Page 34 of Letters to Molly (Maysen Jar 2)

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I love that you, above all else, are honest. I love that you have an old soul and still bug me to write you letters. I love that you said no when I asked you to move in with me because you wanted to save that experience for married life.

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I love that we have the same birthday. There isn’t a person in the world that I’d want to share my cake with besides you. And tomorrow, when we blow out the candles, I’m wishing for you.

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Please say yes.

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Yours,

Finn

Five

Finn

“Finn, are you here?” Bridget called from her office.

“No.”

She laughed as the wheels of her desk chair rolled over the wood floors. Gliding backward, she appeared in my doorway. “You snuck in while I was on the phone.”

“There was no sneaking about it. You were shouting so loud you didn’t hear me.”

Bridget’s lip curled up. “I was talking to that asshole, chauvinistic salesman from the nursery.”

“You mean you were yelling at that asshole, chauvinistic salesman from the nursery. What did Chad do this time?”

“He screwed up my order. Again. He sent Colorado blue instead of Norway spruce and he knows how much I hate the blue with those sharp-ass needles. He didn’t include our bulk discount, he sent two extra chokecherry bushes, and to correct his own mistakes, he said it will be another two weeks. My crew is ready to plant tomorrow on the Nelson project.”

“Shit.” I rubbed my forehead. “I’ll call the owner.”

“This is the third time. Chad always gets your orders right. Always. He’s batting zero on mine, and we both know it’s because I’m a woman.”

I wanted to argue and tell Bridget that Chad was just an idiot, but she was right. I’d been at the nursery the first time the two had met and when she’d gone to shake his hand, he’d blown her off.

“I’ll call the owner. Either he puts a new salesman on our account, or we’ll just use Cashman’s.”

And pay an extra five percent on every order. I’d been using this smaller nursery for the past year because their products were top-of-the-line and their prices were unbeatable. But I wasn’t going to make Bridget deal with a prick.

“Thank you.” She pushed her chair farther into my office, rolling right up to the edge of my desk. She smiled at the picture of Max and Kali on the corner. “Today is the last day of school, right?”

“Yep. It’s hard to believe my Kali is going to be a middle schooler.”

“It feels like yesterday that she came in here and played in the corner after preschool.”

“The years are going by quicker and quicker.” Not just the years. The days and weeks too. It felt like only hours ago I’d started on Molly’s yard project, but it had already been a week.

“The summers are racing by,” Bridget said. “We can’t keep up.”

I pushed my calendar over to her so she could scope out the lineup. “No, we can’t.”

I’d had to turn away three customers over the past week because we didn’t have the capacity to bid their projects. Our mowing crew was maxed out and the waiting list was twenty-deep. Adding more staff wasn’t possible until maybe next season—there simply wasn’t enough trained labor in town.