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commercial fields were behind the house, and on the right side were two ornamental gardens—the house garden and the night garden.
    The Hastings family property bordered theirs on the left, but Lily forced herself to ignore it. After Seth completed his sophomore year in college, he decided to enter seminary. When he did so, he made it clear that there wasn’t room in his life for both Lily and God. Besides, the last she had heard, he didn’t live there anymore. He was probably off somewhere, saving the world.
    Lily turned her attention back to her home. She wanted to climb the back porch and knock on the door, but her knees locked. She stayed where she was, on the side of the road.
    As a child, she had been captivated by the Victorian language of flowers. Her interest had started on a trip to the library, where she found a heavy book with a thick white cover. Each page had an artist’s rendering of a flower with the meaning the Victorians assigned to it written in script below.
    She flipped through the book until she found lily. There were seven entries. White lilies meant purity. Lilies of the valley meant return of happiness. Water lilies meant eloquence. Her name could mean something different every day of the week.
    She spent hours memorizing the meanings for each flower. When it was time to return the book, she hid it under her bed and told her mother she lost it. Twenty years later, she still knew that white daisies meant innocence and ivy meant friendship.
    Honeysuckle meant the bond of love.
    She looked down at the honeysuckle growing along the fence line and broke off three long strands of the vine. She braided them together and twined the garland through the white fence.
    Then she drove home without looking back.
    It was hard to believe two years had passed since that day. As Lily sat among her folded jeans and T-shirts, she prayed that the courage she had lacked on Rose’s thirtieth birthday would sprout up inside of her like that honeysuckle, spreading until it was impossible to ignore.
    SHE SNAPPED THE book shut when Will knocked on her open bedroom door. He cocked an eyebrow and held up a bottle of wine. “Merlot. An excellent packing wine. Cherry undertones with a hint of wood smoke.” He poured two glasses, then sat in the plush chair next to the window. “Your bedroom is surprisingly drab, Lils.”
    Lily accepted the glass he held out to her. He was wrong. Her mother had made the blue-and-white star-pattern quilt covering the bed. The oil painting hanging on the opposite wall was from Rose—a yellow lily resting on a porcelain plate. “Bright. Like you,” Rose had said when she presented it to Lily. A pewter mug filled with dried rosemary—for remembrance—sat on her dresser. Sheet music, rolled into a tight scroll and tied with a black ribbon, leaned against her mirror. And a tiny purple baby cap hung from the knob of her top dresser drawer.
    Her room wasn’t drab, wasn’t boring. It held the most important parts of her life. Will just didn’t know where to look.
    “Talk to me, Lils,” he said. “You’re troubled. I can see it on your face.”
    The afternoon sunlight slanted across the floor. The tiny room was stuffy. She set her book on the bed and her wineglass on the nightstand, then crossed the room and opened the window.
    The ever-present sounds of traffic and birdsong drifted in with the breeze. She pressed her forehead against the screen and watched cars drive past. “I’m fine,” she said. Every three seconds, a sculpture in the artist’s yard squeaked.
    “Yeah, and I’m a monk.” When she didn’t respond, he grabbed the book from her bed. “What has you so fascinated?”
    “It’s a book on the Victorian language of flowers,” she said as she counted the cars parked on the street. Ten.
    “What?” He leafed through the pages.
    “The Victorians. They assigned a meaning for every flower. They’d send each other bouquets with hidden messages.” Her fingers twitched,