The Flower Arrangement Read Online Free PDF Page B

house on Leeson Street, Lara felt worse. Everything looked unfamiliar. Her shelves of design books, her framed typography posters, even the weekly work list, written on the whiteboard in her own handwriting. It all belonged to a stranger—the person she had been before she lost her baby. The only things in the room that shefelt any connection to were half a dozen flower postcards pinned to the wall above her desk.
    The red and white tulip by Judith Leyster. The vase of white lilac by Manet. The bowl of blowsy roses by Henri Fantin-Latour. The vase of tumbling blooms by Brueghel—lilies and tulips, fritillaries and daffodils, carnations and snowdrops, cornflowers and peonies and anemones. Those flowers had all died four hundred years ago, but that first week back at work, they planted a seed in Lara’s heart. Flowers had healed her before, when she was the child who had lost her mother. Maybe they would heal her again now that she was a mother who had lost her child.
    â€œLara, you do realize,” Michael had said gently, “that people send flowers to mothers when a baby is born. You’ll have to go to maternity wards every other day. You’ll have to go back to Holles Street. Have you thought about how hard that will be?” It had been his last attempt to get her to reconsider and the only thing that could have changed her mind, but by the time he said it, it was too late.
    She had already resigned. Told her boss, Frank, that afternoon that she was leaving. Blurted it out in a traffic jam on the way home from a meeting because they were friends and because she felt like a fraud taking a brief for an annual report that she was never going to design. He had looked sad and shocked but not surprised.
    â€œWhen do you want to go?”
    â€œAs soon as you can do without me.”
    He had helped her clear her desk and driven her home. Her things were still in the boxes, lined up in the room that should have been Ryan’s nursery.
    *   *   *
    Lara parked on Holles Street and unloaded the last delivery of the afternoon, a frothy arrangement of white agapanthus and lisianthus with the faintest blush of pink.
    Two overdue women in slippers with fleece dressing gowns pulledaround their enormous bumps were smoking on the steps of the maternity hospital. “Jesus,” one of them said, turning to look at the bouquet as Lara passed, “I’d have to have triplets before me fella gave me a bunch like that.”
    â€œI’d have to have the winner of the Grand bloody National,” her friend snorted, “and the Cheltenham Gold Cup.”
    Lara was smiling as she crossed the marble floor of the entrance hall, but her throat tightened as she took the stairs to the third floor, where she had given birth to her own baby on a sunny spring morning sixteen weeks before his due date.
    The first time she had delivered a bouquet to this hospital she sat outside for nearly an hour trying to talk herself into getting out of the van. She’d only made it as far as the hall, where she dropped the flowers on the porter’s desk and bolted back out. But she’d forced herself to keep coming back until she could bring the bouquets all the way up the stairs to the nurses’ stations on the maternity wards.
    She had learned to distract herself, to fill her mind so there was no room for the memory of the day she’d walked down these same stairs without her baby. Today, she made a mental list of flowers for next week’s order, moving on to foliage as she hurried along the corridor, past the closed doors of the private rooms. She handed the bouquet over to the nurse at the desk, then started back the way she’d come.
    â€œNurse!” A voice called from behind a closed door as she passed.
    Lara looked up and down the corridor. It was empty.
    â€œPlease?” The woman sounded frantic. “Could someone help me?”
    Lara hesitated, then walked back and