Eat the Ones You Love E-Book

Sarah Griffin

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 420

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

A twisted, tangled story about workplace love-affairs, and plants with a taste for human flesh from the acclaimed author of Spare and Found Parts and Other Words for Smoke. During a visit to her local shopping mall, Shell Pine sees a 'HELP NEEDED' sign in a flower shop window. She's just left her fiancé, lost her job, and moved home to her parents' house. She has to bring some good into her life, so she takes a chance. And flowers are just the good thing she's been looking for, as is Neve, the beautiful florist. The thing is, Neve needs help more than Shell could possibly imagine. An orchid growing in the heart of the mall is watching them closely. The beautiful florist belongs to him, and he'll do just about anything to make sure he can keep growing big and strong. Nothing he eats— nobody he eats—can satisfy him, except the thing he most desires. Neve. He will stop at nothing to eat the one he loves. Infused with wit, heart and horror, this is a story about possession, monstrosity and working in retail. It is about hunger and desire, and other terrible things that grow.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Leave us a Review

Copyright

Dedication

Seed

Shoot

Blossom

Fruit

Arrangement

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Praise for

EAT THEONES YOU LOVE

“Deliciously strange, delightfully wicked . . . Griffin thrives in the liminal space between genres, throwing out roots and blooming in weird and wonderful ways.”

V.E. SCHWAB, New York Times bestselling author of The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“It’s been an excellent few years for gothic novels, and Eat the Ones You Love is among the best I’ve read. It’s certainly the most fun. Gorgeous, bewitching, full of heart and secrets and smarts, it kept me up late and turned my dreams strange.”

KELLY LINK, bestselling author of The Book of Love

“This murdery plant is my number one problematic fave. Eat The Ones You Love is intricate, unusual, and unlike anything you’ve read before. An eccentric, deeply sensual, and artistically sure-footed exploration of toxicity in many forms. I devoured it.”

OLIVIE BLAKE, New York Times bestselling author of The Atlas Six

“Sarah Maria Griffin is an artist of the rarest kind: genuine, vulnerable, funny, tragic and wise.”

SARAH REES BRENNAN, New York Times bestselling author of Long Live Evil

“A writer whose originality, wit and gift for the uncanny always makes me feel like I’ve been turned upside down by my ankles and forced to look at the frightening shadows beneath my furniture. Eat The Ones You Love is a story that has everything: monsters, malls, and minimum wage. Griffin is a genius of suburban gothic, and like Baby, I›m always hungry for more.”

CAROLINE O’DONOGHUE, bestselling author of The Rachel Incident

“Eat The Ones You Love is a masterpiece—inventive, intimate, and so incisive on the way class shapes human relationships. Griffin’s voice is absolutely singular; scalpel-sharp and deeply lyrical, every word unexpected and yet precise. Simply put, this book redefines the literary horror genre. Fans of Paul Tremblay and T. Kingfisher have found their new obsession.”

LAURA STEVEN, award-winning author of The Society of Soulless Girls

“Eat the Ones You Love is a visceral experience akin to stepping into a lush greenhouse and feeling your skin come alive, blood warm and tingling, as spring green vines brush your cheeks whispering promises of hunger. Decadent, heartfelt, delicious, dark, broken, sweet, and horrifying, this book is a journey of verdant, blooming love and creeping terror not to be missed.”

DELILAH S. DAWSON, New York Times-bestselling author of Bloom and Guillotine

“Eat the Ones You Love is a beautiful, dark gem of a book. Sarah Maria Griffin writes with acute attention to the intersection between class and relationships, and the all-consuming effects of possession.”

ZORAIDA CÓRDOVA, USA Today bestselling author of The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina

“Sarah Maria Griffin’s prose is intoxicatingly verdant—I found myself dying to get back to reading any time life forced me to put it down. Griffin’s voice holds your hand through the pages with compelling surety. It’s a palpable, skilfully executed horror where you can’t see the florist for the trees until it’s too late. This one lingers and I loved it.”

COURTNEY SMYTH, author of The Undetectables

“I devoured this book in a matter of days, but it will be snaking through my mind for a long time to come.”

ADRIENNE CELT, author of End of the World House

“This poignant and original examination of desire and decay is a stunner.”

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, starred review

“The ultimate complex relationship story, this horrific tale is infused with humor and wit via Griffin’s prose . . . Fans of John Wiswell’s Someone You Can Build a Nest In should pick this up.”

LIBRARY JOURNAL, starred review

Also by Sarah Maria Griffinand available from Titan Books

SPARE AND FOUND PARTS

OTHER WORDS FOR SMOKE

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Eat the Ones You Love

Paperback edition ISBN: 9781803366760

Signed Paperback edition ISBN: 9781835415702

Abominable Book Club Hardback edition ISBN: 9781835415719

E-book edition ISBN: 9781803366777

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

www.titanbooks.com

First edition: April 2025

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This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

© Sarah Maria Griffin 2025

Sarah Maria Griffin asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

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Typeset by Rich Mason in ITC Tiepolo Std, Arial & Baskerville.

To Ceri, for being the warm earth I grow fromTo Caro, for the light to grow towards

I empty my mindI stuff it with grassI’m green, I repeat.

—“BECOMING MOSS,”ELLA FREARS

Only in a time-locked building like the Woodbine Crown Mall would you see a HELP NEEDED sign in a shop window.

Not HELP WANTED.

Needed.

It was handwritten on the back of a piece of what looked to be torn wrapping paper and taped to the glass, at an odd angle. Shell stood outside the florist, her groceries and gravity tugging red crevices in the palms of her hands. Well. Her mother’s groceries. Not what she’d choose for dinner, but it wasn’t Shell’s kitchen, or Shell’s table.

HELP NEEDED.

Shell’s own voice inside her head had been so loud lately. We all need help. She imagined that whoever it was running a dank little flower shop in the Woodbine Crown probably needed a fair amount of help. Maybe not more than her, necessarily. But more than most.

The mall was almost exactly as it had been since Shell was a child, or before, even. Three wings, and the great glass terrarium in the atrium, murked with moss and condensation. This would have been a gorgeous feature if it hadn’t been there for thirty years and never seen a lick of window cleaner. A three-pointed crown with a strange old emerald at the centre, it was a late 1970s relic, an aspiration towards American luxury retail ambience transplanted deep in the veins of the Northside Dublin suburbs. An architectural curiosity. Three floors. The local Dunnes Stores, a library, and a radio station. An enormous fountain in the centremost wing that had been gathering copper-wish pennies to no apparent cause. No functioning elevator. A kip, Shell thought. A weird kip in a nest of housing estates. A heaving, dilapidated heart at the middle of a wire grid of old veins. The terrarium, the sick heart within the sick heart. Sick hearts all the way down.

Not a single part of it had ever been knocked and rebuilt in Shell’s lifetime. No new lights installed. The linoleum tiles on the floor, mostly a dappled beige, except those that had failed under endless footfall, which were replaced at random with incongruous glitchlike patches of red or black. The ceiling was low, but in such a way that a person would hardly notice until they perhaps had been inside for an hour and were met with the strange sensation that they were miles away from daylight. The unit layout was, seemingly, unplanned. It all made Shell feel a bit sick, generally, some low nausea that could have been repulsion at poor design instilled in her at art college, or the unshakable awareness that she was, well, back home. Back here. She’d never had any intention of being anywhere of the sort. She didn’t know whether she hated it truly or was just heartbroken. She couldn’t tell yet, but either way, it was smothering, all of it.

What had happened in January should have freed her, but it trapped her back here instead, and she felt her eyes well up and wasn’t it too far into everything to be still crying? Summer racing up on her. HELP NEEDED nearly set her off, but she couldn’t cry here. Everyone watched everyone as they stepped in and out of the shops, the bookies, stopped at the coffee dock or sat over a plate of deli breakfast at Keeva’s Kitchen in the scant food court under the huge, cold skylight, peering at other people’s groceries through any thin spots in plastic carrier bags. Shell pulled her neck scarf up over her chin for comfort. She could at least pretend to be invisible then. Pretending was half the battle.

Even without the fabric over her nose and mouth, there was a thick in the air that you couldn’t condition out, a gelatin feeling, suffocating. It made Shell feel like she was eight, fourteen, and perhaps like she was seventy-two and still here, in a shopping centre adjacent to her housing estate, still here, still in this place. Something wouldn’t let her leave this part of the world and she had worked so hard to get gone. She had almost escaped.

She looked at the flowers in tall green buckets outside the florist that needed help and thought to herself that she would buy some and at home she’d draw them. They would cheer her parents up, act as a casual token of gratitude and appreciation, and keep her off her phone for a few hours tonight. They would also act as a very helpful excuse to inquire about what kind of help was needed, exactly, in this flower shop.

A graphic design job like her old role at Fox & Moone now was as good as a pipe dream: a situation that felt impossible to replicate. The listings Shell found were all for entry-level positions that somehow required five years of campaign experience, or executive roles that held no appeal to her, even if she had been qualified. She was stuck in the house with too many other adults: her sisters, her parents, too many of them in the space all day. Annoying one another. Her sympathy pass had run out weeks ago; now she was an interloper. It wasn’t like she hadn’t been looking for work. It was more that she’d been sending miserable emails to friends, peers, friends-of-friends, trying to suss out if their companies were hiring and being met with more unemployment, more bad news.

So sorry to hear about you and Gav, such a shame about Fox & Moone, just between you and me we’re actually letting so many people go right now, love a recession, lol, I’m sure you’ll be snapped up in no time babes x

Eventually, they stopped asking at all how she was getting on with the hunt.

Every message she got back from every query hit the same beats. They might as well have just said: Sorry to hear about your life, but I’ve got nothing for you, someone else might, I suppose? Over and over, until all of Shell’s long-treasured favours were tapped out, and she was left staring into her laptop all day, scrolling, hope numbed, unable to cut back any self-pity. She’d have emigrated already if she had the money.

Her mother had expressed concerns about her going off and starting over at her age, at thirty-three—but what about Galway? That would be far enough away for a new beginning but near enough home, too. Just across the belly of the country, the other coast.

Still, even that kind of move was steep cash, and as much encouragement as her mother gave her, there was no world in which Shell was being bankrolled. Shell was to sort herself out.

So, sorting herself out could look like retail. Forty hours in a shop a week was preferable to the wallowing, to the endless pingback of So sorry hun. Minimum wage would be a slap, but one she could take. Floristry was the same as design, right? The meticulous organization of beautiful, delicate things. Shapes. Shell liked shapes. She scooped a heavy bouquet—expensive, but best to look like that wasn’t an issue—from a bucket out front and walked inside. One arm weighted down with carrots, six densely wrapped chicken breasts, and a large tub of gravy granules in a cloth bag, the other cradling a carefully-organized-to-look-kind-of-wild clutch of sunflowers, eucalyptus leaves, ferns, and some mad, virgin’s-cloak-blue blossoms she couldn’t name.

The shop was a little larger than the walk-in wardrobe she’d shared with Gav, back at the apartment. The ceiling just as low. Lit funny, yellow almost, by multiple lamps instead of one overhead light. It was so cold, so suddenly, that Shell felt a chill go over her and her nose turn pink. The shelves were jammed with wreaths, succulents, swags. Buckets on buckets, some tall, some stout, rammed with flowers, organized by species, not colour. Pots and pots of monstera, the kind you see a lot of on Instagram now that nobody leaves their house so much anymore. Talk radio played at a low volume, almost inaudible, but Shell just about caught the jingle: Woodbine Crown FM, afternoon vibe at 106.9! There was an almost-chaos to the place: it was overrun with life. Well. Not life. The flowers were dead the second they were cut, weren’t they? Shelly supposed nothing in here was alive, only a handful of potted plants and herself.

However, it was not just Shell and the merchandise. Down the back of the lush, close den was a high counter, and perched on a stool behind it, reading a book, was the florist.

Shell knew the outline of her, somehow. Had they been in the same school? A few years apart? It wasn’t until the florist looked up from her reading and right into Shell’s eyes that she started to feel in any way nervous. The florist closed the book, tilted her head to the side, and said, “Delphis and sunnies. A dream. Let me stick a little extra paper around those for you.”

Shell smiled, handing the bouquet over the counter, hoping her cheeks would lift the signal to her eyes, and said, “A dream, thank you. Do you mind me asking—like, sorry—what kind of help do you need?”

The florist laughed, husky, unspooling brown paper into a square. “That’s a big question.” She laid the flowers down to wrap them.

“I’m unemployed,” said Shell, before she could think, and the florist, taking a thumb of tape from a large black dispenser, said, “Oh, the sign,” in a voice that made Shell feel as though she’d missed a joke and said something incredibly stupid at once. The florist quickly swaddled the bouquet with the paper and taped it in place. She stood the flowers up on their stems, the bunch finding a stable geometry, flourishing with light petals at the top, bound into a hinge and all the weight low, in the green legs. They both admired them in silence, for a moment, the gold and the blue and the green. The wild and the order.

The florist was taller than Shell and her hair was cropped short. It was dark—perhaps it would have been curly if it had been long, and Shell was very aware then that she was looking at her, properly, trying to decipher why it was that she felt like she knew her. She wore small glasses, but her features were large. Her eyes and her mouth were generous.

“Are you interested?” the florist asked, looking at the bouquet, adjusting it slightly.

“Sorry—what?”

“Interested. In the job. How do you feel about flowers?”

The woman’s apron was denim, like one a carpenter might wear, with a black leather strap holding it high on her form, buckled over her heart. She held the now-wrapped bouquet out, gently, as though it were a breathing animal. Shell reached across the counter to take the flowers and noticed as it changed hands how light the bouquet was for something so large.

“What, these ones? They’re—beautiful.” And the blooms looked up at Shell, the solar disc of flower and the little blue licks of petal and the green, green, green all around them.

“I meant more in general, but yes, they are. Are they for anyone special, or just yourself?” asked the florist, hands on the counter. On her left hand was a dark, slim ring and Shell wasn’t looking for that, necessarily. But it was on the correct finger to imply that she was engaged, or married. Her nails were short but manicured, shiny black.

Shell looked back up and answered, “Just for me. I’m going to draw them. Pass the evenings, you know?”

The florist shook her head slightly, tipping a couple digits of the register without looking. “Ah, I do, yeah. The evenings can be hard all right. And that’s eighteen, please. We don’t take cash anymore.”

“Oh. Yes.” Shell suddenly realized she had no hands with which to remove her card and handed the bouquet back to the florist. There was a moment’s kerfuffle, and they both laughed in a nice way, as though mutually. It was almost as if they were both aware of something about the other, now. She tapped her card. It made a noise. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d used a paper note. The florist handed her back the flowers again, crumpling the receipt into a tiny firm ball and throwing it over her shoulder.

“I’m looking for a full-time assistant. That’s the kind of help I need.”

“I’m—I’m looking for work. I’m a—I was—a graphic designer. But I worked in retail for, like, six years, before I was in the agency. Fox & Moone. They went under,” replied Shell. “Not because of me, like. Because of, well—you know. The world.”

“Oh, I know. The world. The economy.” The florist then smiled like a cat, revealing crooked white teeth and a deep dimple in the left side of her cheek.

Trouble.

Shell held her nerve and smiled fully. “My name is Michelle—Shell. Not Michelle-Shell. Like people . . . call me Shell.”

“Michelle-Shell. I’m Neve.”

She pronounced it softly. Like never, but not quite.

“The sign’s been up a couple of months, and nobody’s asked about it. Realistically, the Crown won’t be open into next year, so this isn’t a long-term gig. You can assist, though, if you like. Come in a couple of mornings, see if you have a feel for it. Thirteen euros an hour—isn’t much, but we have some big clients who tip well. We start most days at four a.m., close up when we’re sold out. I basically never leave but don’t see that as a standard. It’s the early starts and cold hands that put people off this job.” Neve took a business card out of a tiny plastic cradle on the counter and placed it in the bouquet.

“I don’t sleep more than a couple of hours a night anyway,” said Shell. “And, look, sure you know what they say about cold hands?”

“Warm heart,” said Neve, holding her hands up to either side of her face. The ring caught Shell’s eye again, but this time so did calluses and white scarring on her palms. Shell was struck again by the feeling that she knew her from somewhere, but she didn’t say that; instead she smiled and said, “Warm heart,” too.

“Look, fire me over a CV tonight. Email’s on the card. I’ll call your references, get you in on Thursday. Does that work?”

Neve’s tone was direct and slightly commanding. Shell was sure she would agree to just about anything the florist said.

“Yes,” said Shell, almost without thinking at all. They said so long, talk to you shortly, thanks a million, and Shell left, the fragrance of the bouquet more intense now, and she thought to herself that that was the easiest it had been for her to get a job since she was a teenager. It was fifteen minutes from her parents’ place and the potential for long hours would keep her busy, keep her out, away from the crowd in the house. The wages would add up. Slowly.

She could take photos of the flowers for her Instagram. Replace all the surreptitiously deleted images of her life with Gav, scrubbed late one night, silent motions of her thumb rendering seven years of photographic history nonexistent. Selfies of their smiling or pouting faces in Prague, in Barcelona. Images taken of printed photo-booth strips, black and white, her on his lap, both of them in sunglasses for the pose, hers shaped like love-hearts. Their too-formal, stiff poses in other people’s wedding parties. All gone. Every single one of them. Like it had never happened. She would plant lush, blousy peonies and starry white lilies with yellow tongues in the space online where the story of her life had just been: Shell and Gav at Primavera, Shell and Gav at Emer and Donal’s big day, Gav drinking a craft beer with his eyebrows raised. The caption on that said This one, with a heart emoji.

As she’d erased them there in her childhood bed, under the covers, she couldn’t remember a single thing about how she’d felt in any of those shots. She had no idea whose life it was, really, taking up all that digital space. Now it would all be flowers, all hers. Sunnies and delphis and roses and cosmos would be all people could see when they went looking. Bloom after bloom after bloom atop long, fragile stems.

It almost, if she could spin it just right, on the tip of her finger—would look like a choice she’d made. Not just a coincidental opportunity that had opened in front of her, that she had taken out of boredom and discomfort, the need for cash, any cash at all to help her start her life again. Cash for a deposit, a few months’ rent out west to tide her over while she found another job. She’d gotten good at living slim. Cancelled her Pilates studio membership in town, stopped donating to the podcasts she followed.

All that and Neve had been so up front about the Woodbine closing down—Shell had heard rumours of it, but it hadn’t felt possible, or something. Her mam had mentioned it, as had her nana. They were mourning the loss of local proximity to a good supermarket in advance, the cream cakes from the café upstairs, how handy it was to have a hair salon so close by. They were confounded, almost, by the potential of a rental-only apartment block that would spring up in its place.

Who would want to live in a flat on the site of a rancid old mall? Surely the foundations were rotting, surely the bad vibes in the air would carry on to whatever was built over it.

And, well, Neve seemed nice. Smart. Engaged, importantly. This was good, and safe, given the mischief that glinted off her surface, like how at the right time of day, the sun reflects tiny blinks of magic on still bodies of water. They would be great pals, Shell and Neve.

This would be easy.

Or at least, that had been the plan.

If Shell had been paying more attention to anything further than her own feelings, she might not have missed so many details sitting out of place in the flower shop. The vines growing over the ceiling, on the floor—she stepped over them without looking. The long, thin bruises on Neve’s arms—she only noticed the florist’s hands because Neve showed them to her, in flirtation. The wrong things in the space weren’t convenient to Shell: she was only really looking at the woman in front of her, only really looking at the bouquet, only really thinking of how to help herself.

Oh, she’s perfect.

Shell stood the bouquet on her dresser, just as Neve had built it: with perfect balance. Seemed it a pity to disassemble it, to put it in a vase.

I was nestled there, my energy not dwindling yet, a happy observer of this new place outside the Crown.

She was proud that she’d gotten it home in one piece. Despite a lopsided eleven-minute walk back to her family home through the grey, fat labyrinth streets of the housing estate, she hadn’t even lost one petal. She felt like an event, tottering with a bouquet that was slightly bigger than her upper torso, all bright yellow, sky blue, celebration on a dour stretch of Tuesday afternoon.

Shell always felt under surveillance here: the eyes of long-moved-away spectres of childhood peers still peeking out from behind telephone poles, not able to shake the sense of perceived judgement, the tightness under her ribs. An abiding and unrelenting sense of shame, technically, was what it was. The same shame she’d held as a child had mutated now, become textured, sophisticated, and immutable. I could tell she felt like a dick carrying the bouquet.

The worst thing in the estate was to be a person who wanted to be looked at in any capacity: to want for attention, to need anything, or to appear even for a moment as if you did. Parading down the Rise holding an enormous bouquet as though there were something worth celebrating happening was profoundly humiliating, and Shell expected at any moment for the estate to move in this way—to be yelled at by a passing fleet of twelve-year-old boys on bikes, to receive an eye-roll from a harried new mother pushing a buggy containing a screaming child, a judgement from a priest, maybe, stony-faced and appalled at the vanity of it.

In reality, literally nobody cared about the girl with the shopping bags and the flowers. She was invisible: ordinary. If I could, I would crawl inside her collar and whisper in her ear, Nobody cares, Shell, over and over. Nobody is thinking about you, and though this would not release her from the narcissism of believing that the world’s eyes were on her as opposed to on their own steps and field of vision, it would at least jolt her, cause her to consider that maybe her life was even smaller than she had imagined at first. I will tell her this, I will leaf my way into the parts of her that can hear and feel and I will assure her that the eyes of others slip off her like furniture, she is unremarkable, objectively ordinary. Her pain is a non-phenomenon. But as she walked through her neighbourhood here, she believed herself to be the protagonist of reality, and the tragedy was not that she was heartbroken, retrograded, moved back in with disinterested parents. Rather, it was that she was deluded and ordinary and abjectly blind to both of these realities.

Silly girl.

Her humiliating fantasy ended abruptly when she got home and her mother was delighted to see her: all the shopping done, and a big bunch of flowers? She was a dote for going out of her way to bring home something nice. Shell’s sisters were in the living room and were coaxed out to look at the bouquet, swatted away by their mother from plucking some blooms off it for themselves. The bouquet was enough to get everyone up on their feet, out of their books and phones and laptops for six or seven minutes. The bouquet was like a guest in the house, and Shell realized then that becoming a florist wasn’t just good news in that she was going to be earning her way and would be seen to be getting her life back on track—the presence of flowers would assuage some of her mother and father’s resentfulness at her presence. Win, win, win.

None of the losses had shown through yet.

Shell kidnapped the lush, overflowing houseguest of flowers up to her room, promising she’d return them in one piece once she’d taken some pictures, done some sketches of them. Her mother called her a little dote again and again: what a sweet thing her girl had done, off away to market and back with flowers. As though they were picked from a field by a child with a basket and cloak. As though Shell hadn’t been behaving cynically, strategically, bolstering herself with the beautiful, green, and dead.

Up in her room then, the flowers stood, and I a spy amongst them. Shell erected the awkward, too-modern ring light she had purchased the previous Christmas, which had once stood in her bathroom at the flat with Gav. Her bathroom, not theirs. Her bathroom was her own space, a sanctuary where she could carefully make herself beautiful every day, where she could sit on the edge of the bath and scroll her phone in peace—especially at the end. The ring light, a black, industrial tripod and a halo of LEDwhite scream, was almost the shape of a person. Her skeleton man, all the meat of the old life she’d had stripped away, and here she was in her childhood bedroom with just this machine instead of Gav, instead of anything at all. She sort of danced with him, the ring light, trying to get him to stand just so, to light the flowers as though they were a seventeen-year-old girl, as though they would catch the eyes of the internet and give her, if not meaning, at least attention.

She shot the flowers as though they were to be spread across the glossy bed of a magazine fold, as though their pixels were to be stretched and blown and pasted across the walls of a concession stand at an airport. She shot them billboard, she shot them baby you’re gorgeous. Truth be told, Shell did have an incredible eye: something she didn’t know about herself but I know because I know everything about her now is that she was in possession of an anomaly in her vision that permitted her to perceive more colour than the standard human can with their eyes. Tetrachromacy sounds like magic but is mere genetics, and was secret even to Shell herself. So I will credit her this: alone in her room she was not merely feigning marvel at the light and the flowers, she was truly admiring them, shooting them and capturing a version of them that only she could see. If she had known this about herself, she would have made this exceptional sight a core tenet of her personality, so perhaps it was best she didn’t know.

Shell elected a close image that contained enough of the bouquet to express a vibrant range of colour and variety of plants, but not enough to show her room, her unpacked suitcases, her own tired reflection in the vanity mirror. She captioned it, carefully, New Beginnings! bouquet emoji, hibiscus emoji, sunflower emoji, glitter emoji. These flowers could have been a gift from a lover—and this image and caption had the potential to provoke anxiety in Gav, if he bothered to look. She couldn’t be clocked, either: she was getting a job working with flowers, she technically was experiencing a new beginning. This is all the truth, she thought to herself, proud of the smoke-and-mirror act, sitting on her bed, slipping off her sneakers and socks, grateful for her mother changing her sheets—the crisp, laundered sensation of a freshly made bed was almost spiritual.

It would be the duvet for the rest of the day for her, over drawing the flowers. She was tired now, from the emotional exertion of taking out the light, thinking of the light in the old apartment, thinking of her old bathroom and comparing it to the poky family bathroom she shared with her two resentful sisters. Shell decided she was doing her best and crawled into the fresh nest to reward herself for her big morning, by closing her eyes for a nap.

It is there, as she slips out of the day early to rest bones that don’t need rest, that I begin my work on her—but she does the heavy lifting for me. She thinks about Neve almost the instant her pillow warms around her and she dips two, three inches out of waking but not quite into sleep. Thinks about the sharpness of Neve’s jaw, the leather strap of her apron, her hands. Her teeth were neat and white. The gradient of her voice was so familiar.

Shell thinks how they will be such pals. Such friends. Soft, fae Shell with her highlit curls and angular, wry Neve and their little flower shop. Foam pierced with sharp stems, roses spiralling fat from tight buds, learning a new language, learning the names for all the gorgeous and the dead things around them. Wreath, spray, swag, crown, Neve would teach Shell to become an architect and Shell would be a fast and ready learner. Shell would become somebody out of the shadow of her old life, she would stand tall and emit light so powerful that all colour was changed by her. This new press forward, a halo.

What a daydream for the silly girl. I let her have it. I did not change the course of it even an inch. There would be plenty of time for that.

When she eventually woke herself up proper, Shell held her phone at an angle to her face that meant she didn’t have to rise, and checked the public response her two thousand followers on Instagram had left on her image and mysterious caption. They didn’t know it yet, but they were reading the very first chapter of a story she would tell them, one flower at a time. Looks unreal babe! Omg where did u get them? Stunnin Shell! Gorge xxxx. Bouquet emoji, tulip emoji, rose emoji. Standard hundred and twenty likes, fine. No sign of Gav, though he would have seen it. This was close to the last time she would consider Gav’s gaze, though she didn’t know that yet. His sister’s mark was there, though—helpful.

Shell thumbed open WhatsApp.

The number of unread messages gave her a tug of anxiety. Various groups full of talk hummed away: she didn’t want to leave her digital read imprint on many of them, so her lack of participation would be seen to fall under busy over saw it, didn’t care, though only the latter was true.

She opened her most regularly used chat group, the girls who she’d gone to college with and who all still orbited in and out of one another’s lives through brunches and gigs and gallery launches. They’d seen a lot of each other before the breakup. Sometimes it still felt like they were in college—still having little house parties, or going on walks, or sitting on blankets in the park during the summer drinking gin and tonic out of tins. That was all different now, but the three of them had been as good to Shell as they could, given that social gatherings had fallen out of their pattern of habits as the demands of their thirties began to mount. That, and the reality that Shell’s relationship had crumbled and none of theirs had. Chloe was pregnant; Emily had started her own business selling artisanal, handmade candles because her freelancing had dried up. Lorna was—well. Busy. They were all busy. Shell had distinctly not been busy. She’d mostly been sad, hiding, communicating through memes when she couldn’t muster up any more emotional support for anyone else in their triumphs or their true, unspeakable losses. She had neither.

Birth and death were still realities happening to other people, whereas nothing had been happening to Shell, only the slow fall of the tower she had built for herself. Her breakup hadn’t even been that interesting: at least if there had been an affair, a crisis, there would have been something to talk about. Shell and Gav’s slow numbing to each other and the obviousness that the breakup was a good thing in the long run didn’t make for a lot of rallying, cheering. The girls were all still kind of friends with Gav; Shell wasn’t going to split herself open and give them her pain in case some impression of it made their way back to him. The thought of details of her breakdown being distilled into gossip made her feel sick, so she kept her mouth firmly shut. Going to the pub to get shitfaced and climb the body of a stranger wasn’t a restorative option; she hadn’t done anything like that in years, and wasn’t best composed to manage sexual rejection, given that the heady cocktail of being laid off and her relationship dissolving was so recent. Lorna, who had, in college, been the riot leader, who was always trying to convince people at three a.m. in smoking areas to get a taxi to the airport with her and just like, go to Berlin—we can just go—was now the invigilator within the group, insisting that they all put self-care first. Ensuring, sherifflike, that there was no toxic behaviour occurring. So there was no talk of Shell hopping out to meet a pleasant, stupid man for a drink and a ride, and even if there was, she wouldn’t get the chance to share her thrilling tales of self-esteem recovery with her friends.

So she didn’t share anything with them anymore, really. A picture of a lizard wearing a party hat as a reply to How was everyone’s day? A baby goat wearing some sunglasses in reply to Any plans for the weekend girlies? Talking through increasingly deranged memes was easier than saying anything at all. Today, though, she did have something to share—and they were poised, waiting for her tale. Who were the flowers from? What’s the story with the bouquet? Is there a man? Multiple men? A person who is not a man? Are you trying to make Gav sick, because I’d say he’s sick. I’d be fucken sick. New beginnings? New beginnings of what?

The strange little digital spotlight was down on her now. She finally had something to tell them, to show them after weeks of embarrassed deflections.

lol, no man unfortch girls—but new job. i’m starting to take shifts in the florist so I can re-skill: it’s something i’ve always had such a passion for but never had the opportunity to pursue. Drawing was her passion, not flowers, but what did they know? now that a little bit of the pressure is off me to keep up with gav’s lifestyle in town, i’ve done somereevaluating and am going to go down a path i feel really strongly about. plants! flowers! expect loads more bouquets from me in future! Bouquet emoji, fire emoji, bicep flex emoji.

The responses were short, exclamation-pointed—Goodfor you girl, go get it, soundsunreal—not the level of enthusiasm that Shell had hoped for. Perhaps if she told them about Neve, they’d be more interested: the flower shop is tiny and pokey and run by this girl—or like, woman or whatever—who looks and feels really familiar. Shell thought about asking the girls if they knew someone called Neve, but stopped herself. She didn’t want to know if they knew her. She wanted this to be all her own. They already knew everything about her life before: a couple of their boyfriends were friends with Gav. They’d all gone to Inis Oírr to the biennale since 2014, they’d hit micro festivals across the country multiple times a summer, even flown out to Primavera. There had been innumerable, identical, exhausting weddings from the outer limits of their social lives, weekend after weekend after weekend.

I liked getting this vantage point on her. I liked crawling into her memories, into her desires.

Neve was far from this room, farther still from Shell’s old world. Neve was her employer and even the thought of showing her new, strange presence in her life to the girls made Shell feel a bit sick. Neve and the shop were Shell paving the path ahead for herself, not the road behind her. Neve would tell her what to do, so she didn’t have to think about anything for eight hours a day.

Plus, if she wanted to know what Neve’s deal was, she could just search her. Distinctive enough name so that typing Neve Florist Woodbine Crown led her to discover Neve’s social media profiles—agonizingly all private. It would take Shell a shift or two before she could risk a follow, a step over that strange threshold, privileging her to the four-thousand-ish photos stored on Instagram that tracked Neve’s life until now. Only around a hundred followers. Following sixty. Slim metrics. Personal, not performance.

At this stage Shell was bluntly aware that she was attracted to Neve, and had decided that the sensation of knowing her from before was likely pheromones. It didn’t hurt that there was also a dense pollen in the air, that their tiny show had had me and my vines and my leaves and my buds as an audience. I chose Shell, make no mistake, but there was a helpful organic chemistry waiting there, too. This was no possession. I did not even lift the heat of Shell’s blood any higher on the stove of her, not necessarily. Shell saw Neve’s face, her smile, and took in her body, and something in Shell’s own body made a decision. Shell probably would have been thinking about her anyway, scouring the internet for traces of Neve’s identity, scrolling through Google Image Search for the whole look of her.

After some time trying to glean her from the occasional images made public, Shell decided to get up and bring the flowers and me downstairs, share us with her mother, place me generously in the kitchen where everyone could experience my beauty and I could use my flickering strength to observe them in return. She was sure to tell her pleased father that there would be plenty more where they came from in the months to come, that they’d never be out of blooms. Shell was temporarily the star of their rickety show with too many in the cast, a whole family living in dense quarters, reluctantly choosing the act of stepping on one another’s toes rather than bearing out the rental crisis in the rest of the country. After dinner, when her sisters left for their room and her father retired to the sofa to softly scroll his phone and half watch TheSopranos, Shell set about drinking a bottle of white wine out of a glass full of ice cubes with her mother at the kitchen table. They watched videos on her mother’s iPad of women arranging flowers in Sweden, in Japan, in London. Building arches from foliage in double speed, like sculptures turning thin wire structures into lush archways littered with fat peonies and roses in varying shades of coral and cream; these florists are architects, long in their trades, hands green, hearts green. Shell’s mother was a happy tourist, and by the time her first enormous tumbler of chardonnay on the rocks was finished, she was wearing one of my flowers from the bouquet above her ear. Shell twirled a piece of eucalyptus between her finger and thumb as she tried to take in anything from the screen, other than a low sense of marvel at how easy these florists made it look. How that could be her someday. How she hadn’t had this ambition when she woke up that morning, but here it was.

They watched a forty-minute video of a woman building a chandelier that trailed fern and bloom down as though they were glass and light and drank another bottle between them. By the time one a.m. came and Shell was loaded, hugging her mother good night, she had genuinely convinced herself that she really cared more about the flowers than the impression of organizing the flowers, that she was really ready to be an apprentice at the heel of a sculptor, that this might just be the best thing that ever happened to her, and you know, she wasn’t wrong.

Her life otherwise would have been on a predictable rail. She and Gav would have had two children, a wedding that seated about two hundred friends and family members, a three-bedroom house in a suburb in a nicer postcode than the ones either of them were raised in. She would have been safe.

But—she never would have felt like she felt when she met Neve. She never would have felt what she was going to feel when I arrived for her, in her. She never would have known what it was to glimpse past tile and brick and wire and the boundaries of the world into something bigger, and older, and wilder. She never would have known that I am the best thing. Neve might have been the sculptor and she the apprentice, but I am the angel in the marble and I am starving. I am so, so hungry.

And lucky her to come to know the feeding of me.

It could have been anyone who took notice of the sign, but it was Shell, and the room was flooded by emotion when she and Neve began to speak. Both of them in so much pain, so polluted by loss that it had just about changed their colour; it warmed the temperature of the air in the shop, and I could feel it over every inch of myself, how the energy they both took to conceal it was so potent you could get wasted off it, if that kind of thing was your poison. If this tiny exchange rushed through me so hard, what will it feel like in a week, in two weeks, in a month? To watch it bloom and ripen for eating?

Michelle, Shelly, Shell. The sorrow when she read the word needed over and over again there in the southernmost wing of the Crown. How much she needs will be the ruin of her. I felt the live little tug of curiosity that rose in her, how fresh a feeling it was. She’d felt very little other than the same gradient of miserable after the extremity of her own sorrow had become boring to even her. She will find new pain to thrill through herself in no time. I will lead her there and she will, I am sure, follow me like I am a miracle.

I am, though.

A miracle.

A brisk handful of emails charted Shell’s week so that before she knew it, she was to be waiting outside the locked, shuttered public entryway to the Woodbine Crown at 4:30 a.m. on Thursday. She’d only been in the shop on Tuesday and was glad to feel a sense of Neve’s urgency around getting her started. Her new life right there, opening like a palm.

Getting ready for work had been a strange task. She’d been at home for so long—between her parents’, and her and Gav’s old place, so accustomed to sweatpants and cardigans and slippers that she was finding it hard to work out what looked normal, semiprofessional. Retail professional. Shop-floor professional. It was different, facing the public in this way. She thought of how Neve had put herself together, from the small glimpse of her she’d taken behind the counter, and went through some of her packed-away clothes, looking to correspond. The strangeness of getting dressed for work at 3:30 a.m. was not lost on her: her head felt loopy in the way it only ever did on the way to the airport for an early flight. This was it—this was her routine from now on. Her middle-of-the-night life. She let the selfie ring illuminate her bedroom rather than turning on the bluntness of the overhead light. Her eyes and her mouth felt strange as she brushed her teeth and pawed out her eye sockets with cotton-pad cleansers in the bathroom, being as quiet as she could so as not to wake the rest of the house. She was cold. Didn’t matter how warm the house was or wasn’t, how thick her pyjamas—this time of night was a cold one from the inside of her, not the outside.

She wore a carefully selected pair of black dungarees, wide-legged, turned up a little at the ankle. They were stylish, but they also communicated a crafty, artisan energy that she felt would be appropriate for the nature of the work she was about to undertake. She paired them with a ribbed dark charcoal vest and a thick cream Aran cardigan. Shell had gotten rid of a great deal of her silver jewellery so as to purge herself of the tasteful little totems Gav had left her with, and opted instead for thick circular earrings made of off-white leather. Sneakers in the same shade. Hair out of her face in a knot on her head. A minimal makeup composition: not enough to proclaim too much glamour, but enough to make her look as though she cared. Because god, she cared so much. She had painted her fingernails the evening prior, an almost invisible nude. She was well composed by the time she was leaving the house, a little after four, a cup of tea in a KeepCup in one hand, a bitten crescent of toast in the other.