different he seemed the night before,” Emily admitted. “He was so thoughtful. I genuinely believed he was being kind.”
Sarah stirred her coffee.
“Maybe the flowers weren’t the problem,” she said. “Maybe the problem was that he thought buying them meant you owed him something.”
Emily considered that for a moment.
It wasn’t the money that bothered her most. It was the realization that what had looked like generosity might have been an unspoken bargain all along.
She thought about the other small moments from their date: how Daniel had
