunset because you make me think in metaphors and I hate metaphors. They’re inefficient.
**Emma:** You’re a mess.
**Jake:** I’m a mess who’s flying home tomorrow with one carry-on and the emotional bandwidth of a teenager. Meet me at the airport?
**Emma:** I’ll be the one in the blue sundress.
**Jake:** The one with the buttons that never stay done?
**Emma:** That’s the one.
Day seven. She stood at the arrivals gate with Mia and Leo, who were arguing over a bag of gummy sharks. Scout was at home, probably chewing on the bag of soil. Emma’s blue dress was slightly too tight and she’d spent twenty minutes fixing her hair, then five more telling herself she wasn’t nervous.
Jake’s flight landed on time. He came through the sliding doors with a bouquet so large it had its own gravitational pull. Sunflowers. Dozens of them, golden and ridiculous, wrapped in brown paper. He looked exhausted and sunburned and a little terrified.
He stopped three feet away. “I know dirt isn’t flowers. But I wanted to start over.”
She took the bouquet. It smelled like summer and the way their backyard smelled just before rain.
“You’re still an idiot,” she said.
“Yeah. But I’m standing in an airport with flowers that have likely violated several agricultural regulations. So that’s growth.”
She kissed him right there, sunflowers crushed between them, gummy sharks falling all over the terminal floor. Leo said “gross.” Mia handed a gummy shark to a TSA agent.
That night, after takeout burgers and three loads of laundry, they fell asleep on the couch with Scout sprawled across their feet. Jake had set the sunflower bouquet in a pickle jar on the kitchen table because they didn’t own a vase. He’d also, quietly, moved the bag of soil to the back porch.
Three weeks later, on a Saturday morning soaked in Portland drizzle, Emma found him in the backyard with the bag of potting soil split open and a row of tiny containers.
“What are you doing?”
“Planting the sunflowers. I told you—possibility.”
She knelt beside him in the wet grass. Scout immediately stuck her nose into a seed packet and sneezed. The bag of mulch sat nearby, finally fulfilling its destiny. Emma pushed a seed into the dirt with her thumb.
“You know sunflowers take all summer to bloom.”
“I know,” Jake said. “But I’ll be here.”
They planted twelve seeds. Scout dug up three before lunch, and Jake reset them with the patience of a man who’d finally learned what was worth waiting for.
He looked at Emma, dirt smudged across his cheek. “You still mad about the mulch?”
She wiped her hands on his shirt. “I’m keeping it for the garden.”
“So it worked.”
“You bought me dirt and called it romance. That didn’t work, Jake. You stopped treating me like a balanced equation. That worked.”
He nodded, slow. “Sunflowers. Not a spreadsheet.”
“Sunflowers. Not a spreadsheet.”
He glanced at the overturned seed tray and the dog rolling in a pile of leftover soil. “I’m going to have to do this every year now, aren’t I?”
“Every year. And you’re going to write me a note with each one.”
“A note. I can do a note.” He thought for a second. “Dear Emma, you’re still spilling coffee. Love, Jake.”
She laughed, the sound carrying over the fence into the gray morning. “Perfect. Just don’t mention the pH level.”
“The soil is a solid 6.5,” he said, and she kissed him again, dirt and all, in the middle of their half-planted garden that was going to be a disaster. But they’d get there. They’d already started.
