I’m standing in the sun like an idiot, palm trees and cheap motel signs painting the horizon and the airport’s glass walls throwing back a million tiny reflections of everything I’m trying not to think about. My fingers keep finding the stems of the bouquet like it’s an anchor — yellow and purple, bright like she’d picked them herself, like the colors actually mean something that won’t get ruined the minute I open my mouth. I picked them myself, for once. I went to three different stands, asked the clerk which yellows looked happiest, which purples wouldn’t wilt in a car, and I rearranged them in the backseat with a stupid mix of precision and panic until the arrangement looked like how I wanted it to feel: mostly sunshine, with the purple tucked in like a promise.

During the flight I kept thinking of all the things I could say and how none of them were the right thing. I practice my smile in the rearview mirror until it looks practiced and thin. I clutch the card like a small, blunt weapon because words are heavy and small cards feel safe. I wrote “From, Mike” because I couldn’t figure out how to put eleven whole months of missing and homework and dumb jokes and late-night phone calls into a single line. I couldn’t risk doing something that felt like a declaration and then tripping on it when I actually met her.

The terminal smells like exhaust and coffee and the kind of nervous cologne you wear when you want to seem older than you are. People move around me in a blur—families pulling rolling suitcases, couples intertwined, travelers hunched over phones. Will’s there, of course—Will, whose presence is a comfortable, awkward punctuation in everything that happens with us. He’s trying to be calm, pretending the whole thing is fine, but his hands keep doing that thing he does where they fidget without permission. I can tell he wants to say something that’ll make it less strange between us, but he’s on edge too — I can read him like a map because we’ve been doing this map-reading together for years. We stand too close and not close enough. Will raises an eyebrow like he’s testing if I have sunglasses or confidence. I don’t. I have flowers and a card and a stupid grin I can’t control.

She comes out like she always does—not in a rush, but sure of the space she takes up. The whole world narrows to the way her head tilts, the curl of hair that stubbornly refuses to be tamed, the way sunlight finds the freckles on her nose. Everything else blurs—every overhead announcement, every laughing stranger—becomes background static to the one live thing I am suddenly terrified to mess up. My palms go slick. I tell myself to breathe like I’m running base and have to count steps. I step forward because not stepping forward now would be a different kind of cowardice.

When I hand her the flowers, I feel like I am handing over an audition for how much I understand her. “I know you like yellow and purple,” I say, and I can hear how small my voice is, how boyish. “So, uh… I tried to make it a seventy-thirty thing.” I say it like it’s a joke, buffering the moment with numbers because numbers are safer than feeling. Her face lights up in a way that knocks the wind out of me — she actually likes them. For a second the entire trip, the anxious planning, the endless rehearsing, feels worth it. She leans in the way she does when she’s about to tell you a story and the scent of the flowers hits me: lemon and warm honey and the faint, green smell of stems. It’s thinner than panic, stronger than relief.