Forget Me Not

Ama Torres is a Sacramento wedding planner who does not believe in marriage. Her mother, Cynthia, has been married sixteen times, and Ama grew up learning the wedding industry. She worked for years under Whitney Harrison, the most powerful wedding planner in Sacramento, before leaving to start her own business. Whitney drilled into her that crossing professional boundaries leads to disaster, but Ama thrives by understanding her clients' love stories. Watching her mother's marriages has convinced Ama that long-term commitments are doomed, so she avoids relationships altogether.

When celebrity influencer Hazel Renee and her fiancée, Jackie Nguyen, a legislative director, approach Ama to plan their October wedding at the McKinley Park Rose Garden, it feels like a career-defining opportunity. They have a $250,000 budget and genuine chemistry. There is one problem: Their florist is Elliot Bloom, owner of Blooming, a Sacramento flower shop he inherited from his father. Elliot is Ama's ex-lover. They have not spoken in over two years.

The novel alternates between present-day wedding preparations and flashbacks tracing Ama and Elliot's history. In the earliest flashback, set roughly five years before the main story, Elliot is a reluctant young florist at his ailing father's shop. At a wedding, he witnesses a groomsman grope Whitney's young assistant, who punches the man in the nose. Whitney blames the assistant, hissing "Be a professional" in her face. Elliot does not yet know the girl's name is Ama.

Nearly two years later, Ama visits Blooming as a newly independent planner. Elliot is rude and dismissive, guessing incorrectly at what "Ama" is short for and giving her a boutonniere of buttercups and petunias, flowers symbolizing immaturity and resentment. Their professional relationship deepens despite constant friction. He correctly guesses her full name, Amaryllis, after a minor character in the musical The Music Man. She photographs his work, pushes him to expand into custom installations, and brings him donuts he claims to hate. At a wedding at the Old Sugar Mill, a winery venue, an argument erupts into their first kiss in a wine storage room, and their furtive encounters continue at subsequent weddings.

Ama sets rules: They are exclusive and spend more time together, but she refuses to call it a relationship. What follows is a relationship in everything but name. They spend nearly every night together and discuss merging their businesses. Ama discovers that all six of Elliot's flower tattoos depict endangered or extinct species he cannot have. She memorizes each one. Elliot's mother, Senator Laura Gilbert, meets Ama and hires her to plan her own New Year's Eve wedding.

At the senator's wedding, while dancing together, Ama gives Elliot a gift: an email from Harvard's Arnold Arboretum granting him a private visit to see the Franklin tree, the endangered flower tattooed on his forearm. She tells him she thinks she is falling in love with him. Overcome, he says, "Marry me." She refuses. They argue in whispers on the dance floor. She insists marriages end, relationships end, and their involvement was a mistake. She walks away. From inside a closet, she overhears him crying alone in the hallway but cannot bring herself to open the door. She drives home and finds her mother freshly divorced again, reinforcing Ama's belief that love is fleeting.

Two years pass. In the present, Ama takes the wedding despite the agony of working with Elliot. He refuses to look at her or speak to her directly, but their creative partnership proves as electric as ever. He has transformed the shop's back room into a stunning showroom inspired by her old suggestion. He presents a prototype floral dance floor of flowers sealed under Plexiglas with fairy lights and proposes anthuriums in different shades to unify Jackie's classic taste with Hazel's dramatic style.

Ama's design vision grows ambitious: She plans to close the street around the Rose Garden, rent an Airbnb across the park, and convert an abandoned ballet studio near Weatherstone into a reception hall with a rooftop cocktail area. She suspects Whitney deliberately overbooked vendors on October 7 after Ama confided the date. When a Caribbean hurricane destroys the anthurium supply, Elliot proposes queen protea as the replacement, a rare and dramatic flower. A production crew from Fabulous Dream Weddings, a wedding reality show, begins filming the preparations. At a staged dress-shopping scene, Whitney appears and reminds Ama that getting too close to clients "was always her forte."

On the wedding day, disaster strikes. The arch snaps. A family heirloom described as a "basin" turns out to be a full clawfoot bathtub, which falls on Ama's foot when she tries to lift it alone, fracturing her metatarsal. Elliot drives to her, takes her to the emergency room, and assumes her Bluetooth earpiece to become the de facto wedding planner. From the hospital, Ama coaches him by phone. When he comforts a tearful Jackie, who fears she will fall out of love with Hazel, Elliot tells her that real love does not work that way. He reveals he still counts the days since the person he loves last needed him. The earpiece remains unmuted, and Ama hears everything, realizing he is talking about her, not a later girlfriend.

Ama arrives at the reception on crutches to find Whitney there uninvited, acting as the wedding planner. Ama confronts her, accusing her of sabotaging vendors. Whitney grabs Ama's arm and calls her an "ungrateful bitch," caught on camera by the film crew. Ama places a hand on Whitney's shoulder and says, "Be a professional," turning Whitney's own words against her. Whitney storms out and is nearly trampled by the first arriving horse-drawn carriage. The reception is spectacular: The floral chandeliers, queen protea columns, rooftop dance floor, and horse-drawn carriages all come together. Hazel promotes Ama's business on Instagram.

In the alley behind the venue, Ama kisses Elliot and whispers that she loves him. He holds her briefly, then steps back. "I can't," he says. "Not again." He walks away. The next morning, Mariana "Mar" Jaswal, Ama's ex-stepsister and closest friend, pushes her to confront what she wants. "To be with him," Ama admits. She drives to Blooming, kneels on her one good knee, and proposes: "Marry me."

Elliot says it is "not necessary." He does not want her to change who she is for him. She tells him she overheard his speech to Jackie and that she is ready for one relationship: him. He lifts his shirt to reveal a seventh tattoo over his heart, a Red Pearl amaryllis. He explains that the tattoos depict flowers he cannot have, ones "likely to disappear before I can love them." He will not marry her, but he will "date the shit out of" her. They reunite on the old worktable, exchanging declarations of love.

Six months later, the Fabulous Dream Weddings episode has aired. Whitney's outburst has gone viral. Ama is booked two years in advance and works from a desk in Elliot's showroom, their businesses intertwined as she once envisioned. Every morning, she proposes. Every morning, he says no but adds, "Maybe tomorrow." Meeting with a new couple, Ama privately reflects that her favorite proposal story will be the one where he finally says yes.