“I’m failing,” Eleanor corrected, stripping the petals off a dying rose. “There’s a difference. Closing is dignified. Failing is just … messy.”
“What now?” she asked.
“Neither am I,” he said. “But I’d like to learn. If you would.”
For three decades, she had been the perfect corporate wife. She had matched his ties to his shirts, organized dinner parties for his clients, and raised two children who now lived in time zones that made phone calls difficult. When her husband, Richard, left her for his thirty-four-year-old Pilates instructor, he did so with a spreadsheet. “Assets and liabilities,” he’d called it, sliding the paper across the kitchen island. She’d been folded into the “liabilities” column.
Now, Eleanor stood in the cramped back office of The Painted Lady , her new (and, according to her daughter, “questionably sensible”) flower shop on a rainy side street in Portland, Maine. The shop was failing. The hydrangeas were drooping, the rent was overdue, and her only employee—a seventeen-year-old named Chloe who wore earbuds constantly—had just quit via text: sorry mrs v, found a place that doesn’t smell like wet ferns lol.
