The bouquet arrived just after noon. One hundred yellow roses. No card. No signature. Just my name.At first, I smiled. My husband was away on a week-long business trip, and I assumed he had arranged a surprise. The flowers were stunning, the blooms full and deeply yellow, the kind of color that fills a room before you even understand why the room feels different.But something felt different about them.For one thing, my husband knew I preferred white roses. We had talked about it at a flower market in the early months of our marriage, one of those small conversations that becomes a settled fact, and Daniel had never forgotten it since. For another, there was the number. Exactly one hundred. Not ninety-nine. Not a rough approximation. The florist’s tag listed the exact count, printed with the particular precision of someone who wanted to be certain the number would be noticed.I stood there staring at them for longer than made sense.

Yellow roses have never had a single meaning. Some people associate them with friendship. Others with appreciation. In some cultures, particularly older traditions I had read about in contexts I would explain shortly, they carry a more somber weight, something closer to farewell. A last goodbye dressed up in a cheerful color.I began to feel uneasy in a way I could not immediately name.I called my husband. No answer. I sent a text. Nothing came back.Then I noticed something about the arrangement itself. The bouquet had not been assembled randomly, the way most large deliveries are, stems packed in concentric rings without particular thought. Several roses near the center had been positioned differently, angled slightly inward, as if someone had placed them with care and intention rather than speed.I started counting. Ten rows of ten. Except one row was not entirely uniform. One rose near the middle had a tiny red mark hidden beneath a petal, so small I might easily have missed it if I had not been looking closely. Then another. And anotherThere were exactly three. Three marked roses in a ten-by-ten matrix.My hands started shaking before my mind had fully articulated why. called my husband again. The phone rang until voicemail.My name is Iris Calloway, and I need to tell you what the three marked roses meant to me specifically, and why that meaning made the next hour feel like falling through something I had not known had a floor.