Jamie's shop smells like green things and water and something floral I can't identify. Petal & Vine. I've walked past it maybe two hundred times, always meaning to go in, never actually doing it. Today I need flowers for the counter—something to make the shop feel like October—and I'm standing in her doorway trying to remember how to be a customer instead of the one behind the counter.

"You're the coffee shop girl."

I turn. Jamie's maybe my age, maybe a little older, with dirt under her fingernails and an apron that's seen better days. She looks like I feel most of the time—slightly overwhelmed, slightly behind, completely in love with something that doesn't always love her back.

"Rena," I say.

"I know. I've been meaning to come in. I keep walking past, but—" She gestures vaguely at the shop, at the buckets of flowers, at everything that clearly needs her attention more than coffee.

"I do the same thing," I admit. "Walk past. Mean to stop. Don't."

She laughs—this surprised, relieved sound—and suddenly we're talking. Really talking. About the block, about business, about being young women trying to make something work in spaces that used to belong to someone else.

"The Morrison wedding got cancelled," she says, and her face does something complicated. "Four hundred roses. Already paid for. No one wants them now."

"That's awful."

"They'll die before I can sell them. I've been giving them away, but—" She shrugs. "There's only so many people want free roses from a cancelled wedding. Bad luck, apparently."

I think about bad luck. About all the things I was told would happen if I left—the curses, the consequences, the divine punishment waiting for girls who wore jeans and drank coffee after dark and chose their own lives. None of it came true. The only bad luck was staying as long as I did.

"I'll take some," I say, before I know I'm going to say it. "For the shop."

"You don't have to—"

"I want to."

She picks them out herself, this careful process of selection, and I watch her hands move through the flowers the way my hands move through coffee beans—knowing without thinking, choosing by instinct. She wraps them in brown paper and hands them over.

"On the house," she says.

"You can't—"

"First-timer discount. Come back and actually pay next time."

The roses are extravagant in my tiny shop. Impractical. Completely unnecessary. But Jamie smiled when she wrapped them, and I smiled when I took them, and maybe that's what neighboring is—these small unnecessary generosities that say I see you, I'm here, we're in this together.

Before I formed you in the womb I knew you. I'm still figuring out who I am outside of who I was told to be. But today I learned that I'm someone who buys too many roses and talks to florists and says yes to things that don't make practical sense.

That's something. That's new. That's mine.