The flowers arrived on Tuesday.

Delia brought the vase into my office holding it like evidence. White roses, white lilies, white everything. A florist's idea of apology. The card sat on top, cream-colored, his name in printed script.

"What do you want me to do with these?" she asked.

I didn't look up from my chart. "Hospital next door. Oncology floor. They'll know what to do with them."

"Okay." She paused in the doorway. "Should I start turning these away at the door?"

"No." I finished my note, closed the folder. "Log them. Dispose of them. Don't tell me they arrived."

She nodded once, sharp and efficient, and left with the vase.

I went back to my charts. A fever case, a follow-up ear infection, a well-check for a two-year-old who'd just started saying full sentences. I wrote careful notes. I drew a small star in the margin of the two-year-old's file because he'd told me his favorite thing was airplanes.

I did not think about the flowers again.

That's what I told myself.

---

Wednesday morning I left my building at five forty-five for the gym, same as always. The street was still dark, the kind of Seattle dark that's more gray than black, heavy with the promise of rain that hasn't started yet.

Stefan was standing beside a car parked across the street.

I saw him before he saw me. He was looking down at his phone, one hand in his coat pocket, breath misting in the cold. Not hiding. Not lurking. Just standing there like he had a right to the sidewalk, which technically he did.

I kept walking.

He looked up when I was ten feet away. "Wren."

I nodded the way I'd nod at anyone whose name I'd forgotten but whose face looked vaguely familiar. Polite. Brief. Empty.

"I was hoping we could talk," he said.

I adjusted my gym bag on my shoulder and kept walking.

"Just five minutes," he called after me.

I didn't turn around.

At the corner I heard a car door open and close, an engine start. I didn't look back to see if he followed. I just kept my pace steady, my breathing even, my face blank as glass.

The gym was warm and bright and smelled like rubber mats and old sweat. I wrapped my hands. I hit the bag for an extra two rounds.

---

Thursday he was at the coffee shop.

I walked in at seven-thirty, post-training, hair still damp, and he was sitting at a corner table with a laptop open and a cup in front of him that looked like it had been there awhile. The coffee was probably cold.

He looked up when the door chimed.

I ordered my usual. Black coffee, no room. The barista knew my name. I paid, took the cup, and walked past Stefan's table on my way to the door.

"Wren," he said, quieter this time, like he was asking permission just to say it.

I kept walking.

Outside, I took a sip. The coffee was hot and bitter and exactly what I needed. I got in my car and drove to the clinic and saw eleven patients and did not think about him once.

That's what I told myself.

---

Friday evening I stayed late to finish charts. The clinic was quiet, just me and the hum of the refrigerator in the med room. I locked up at seven and walked to my car in the parking garage, heels clicking on concrete, keys already in my hand.

Stefan was leaning against the pillar beside my car.

I stopped three feet away.

"This is getting predictable," I said.

He straightened. "I'm not trying to corner you."

"You're standing beside my car."

"I just want to talk. Five minutes. That's all I'm asking."

I looked at him for a long moment. The gray at his temples. The lines around his eyes that hadn't been there before. The expensive coat that didn't quite hide how thin he'd gotten.

"No," I said.

I walked past him, unlocked my car, and got in. He didn't move. He just stood there, hands loose at his sides, watching me through the windshield.

I started the engine. I backed out. I drove home.

In my rearview mirror, I saw him still standing there, small and still beneath the fluorescent lights.

---

That night Raegan called.

"He's escalating," she said without preamble.

"He's persistent," I corrected. "Not the same thing."

"Wren."

"I'm handling it."

"You shouldn't have to handle it. That's what restraining orders are for."

"He hasn't done anything illegal."

"Standing outside your building at dawn feels pretty fucking illegal to me."

I set my phone on speaker and poured myself a glass of water. "He's not threatening me. He's not following me home. He's just… there."

"That's called stalking."

"That's called pathetic."

Silence on the other end. Then, softer: "Does it bother you?"

I looked at my reflection in the dark window. My face was calm. My hands were steady.

"No," I said. "It doesn't."

And the strange thing was, I meant it.

I didn't feel anger. I didn't feel fear. I didn't feel anything at all when I looked at him, and that absence — that clean, hollow nothing — was the most honest thing I'd felt in years.

"Good," Raegan said finally. "Keep it that way."

After we hung up, I sat on my couch in the dark and thought about white flowers in a hospital room, and a man standing alone in a parking garage, and the way some debts can never be paid no matter how many times you show up with your hands open.

I went to bed at ten.

I slept fine.

I saw the car first. Black sedan, parked crooked across two spaces near the cemetery gate. I knew it was his before I even turned off the engine.

The chrysanthemums sat in the passenger seat, white petals bright against green paper. I'd bought them at the same florist I always used, the one on Pike Street that opened early. White chrysanthemums. My father's favorite. Every year, same day, same flowers.

I took them and walked.

The path was wet from last night's rain. My boots left prints in the soft ground. I could see the headstone from twenty yards away — gray granite, simple lettering, a name and two dates that never stopped feeling wrong.

Stefan was on his knees in front of it.

I stopped walking.

He had his forehead pressed to the stone. His shoulders were shaking. I couldn't hear him from where I stood, but I could see his mouth moving, words spilling out into the cold morning air where no one living could answer them.

I waited.

It took him almost a minute to sense me there. When he looked up, his face was wet. His eyes were red-rimmed and raw.

I didn't move.

He stood slowly, like his knees hurt. Maybe they did. He was older now. We both were.

"Wren," he said. "I didn't know you'd be—"

"You don't get to cry here," I said.

He stopped.

"He's not yours to mourn."

The words came out quiet. Flat. I wasn't angry. I wasn't anything. I was just stating a fact, the way I'd tell a patient their test results.

Stefan opened his mouth. Closed it. His hands hung at his sides, useless.

I walked past him. I knelt where he'd been kneeling and set the chrysanthemums against the base of the stone, arranging them the way my father would have liked — neat, simple, no fuss. My fingers were cold. I didn't hurry.

Behind me, Stefan said something. I didn't catch it and I didn't ask him to repeat it.

I stood. I brushed the wet grass off my knees. I looked at the headstone for one more moment — *Marvin James Mitchell, Beloved Father* — and then I turned and walked back down the path.

Stefan was still standing there, halfway between the grave and the gate, like he couldn't decide which direction to move.

I walked past him without slowing.

"Wren, please—"

I got in my car. I started the engine. In my rearview mirror I saw him standing alone in the middle of the path, a dark shape against the gray morning, and then I turned onto the main road and he disappeared.

---

I went to the clinic. I saw patients. A toddler with croup, a seven-year-old with a sprained ankle, a baby who wouldn't stop crying until I sang to her. I drew stars on charts. I wrote prescriptions. I smiled at worried mothers and told them their children would be fine.

At six I locked up and drove home.

I made dinner. Pasta, simple, nothing fancy. I ate half and put the rest in the fridge. I showered. I read for an hour, medical journal, new research on pediatric asthma.

I went to bed at ten.

I woke up at three.

The dream was the same as it always used to be, back before I learned how to stop having it. The staircase. Twelve steps. My hand reaching for the railing and finding nothing. The world tilting. The impact.

The silence.

That was always the worst part. Not the fall. The silence after. The terrible, absolute silence of a body that should have been moving inside me and wasn't.

I lay in the dark with my hand pressed flat against my stomach, against nothing, against a space that had been empty for seven years.

My breathing was fast. Not panicked. Just fast. I counted inhales. Four counts in, hold, six counts out. Again. Again.

At four I got up. I made tea I didn't drink. I sat on the couch in the dark and opened my father's letter, the one I kept in the drawer of my nightstand, the one I'd read so many times the creases were starting to tear.

*You are the bravest thing I ever made, and no man will ever be worthy of the fight in you.*

I read the last line three times.

My breathing steadied.

I folded the letter and put it back.

---

Friday afternoon I had my standing appointment with Dr. Adler. Her office was warm and smelled like lavender. I sat in the chair by the window, same chair as always, and told her about the nightmare.

"First one in three years," I said.

She nodded, made a note. "What do you think triggered it?"

"The cemetery."

"Seeing Stefan there."

"Yes."

She set down her pen. "What did you feel when you saw him?"

I looked out the window. A crow was sitting on the fire escape, black feathers slick with rain.

"Nothing that I recognized," I said finally.

Simone waited.

"I thought I'd feel angry," I said. "Or afraid. Or something. But I just felt… blank. Like looking at a stranger."

"Is that troubling to you?"

I thought about it. The crow flew away.

"No," I said. "It's honest."

Simone smiled, small and sad. "That's progress, Wren."

I didn't answer.

Progress felt like the wrong word for what I'd become. Progress implied moving toward something. I wasn't moving toward anything. I was just standing still, finally, after years of running.

Maybe that was enough.

Maybe it had to be.

The nightmare came back Tuesday night, different this time. Not the staircase. Something older.

I was seventeen, standing in the doorway of the kitchen, watching my father drag a mattress up the stairs by himself because the boy wouldn't let him help. Stefan was fourteen then. Scrawny, furious, a bruise yellowing under one eye that nobody asked about. My father set the mattress down and said, "This is your room now," like it was nothing. Like he hadn't just spent four months fighting a caseworker for the right to say it.

Stefan didn't say thank you. He just sat on the bare mattress and stared at the wall until we left him alone.

The dream skipped forward the way dreams do. Sunday mornings, years later, in our first apartment — Stefan at the stove before I woke up, steam curling off a teapot, the smell of jasmine drifting under the bedroom door. He'd bring it to me in bed and say, "I read that you're supposed to bring it before she opens her eyes. Better luck." I never asked why he thought that mattered so much. I just drank it and loved him for trying.

Then the dream turned, the way it always does now.

His voice, flat, in a parked car outside a clinic I didn't want to enter. "A baby right now would destroy everything we've built, Wren. You know that." My hands in my lap, shaking, not from cold. The receptionist's clipboard. The paper gown. My hands shaking again in the parking lot after, and Stefan's hand on the back of my neck, warm, steady, like comfort, like nothing had happened at all.

Then a hotel receipt in a jacket pocket, months later, a name I didn't recognize, a date I remembered too well. A downtown address I drove to on a Tuesday afternoon because some small stupid hope in me needed to be wrong.

A boy's face in the doorway. Twelve years old. Already looking at me like he knew exactly who I was and exactly what I was in the way of.

I woke up at four with my jaw aching from clenching it in my sleep.

---

Stefan was at the café when I walked in Thursday morning. I almost turned around. I didn't, because turning around would have meant he still had that kind of power over where I went.

He stood when he saw me, too fast, knocking the edge of the table. Two cups sat across from each other. Steam rising off both.

"I know you didn't ask," he said. "I just — I was already here. I thought—"

I sat down because standing felt like giving him something.

He pushed one of the cups toward me. "Jasmine," he said, like I couldn't smell it already, like the smell hadn't hit me the second I walked through the door and made my stomach turn over on itself before my mind caught up.

I looked at the cup. Pale gold liquid, a few petals floating on top. Sunday mornings. Steam under a bedroom door. A version of myself that used to smile at that smell.

My hand moved before I told it to. I pushed the cup away, harder than I meant to, and some of it slopped over the rim onto the saucer.

Stefan went still.

"Wren—"

"I'm allergic to jasmine now," I said.

I didn't look at him when I said it. I looked at the cup, at the small brown stain spreading across the white saucer.

"Since when," he said, and his voice had gone thin.

"Since the facility." I said it the way I'd report a lab result. Clinical. Unhurried. "They used to bring it on a cart in the evenings. Some idea about calming the patients before lights out." I finally looked up. "My body decided it didn't want anything else that reminded it of that room. Turns out you don't get to pick."

He stared at me. His mouth opened. Nothing came out.

"Doctor called it psychosomatic," I added, because the silence needed filling and I didn't want him to be the one to fill it. "Doesn't matter what you call it. My throat closes. My eyes water. It's real enough."

"I didn't know," he said. "I didn't know they—"

"You didn't ask," I said. "You signed the paperwork. There's a difference between not knowing and not asking, Stefan, and I stopped being generous about the difference a long time ago."

I stood. My chair scraped against the floor, loud in the quiet café.

"Wren, please, just—"

"The woman who liked jasmine tea doesn't live here anymore," I said. "I don't know how many more ways I can tell you that."

I walked out. The bell over the door rang behind me, bright and stupid and cheerful.

I didn't look back through the window. I didn't need to. I already knew what he'd look like — sitting there with two cups going cold, one poured for a woman who no longer existed, and one he hadn't touched because some part of him already understood, for the first time, that he was drinking tea alone with a ghost.