The Flower Arrangement Read Online Free PDF

own.” He looked wistful. “What did you call her again?”
    Lara had called her Lily, but she couldn’t say that. If she tried to say anything, she would start to cry. She held her breath and managed a jerky shrug.
    â€œWell, I’ve said my piece.” He tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “I’ll shut up now and get out of this lovely hair of yours.” He gathered her into a fierce hug. “
Ti amo molto
. You know that, don’t you?”
    He was the straightest talker she knew, but there was one thing he had never been able to say. Phil still teased him about it. “Come on, Dad, it’s three little syllables. You can do it!”
    But the words caught in her dad’s throat. His face would flush, his hands would flap in frustration. He could say “I love you” in French or Danish, or Creole or Esperanto. But he couldn’t say it in English.
    He hailed a passing taxi, and as he opened the door, Lara heard the driver singing along to the radio. George Michael’s “Faith.” She waited until the taxi had disappeared around the curve of Mount Street, then she let her breath out in a little ragged sob and looked up at the elegant facade of the hospital. The red brick glowed in the afternoon sunshine and the windows were full of sky. She wondered which was the room where she and Michael had been told that Ryan was gone.
    Faith was not enough: Lara could have told the taxi driver that. She’d had faith through the three years it took to get pregnant. Through the false alarms and the dashed hopes and the fear that it was never going to happen. Through those first three months of her pregnancy when she was terrified that she would do something wrong. Through the scare at ten weeks, when she’d had spotting.
    She’d still had faith the afternoon of her twenty-four-week scan, when the technician’s smile had frozen and she switched off the machine.
    And even after the doctor had told them that she was sorry, really sorry, but there was no fetal heartbeat, Lara had faith. There must besomething wrong with the machine, she’d said. She’d felt Ryan moving that morning. Michael was holding one of Lara’s hands and the doctor had taken the other one, and she explained that what Lara had thought was kicking was just a uterine contraction, her body reacting to the loss of her pregnancy. Their baby had been dead for days.
    Lara felt then the way she thought people must feel when they realize that the car they are traveling in is about to crash, frozen in the moment between impact and aftermath. Believing even as the car swerves crazily into the path of the oncoming traffic that it can somehow be stopped. She turned to Michael, wanting him to tell her that this could not be happening, but all the color had drained from his face. His mouth above his neatly trimmed dark beard was a thin, shaky line.
    She felt as if she was watching herself from a distance as she was admitted to the hospital to be induced. As she had a shower in a tiled communal bathroom, soaping her swollen stomach for the last time. As she lay on a bed in the pre-labor ward hooked up to an IV of Pitocin.
    She listened to groans and the restless pacing of the other women on the ward, who were going to deliver live babies. Now she could only remember one of them, a dark-haired girl called Rebecca, very young, very overdue. Sixteen, she heard one of the nurses whisper, unplanned pregnancy, no boyfriend.
    Rebecca sobbed all night and Lara was grateful to her for that. She was so stunned by the violence with which her future had been ripped away that she couldn’t cry at all. That night, it was as if the girl was crying for both of them.
    But in the weeks that followed, all she could do was cry. Everyone said that she would feel better after she went back to work, and she wanted to believe them. But when she finally returned to her office on the top floor of an elegant Georgian