The Flower That Grew from Ashes novel Chapter 154

She simply wasn't ready.

She wasn't ready to let another stranger into this safe, completely sovereign space she had fought so hard to build.

Four years with the Lehmans had acted like a slow-release poison, gradually and entirely destroying her fundamental ability to trust people.

It felt like being a tree chopped in half. Even if she had managed to sprout a few new green shoots in foreign soil, her root system underground was still pathetically shallow.

She was terrified of the slightest rustle in the wind, instinctively refusing to extend her roots any deeper into the vast, dark unknown.

Amid these frantic, fulfilling days that felt like copied-and-pasted routines, familiar faces began to emerge.

They became Daisy Flower's first wave of regulars.

There was the architectural engineer who worked in a nearby office building—a tall, lanky Norwegian man who religiously came in every Monday morning to buy a bouquet of white calla lilies for his desk.

He claimed the white helped keep his mind sharp while drafting blueprints.

There was a melancholic middle-aged woman who came on the fifteenth of every month to buy a bundle of purple irises.

Annelise later learned they were her late mother's favorite flowers.

And there was a young gay couple, two handsome guys who came in to order a custom bouquet for every single anniversary and milestone.

They told her they had finally confessed their feelings to each other right in front of her shop window.

Annelise memorized the faces of all her regulars, along with their unique preferences and stories.

They, in turn, began to affectionately call her by her name.

But 'Annelise' was a bit too much of a mouthful for the locals. So, they eventually shortened it to a single syllable.

"Anne."

That was what they called her.

"Hello, Anne."

"Morning, Anne."

"Thank you, Anne."

The first time Annelise heard the nickname, she froze for a long moment.

Anne.

In her mother tongue, it sounded just like the word for 'peace'.

Annelise's heart skipped a beat. She stared at the number flashing stubbornly on the screen, hesitating for several seconds.

Finally, she took a deep breath and swiped the green answer button.

First came a stretch of stifling, static-laced silence.

Then, a voice she once knew better than anyone—but was now sickeningly foreign—traveled across over three thousand miles and a seven-hour time difference. It slithered into her ear like a phantom from hell, carrying a clammy, nauseating chill.

"Annelise..."

The voice was exhausted, raspy, laced with a deliberately suppressed, fragile sob.

"It's me, Clarissa."

"Please... please don't hang up."

Annelise's fingers tightened around the phone in an instant.

Her sharp nails dug brutally into her palm.

The past she had fought so desperately to escape—the world dripping with lies, betrayal, and blood—had just crashed back into her life without warning, in the way she expected least.