Before We Were in Love
Chapter 10 - Before We Were in Love
She tried to remember their first date accurately. It had been at a diner with cracked green booths and a waitress who called everyone honey. Adrian ordered blueberry pancakes for dinner. Meredith told him she had recently closed her flower shop and was afraid she'd never save enough to reopen one. He didn't offer to fix the problem. He asked her about the flowers she liked least, and she laughed because no one had ever asked her that. She told him carnations, then took it back, because carnations lasted and tried hard and deserved some respect.
That evening she called Bea, who had worked beside her since the studio opened. "Did I seem happier when I met him?" Meredith asked.
"You seemed hopeful," Bea said. "You also worked every day and ate cereal for lunch. Both things can be true."
Meredith appreciated the answer. She was frightened of the impulse to erase four years as if they had never happened. Her life contained honest labor and real friendships and moments of laughter that did not depend on Adrian's honesty. He had lied about why he approached her. He had not created her capacity for love, and he could not take it away.
She opened the boxes one final time and kept a small clay dish she'd bought on a trip with him, not because it was his, but because she liked it. Everything else was ready to go. The act felt neither brave nor tragic. It felt like clearing a table before the next meal.
There were facts that changed a life and facts that changed the shape of everything preceding them. Meredith had accepted that Adrian was alive, that his mother had lied and that a dead young man lay in the wrong grave. She thought she had reached the limit of what the past could hold. Lucia's last sentence proved otherwise.
They met by secure video with Helena present. Lucia was in her forties, with short silvering hair and tired eyes. She sat at a kitchen table somewhere in Montreal, a blue mug cupped between her hands. Before she disappeared she'd worked on contract compliance for Bellamy. Years earlier, while reviewing an unrelated file, she had found evidence suggesting Martin Mercer had been pressured to sign false attestations. One witness note mentioned Ruth Vale, then a part-time records clerk at a downtown law firm.
Meredith stared at the screen. "My mother worked in law offices until I was eight. I thought she mostly filed papers."
"She did file papers," Lucia said. "She also remembered conversations. She heard Martin arguing with Victor at the office and later wrote down what was said. She put a copy in a folder of routine correspondence. Years after that, she gave it to Adrian when he came looking for evidence about his father."
"When?"
"About four years ago."
Meredith counted backward. She had met Adrian at a florist supply warehouse four years earlier when he picked up the wrong delivery and stayed to help her unload buckets. He had shown up the following week with coffee and an apologetic grin. She'd told that story at parties. It was their beginning, harmless and clumsy and full of promise.
"He knew who I was before we met," she said.
Lucia nodded. "I believe so."
For several hours Meredith could not bear to look at her old photographs. She went to the studio and washed glass vases until her hands ached. She remembered Adrian asking about her mother's health, offering to drive her to appointments, learning the names of the nurses. Had any of it been genuine? She hated herself for wondering. She hated him more for making the question reasonable.
Peter came by at dusk. Meredith told him what Lucia had said. He sat beside a bucket of chrysanthemums and admitted he had known Adrian was searching for Ruth, though he hadn't known they became involved. "My brother could be generous," he said. "He could also convince himself a good outcome justified a bad beginning."
"Your mother seems to have taught him that."
"Maybe. But at some point a man has to take responsibility for his own choices."
Meredith called Adrian once more. She asked one question: "Did you meet me because of my mother?" He said yes. He told her he had gone to the warehouse to ask about Ruth, lost his nerve, and invented the delivery mix-up. Their early dates were real, he insisted; his love for her had been real. Meredith believed the second part might be true. She also understood that believing it did not require forgiving the first.
"You let me tell that story to everyone," she said. "You listened while I described our chance meeting at the flower warehouse."
"I was ashamed."
"Then shame should have made you tell me."
She ended the call. The next morning she packed Adrian's remaining belongings, including the chipped mixing bowl, and asked Peter to collect them. She kept the photograph of the lake, not as a promise but as proof that she'd been happy once and could be happy again.
Over the following months, the investigation moved slowly and publicly. The inquiry into the crash was reopened, and a court-authorized process established that the person buried under Adrian's name was Elijah Torres. Rosa brought her brother home for a proper burial. Meredith attended at Rosa's invitation and stood in the back, where the family had arranged photographs of Eli repairing bicycles, holding his grandmother's hand, and making ridiculous faces with his nieces.
After the service, Rosa told Meredith, "He'd hate all this fuss." She smiled through tears. "But he'd like us being here together."
Meredith handed her a small bunch of blue irises. She had learned from Alma that they were his grandmother's favorite. Rosa held them against her coat and said, "You don't have to carry what happened to him. You've done something good by helping us find him."
There was no tidy way to accept that kindness. Meredith hugged her.
May you like
Later, a message came from Helena with the news that several executives, including Victor and Rusk, had been charged in connection with fraud and obstruction; the investigation into Eli's death remained active. Colleen had agreed to testify and had retained counsel. Adrian, too, was cooperating. None of it promised quick justice, but it was movement.
Meredith returned to the studio and found an envelope slipped beneath the door. It contained one photograph of Ruth, years younger, standing beside Martin Mercer at a summer picnic. On its back, in Ruth's firm old handwriting, were five words: TELL MEREDITH ABOUT THE GARDEN.
