Chapter One

Nobody in Purgatory ever expected much from the Earp girls. An absent mother and an alcoholic father who was killed on duty made up their parents. Wynonna was a wild card- she ran away for years after her family was broken and she left sweet little Waverly behind her. Everyone thought that she would stay the hell away from Purgatory and one day they'd get a call saying that she was found dead in a ditch somewhere. Waverly was smart, yes, but mostly she was pretty. She was nice to everyone in town and it was expected that she would marry some local boy and settle down.

Which is why it came as a complete shock when Wynonna blew back into town on her twenty-seventh birthday with a business license and enough cash to buy a property. No one was surprised that Wynonna Earp started a tattoo shop, but everyone was surprised when Waverly Earp gladly quit her job as a Shorty's barmaid and went to work for her sister.

Sure, she had always been artistic. In high school she was in the band and she took as many art classes as she could. Uncle Curtis and Aunt Gus paid for dance lessons, which evolved into cheerleading. It was unexpected, but she's a damn good tattoo artist.

Earp's Ink quickly becomes the town's favorite tattoo shop, even with Wynonna constantly refusing service to men who just want to leer at her baby sister.

The girls are living at the old Earp homestead, putting a good chunk of the money they earn into rebuilding and redecorating.

Everything seems perfect.

—

Nicole Haught is a lonely person. She always has been. She was an only child until the age of five, when her sister Haley was born. Her parents were reluctant to let her around the baby, and as they grew older, the age gap made it hard to relate to each other.

At school, Nicole was all but shunned. She was too tall and too much of a tomboy and she was a ginger to boot. She was too interested in true crime shows and when she came out as a lesbian in her sophomore year of high school, she lost the few friends she had managed to make.

Her parents started ignoring her. She left as soon as she graduated high school and worked odd jobs just to buy food and keep a roof over her head.

She saved up for years and years before she had enough money to move to a Podunk little town in the middle of nowhere, Canada. Everything in Purgatory is cheap as shit so Nicole buys a store with an apartment upstairs.

The only things that have ever been able to keep her company are cats and plants. Cats like Nicole and Nicole likes cats. She's never met a cat that hasn't liked her, even the feral cats who lived in an alleyway that she passed on her walk home from her high school. Somewhere in Nebraska she had found a tiny orange kitten cowering in a box off the side of the road. Nicole knew that caring for a kitten would be almost impossible while she was living in her car, but the kitten just looked so terrified and Nicole couldn't help herself.

Nicole picked up the kitten and held her close, murmuring soft words. She didn't name the kitten until three days later when she saw a book about a woman named Calamity Jane in a secondhand bookstore. She bought the book for four dollars and eighty-two cents. The little orange fur ball became her first real friend in years.

To most it may sound stupid, but Nicole thinks that everyone deserves flowers or at least some type of plant. They can't judge you or tease you. All you have to do is take care of them and they'll bring some color into your life.

Nicole reads as much as she can, and once she read a quote by the painter Monet. He said "I must have flowers, always, and always." Nicole can't think of anything more true than that quote.

So the day after she moves into her apartment in Purgatory, she goes out to the local hardware store and she buys everything she needs to start growing her flowers. Starter pots, potting soil, seeds. She gets bigger pots that she'll use to transfer her plants into when they get big.

She goes to a local print shop and makes a banner that just says flowers in big block letters. (She tells herself that she'll think of a name later.)

She looks online and finds as many cheap, junky tables in the area as she can. She sets them up in the store and gets to planting. As soon as her seeds start sprouting she hangs up the banner and handwrites an open sign.

At four in the afternoon an old lady comes by and buys a couple of sweet pea seedlings. She welcomes Nicole to the town and says that she might stop by again.

Later that evening as Nicole is curled up on her old couch with Calamity Jane, she says that things might be getting better.