Fiona
Archie chose the botanical garden for our next date, a quiet, sprawling place tucked away from the busier parts of the city, greenhouses full of orchids and winding paths lined with flowers I didn't know the names of but found myself wanting to learn simply because he seemed to know so much about each one we passed.
"My mother used to bring me here," he said, as we walked slowly along a path bordered by roses in every shade of red and pink imaginable. "Before she passed. It was one of the only places my father never seemed interested in visiting, which made it feel like ours somehow. A place he couldn't touch."
"I didn't know you came here as a child," I said, surprised by the tenderness in his voice, so different from the careful, guarded tone he usually reserved for anything inv
