Eventually, though, I returned to arranging flowers.
I realized the flowers weren’t responsible for what happened.
They were simply flowers.
They bloomed.
They faded.
And perhaps that was why I began seeing them differently.
A year after the strange wedding, I received a photograph in the mail.
It showed Adrian and me from the early days of our relationship.
On the back was a handwritten sentence:
“Some stories survive because someone finally tells the truth.”
I knew immediately who had sent it.
I smiled.
Not because everything was perfect.
It wasn’t.
Not because the past had disappeared.
It hadn’t.
But because the memory of Adrian no longer belonged entirely to the funeral.
It belonged to me again.
We never had the wedding we originally planned.
We couldn’t simply return to the lives we had imagined.
Too much had happened.
But one evening, Adrian asked me whether I could forgive him.
