To the neighbors on Elm Street, I was just Arthur. Old Arthur. The man who wore beige cardigans, walked with a slight limp, and spent six hours a day meticulously pruning his petunias and hydrangeas. They saw a man whose hands were stained with soil, whose back was bent by time, and whose eyes were always a little too watery behind his thick bifocals.

They didn’t know that the limp came from a shrapnel wound in Fallujah. They didn’t know the watery eyes were a side effect of tear gas exposure that never quite cleared up. And they certainly didn’t know that the hands cradling the delicate root systems of a rosebush were the same hands that had once snapped a combatant’s neck in a silent mud-hut in Kandahar.

I liked it that way. I liked being the Flower Man. It was a penance. A way to create life after spending two decades taking it.

“Arthur! Are you deaf, old man?”

The voice cut through the serene morning air like a rusted saw blade. I didn’t flinch. I carefully tied a drooping stem to a bamboo stake before turning around.

Mark stood in my driveway, leaning against his polished black Audi. He was wearing a suit that cost more than my first car, and a sneer that cost him nothing but his soul. Behind him, sitting in the passenger seat with the window down, was his mother, Lydia. She was checking her makeup, utterly disinterested in the world around her.

“Hello, Mark,” I said, my voice soft and gravelly. “How is Sarah?”

“Sarah is fine,” Mark scoffed, checking his gold watch. “She’s packing the bags. We’re dropping her off for the weekend. Lydia and I are going to the winery. We need a break. She’s been… moody. Depressing, really.”

“Depressing,” I repeated, wiping dirt from my hands.