Page 52 of Drop Dead Gorgeous

CHAPTER 11

GRIM

The moment I see Lavinia through the flower shop window—bent over the worktable, her hands moving through a loose pile of stems with the unhurried certainty of someone who has done this ten thousand times—I feel something inside me change. Not change, precisely. It is the wrong word. A change suggests motion. This feels more like a severing, a thread drawn impossibly taut until it begins to split. Before I can even reason with myself, I am already moving, my breath fogging in front of my face as I cut through the side gate and into Belladonna Blooms.

The shop is full of cut narcissus. They look ridiculous this time of year, little suns blazing from every surface. The smell is narcotic, if you are mortal. To me, it is only a memory, the ghost of a scent already beginning to recede. Lavinia looks up at the jangle of the bell and gives me the softest of smiles.

“There you are,” she says, dusting flour from the crook of her nose. “I was wondering when you’d appear.”

I want to answer her with a smile, to play the role for just a little longer, but there is a pressure behind my eyes like a thousand-year-old iceberg ready to calve.

“I needed to see you,” I manage. “Are you all right?”

She leans her shoulder against the back counter as though bracing herself against the winter air I have let inside. Her blue eyes narrow almost imperceptibly. She sees through me like glass.

“I’m fine. Just needed to get the morning orders done before Mrs. Garcia comes to pick them up. Are you okay?”

I do not know what to say. I, who converse with the dying and the doomed and the never-born, who have listened to the last confessions of popes and despots and children, find myself unable to form a simple lie.

“I felt something was wrong.”

Lavinia’s smile does not quite falter, but I know a defensive maneuver when I see one.

“Wrong like we’re running low on cash, or wrong like you had another one of your nightmares?”

I step closer. I can see the list she has written: six centerpieces for the bakery, twenty stalks for the hospital, an order for the funeral home with one name circled three times—EMILIO. Lavinia does not flinch as I stop a foot away.

I search her face for proof that I am mistaken. She looks a little pale, perhaps a little more tired than yesterday, with shadows beneath her eyes I don't remember seeing before. None of those things should matter. Humans wake tired every day. They bruise. They cough. They heal. Yet the dread climbing through me refuses to loosen its grip.

“Wrong like…” My voice catches. “Something’s changed in you. Your thread. Your?—”

She cuts me off.

“My thread?”

I do not know how to soften it.

“Your life.” The words feel heavy in my mouth. “It’s… shortened.”

For a moment, all the warmth drains from the room. I feel the draft between us, the razor wind that runs through every mortuary and sickroom when the hour draws close. The world narrows to the lines of Lavinia’s hands, the faint scar crossing her thumb, and the way her lips press together with the weary resignation of someone who has been carrying this knowledge alone.

“How long?”

I swallow.

“Three days, eleven hours, and some change.”

She lets out a quiet sigh.

“Well.” A sad little smile touches her mouth. “That’s less than what Doc Halvorsen gave me.”

She sets the order list aside and laughs, though it sounds more like something breaking.

“Is that why you did this? Is that why you befriended me?”

I blink.

“What do you mean?”