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“Papa?”
Daniel looks up from the kettle. His hand is shaking again.
It’s quiet outside. Monaco is caught in the middle of one of its rare spring storms. The windows are blurry with rain, the sky all grey smudges and thunder murmurs. There’s the faint smell of lemon soap and something vaguely sweet—clementines or sugar cookies—trailing in from the kitchen, but the apartment is still, like it’s holding its breath.
Juliette’s voice breaks the silence like a dandelion breaking through concrete.
“Why do you have so many flower tattoos?”
She’s on the rug, curled up with her knees to her chest, wearing a sweatshirt three sizes too big—the one with little embroidered bees buzzing around the sleeves. Her hair is a wild mess of sleepy curls, and she has a band-aid on her chin from falling up the stairs two days ago, because of course she did.
Daniel’s mouth goes dry.
She’s only eight.
She still pronounces ‘croissant’ like ‘croysant.’ Still calls pigeons ‘city chickens.’ Still cries when someone else’s ice cream falls, even if hers is fine.
But the question hangs there, soft and innocent and impossible.
Juliette doesn’t even look up when she asks it. Just draws little daisies on the corners of her notebook, humming a song that doesn’t exist. That’s the part that kills him, he thinks. The humming. Jules used to hum too.
Daniel’s hands are still trembling as he brings her tea over in the mug with the sleepy sun painted on it. Rooibos. Extra honey. A touch of oat milk.
He sets it down beside her and says nothing for a long moment. Just watches the way her fingers are stained with marker ink. Watches the way she traces a petal over and over, like she’s afraid it might disappear.
She has two flowers.
Just two.
One tucked behind her left ear, so small and delicate that most people miss it. A little golden chrysanthemum. And the other above her ankle, pale and soft, a dandelion about to blow away.
He remembers the night they bloomed. Remembers the weight in his chest. The way the world tilted on its axis when he saw her sitting in the hospital hallway alone, knees pulled to her chest, no shoes, IV still taped to the back of her hand, a blanket falling off her shoulders like it didn’t know how to stay.
He remembers looking into her eyes and seeing him.
“Why do I only have two?” she asks now, blinking up at him with those eyes—the same shade of warm, dark hazel that made Daniel fall in love when he was barely more than a boy.
Juliette’s eyes are the color of memories. Daniel sometimes forgets to breathe when she looks at him too long, like if he stares too hard, he might slip back in time and find Jules waiting there, leaning on a car, grinning like he never left.
And it’s like someone’s peeled open his ribcage with a whisper.
“You’ll get more one day,” Daniel says softly, brushing a bit of hair behind her ear. “When you meet people who leave footprints on your heart.”
“But yours—” she touches his arm, tiny fingers tracing the vines and petals there “—yours are everywhere.”
He forces a smile. “Yeah, cariño. They are.”
There’s a silence then, small and gentle, like two birds pausing mid-flight.
Juliette stares at his arms for a moment longer, then says, in that delicate, curious way of hers:
“Were they all for one person?”
Daniel lets out a breath. Slow. Heavy.
“Yes.”
And then he lets himself sink into the memory. Lets it fill the room like rainwater, creeping slow into every corner.
“His name was Jules.”
The name tastes like spring on his tongue. Like honey and lemon and grass-stained jeans. Like sunscreen and old Renaults and hands that always knew where to find him in the dark.
Daniel sometimes dreams in French. Not the whole language, just pieces. Words that sound like goodbye. He never spoke it before Jules. Now it curls under his tongue like a ghost.
“He was my best friend,” Daniel says, eyes distant. “And then he was more than that.”
Juliette’s listening the way only children do. Entirely. Gently. With her whole heart.
“I met him when I was thirteen,” Daniel says, settling beside her on the rug. “I already had a lot of flowers by then. More than anyone else I knew. I thought I was broken.”
He remembers hiding the blooms under long sleeves. Avoiding mirrors. Doctors. The scared look on his mother’s face the first time she saw an entire bouquet sprout along his back overnight.
“And then I saw him.”
Jules. With wild hair and oil-stained fingers, laughing at something dumb, too tall for his age, too soft for the world. He had a mouth like poetry and eyes like the edge of summer. Always smiling. Even when it hurt.
Daniel had watched him punch a wall during a karting argument, then seen a marigold appear on his own wrist ten seconds later.
They figured it out after that. Slowly. In pieces.
“When he bruised his knee, I got a crocus on my thigh,” Daniel tells her. “When I burnt my hand cooking pasta, he got a snapdragon.”
Juliette giggles. “Did he scream?”
Daniel laughs too, but it breaks midway. “Yeah. Loud. Said he was never letting me near a stove again.”
The room feels warmer now. Full of memory. Full of him.
“He was... he was everything good,” Daniel says softly, tracing the ink of a faded daisy on his knuckle. “He was sunlight, and gentle hands, and the way people look at you when they really see you.”
He pauses.
“He always saw me.”
Juliette puts her hand over his. Her skin is warm. Small. Fragile in the way hope is.
Sometimes Daniel still wakes up with phantom petals in his mouth. He used to spit blood and marigolds into the sink during the bad months. Now it’s only silence. Nothing blooms anymore. It’s almost worse than the pain.
“Did he like flowers too?” she asks.
Daniel nods. “He used to draw them in the margins of his notebook. Little ones. Especially violets.”
There’s a small tattoo near Daniel’s ribcage. A violet. Jules had drawn it once on a napkin in a gas station parking lot, laughing at nothing, chewing on a pen. It bloomed when Jules broke his collarbone. It withered when the machines stopped beeping.
“What flower bloomed when you kissed?”
Daniel smiles. “A tulip. On both of us.”
He remembers that kiss. The ache of it. The terrified joy. The way Jules cupped his face like he was holding something sacred, not broken.
There is a rose that bloomed on Daniel’s shoulder the night they first said ‘I love you.’ Not shouted. Not even spoken loud. Just whispered against a collarbone, quiet and true. The rose is still there. Thorns and all.
He remembers the first time they made love. The wild garden that bloomed across both their bodies like fireworks and promises. Roses. Lavender. Camellias curling behind ears.
And then—
Then came Japan.
Daniel’s voice goes quiet. Like the air has gone thin.
“It rained that day,” he says. “Not the good kind. The kind that feels like an omen.”
He tells her how Jules crashed. How he didn’t see it, but felt it.
Like someone had cracked open his chest and shoved a blooming field inside.
“Flowers bloomed so fast, I could barely breathe,” he whispers. “Foxgloves on my ribs. Peonies along my spine. I woke up at night choking on petals.”
Juliette’s eyes are wide, full of tears she’s not letting fall. Her hand grips his tighter.
He tells her about the coma. The way the flowers kept coming. Slow, steady. Every few days, a new one.
When Jules was in the hospital, Daniel would sit at his bedside and read him weather reports. Not books. Not poems. Just weather. "It’s raining in Australia," he’d whisper. “The kind you love. The kind that smells like eucalyptus.”
There was a single forget-me-not that bloomed on Daniel’s neck six months in.
Small, almost shy.
He liked to believe it meant Jules remembered him.
That even in sleep, the heart still knows who it loves.
Jules might’ve dreamed of Juliette, too. A child with his eyes and Daniel’s smile, running through a field full of clover, arms outstretched.
Maybe he saw her before Daniel ever did.
There’s a corner of Daniel’s mind that is still stuck in that hospital room.
Still begging.
Still bargaining.
Still whispering, “One more day. Just one more flower.”
Daniel had stopped trying to count them.
The flowers.
He used to mark them on a little notepad by the hospital bed—tiny sketches beside dates, a habit half born out of desperate optimism and half out of guilt. A tulip on his forearm for the bruises from a nurse’s slip. A cluster of red clovers along his ribs after a seizure. A snowdrop, so pale it barely bloomed, when Jules had gone silent for too long.
He’d started to memorise them. The way they curled. The way they stung. The way they whispered to his skin he’s still here, he’s still fighting, he’s still—
And every time a new petal unfurled—every time a new bloom bled through his skin—he’d feel the sting and think, this means he’s alive.
Because pain, even someone else’s pain, still meant presence.
But they began to fade. Not all at once—no. That would’ve been merciful.
First, they came slower. One every few days. Then, one a week. Then silence, long and bone-deep.
The silence that came after wasn’t peaceful. It wasn’t warm.
It was like holding your breath in a room where no one else is breathing.
It was worse than the waiting.
It was worse than the pain.
It was worse than anything.
Until one day—
they stopped.
“I knew then,” Daniel says, and his voice is nothing now. A ghost of a ghost. “Even before they called me.”
He doesn’t tell her what happened next.
He doesn’t tell her how he screamed into the floor until his throat tore raw and useless, until his ribs ached from the force of it, until he wasn’t sure if the sound coming out of him was human anymore. How the carpet still holds the memory of his voice—how he was curled up so tightly on the ground that his knees left dents in the wood below, and the echoes of that howl are still buried in the fibres, tucked away like a ghost too stubborn to leave.
He doesn’t tell her how he staggered to the bathroom and looked in the mirror just to see if Jules would still be looking back.
But Jules wasn’t.
Just Daniel.
Just a man with eyes too red, and a mouth too twisted, and flowers tattooed like old wounds across his chest, like apologies that never got to be spoken.
So he punched the mirror.
Again.
And again.
Until the glass fractured like his chest had, until his knuckles split open and he almost welcomed the pain. Because for a second, it was something else. Something that wasn’t hollow.
The roses bloomed again at the edges of the blood, but they weren’t from Jules. They were his. Just his. The body grieving the soul it shared its life with. The blood didn’t carry love anymore, only absence.
He doesn’t tell her how he stood under the scalding shower for hours, clawing at the roses on his arms, begging them to peel off, to wash away, to take the memory with them. How he thought maybe if he scrubbed hard enough, the flowers would dislodge, the skin would forget, the world would undo itself.
He tried soap.
He tried heat.
He tried fingernails.
But they stayed.
They stayed because they weren’t new anymore.
They had already wilted.
Already turned to ink.
Already burned themselves into his skin like gravestones.
He sobbed until his knees gave out.
He curled into the tile, naked and shaking, a grown man pressed against porcelain like a child trying to wake from a nightmare that was, in every way, already real.
And no one came.
No one came because the only person who ever had…
was gone.
He just holds her hand.
Juliette wipes her eyes on her sleeve. She looks so small.
“So,” she says, her voice small, sleepy-soft, the kind of softness that comes only in the quiet after a story that was maybe too big for an eight-year-old to hear, but one she asked for anyway, “you didn’t have a baby with him. But I’m yours anyway.”
Daniel’s mouth opens, but no sound comes. Not at first.
There’s a moment—brief, sharp, the kind that stays caught between ribs for years—where he thinks he might not be able to answer her at all. Because the grief is right there, right under his tongue, raw and iron-heavy, and somehow she just reached in and touched it with the gentlest hands he’s ever known.
He nods.
Not fast. Not dramatic. Just once. Slow. Certain. Like gravity.
Tears fall—not in a cinematic rush, not in a gasping collapse—but quiet. Soft as petals. As though his body’s finally, finally let go of something it’s been gripping for years.
“You’re mine,” he whispers, voice catching at the edges like frayed cloth, “and his. In all the ways that matter.”
Juliette beams at him.
Not the sunshine kind. The other kind. The kind of smile that belongs in old photographs. The kind that lives behind glass and dust and candlelight. The kind you don’t know is your entire world until you see it across a room full of ghosts.
She climbs into his lap without asking. Wraps her arms around his neck like it’s the most natural thing in the world. And maybe it is. Maybe it always was.
She smells like cinnamon and paint and the faintest trace of roses, still.
And in that moment, Daniel thinks that maybe, maybe, Jules gave her to him.
Not by blood. Not by name.
But by the way her eyes look exactly like his when she’s concentrating.
By the way she folds her arms when she’s pretending not to cry.
By the way she tugs at Daniel’s sleeve before saying something important, like Jules used to do.
Like now.
“Papa,” she whispers, and her voice is the softest thing he’s ever heard, “do you think he would’ve loved me?”
Daniel’s throat tightens. He pulls her in, presses his lips to her hair. The room smells like dust and night and memory.
“Oh, bambino,” he breathes, “he already did.”
She burrows closer, her cheek pressed to the soft, worn cotton of his hoodie, her breath warming the space above his heart.
Her hand, small and sure and steady in a way children shouldn’t know how to be, rests over the spot that still aches on quiet nights. Like her fingers know exactly where the worst part is.
Where the fault line lies.
“Then I’ll love him back for both of us,” she says, with all the calm, unshakable certainty of someone who’s never had to question if her love is enough.
And that’s it.
That’s what undoes him.
Not the photos. Not the hospital. Not the endless ache of waking up alone.
This.
This little body wrapped around him like a lifeline. This tiny heart already making room for a ghost she never met.
The grief claws its way up his throat, violent and shaking and alive.
The tears come before he can stop them. Fast, hot, messy. The kind he hasn’t let himself cry in years. Not like this. Not in front of anyone.
But Juliette doesn’t flinch.
She just breathes.
Like she understands that sometimes people fall apart exactly when they’re being held together.
Daniel rocks her gently, arms wrapped around her like a shield and a prayer and a goodbye all at once. He kisses the crown of her head like he’s trying to anchor himself back to earth. Like maybe the scent of her shampoo, soft and strawberry-sweet, can sew him back into something whole.
Outside, the rain picks up—steady, rhythmic, like it knows something he doesn’t.
Inside, a father holds his daughter.
And remembers a boy with copper-brown eyes and a laugh that sounded like wind through leaves.
Remembers the way Jules kissed him the first time they won something together—not a race, but the moment they realized this was what it meant to be known. To be chosen. To be loved so gently, flowers bloomed even in pain.
He stays long after she falls asleep.
Her small body curled into him like a comma at the end of a sentence that never got to finish.
He doesn’t move.
Doesn’t blink.
Just lies there, staring at the ceiling, listening to the rain and the silence and his own heartbeat, soft beneath her hand.
Eventually, he looks down.
Traces the tulip on his wrist with the pad of his thumb—the very first flower he ever saw bloom from nothing.
The one Jules gave him when they were children. The one that meant undying love, deep connection, the start of something real.
It’s a tattoo now. Faded slightly. Less vibrant than it used to be.
But still there.
Still his.
Still theirs.
He smiles. Not a happy smile. But the kind that hurts and heals at the same time.
Like mourning.
Like memory.
Like love.