Save the Date by Mary Kay Andrews

last time you actually took any time for yourself?”
    “I know exactly how long it’s been,” Cara said ruefully. “I haven’t had a real day off since the Monday before Valentine’s Day last year.”
    *   *   *
    Valentine’s Day the previous year had been memorable, for sure, but for all the wrong reasons. It was her birthday, but because of the business she was in, Cara rarely had time to celebrate.
    That year had been crazier than usual. She’d been forced to rent a second van just to get the flower deliveries covered. And when her second driver slipped and fell and broke his ankle on the third delivery of the afternoon, Cara had gotten behind the wheel of the van in his place.
    She was making the last delivery of the afternoon, to a dentist’s office on the south side of town: two dozen long-stemmed American Beauty roses to the dentist’s wife, who ran the office, for her husband, Dr. Pratt, one of Cara’s regular customers.
    While Nancy Pratt was oohing and aahing over the roses from her husband in the reception area, another florist’s delivery driver had walked into the office, with a huge vase of lilacs.
    Lilacs? Who ordered lilacs in Savannah? Only one man Cara knew of. Her husband, Leo.
    As soon as she saw the lilacs, Mrs. Pratt opened the door to the back office. “Cyndi! Flowers from your mystery man again.”
    Cara heard a chorus of giggles from the girls in the office—the receptionists and billing clerks and hygienists. “Our Cyndi has a mysterious beau who sends her gorgeous flowers every month,” Mrs. Pratt confided.
    A petite redhead in a tight-fitting white lab coat unbuttoned just enough to reveal her double-D décolletage burst through the door.
    “Oh my God, is he is the sweetest thing ever?” She reached for the card stuck among the lilacs. Then she saw Cara, standing there beside Mrs. Pratt and her American Beauty roses, and Cyndi froze. She snatched the vase and disappeared into the back office.
    Cara had seen enough. When she got home she picked up the huge vase of lilacs that had been left on her doorstep, and set them on the kitchen counter. She listened to the message Leo left on her voicemail. “Late meeting tonight. Sorry babe. I know you’ll be dead on your feet by the time you get this, so we’ll celebrate your birthday tomorrow night. ’Kay? Love you.”
    Leo’s message had a strangely energizing effect on Cara. She went into his home office, and using a nail file, pried open the desk drawer where he kept their financial records. It was easy to find the statements for the new Visa card he’d procured for himself, easier still to find the monthly flower deliveries to Cyndi Snodgrass and the biweekly check-ins at the Airport Courtyard Marriott, visits that neatly coincided with Leo’s supposed sales meetings in Atlanta.
    Cara left the Visa statements on top of the desk. She dumped the lilacs onto the middle of their bed. She packed her clothes and her books and called Bert on the way over to his apartment to ask if she could stay in his guest room for a few nights.
    She’d hired a lawyer and started divorce proceedings the next day, and within two weeks she’d rented the apartment over Bloom. And she’d worked every day since then, with the exception of the day after this Valentine’s Day, when she’d gone to visit the breeder in Atlanta to pick out her own birthday present, her new roommate, Poppy.
    “You’re going to burn yourself out,” Bert chided her now. “Do you realize we’ve got weddings every Saturday for the next six weeks, not to mention the Mandelbaums’ golden anniversary party and those two huge banquets at the Westin? Plus the deb parties…”
    “We can’t afford to turn down Lillian Fanning,” Cara said firmly. “Between Lillian and Vicki Cooper—if this keeps up we’ll have more business than we can handle.”
    “We already have more business than we can deal with,” Bert grumped.
    “We can handle it,” Cara said.
    “Yeah,