The flowers starting appearing on her doorstep on her birthday. It was a cloudy day, with the sun only poking through for a couple of minutes at a time, and a cool breeze lazily drifting through the trees that neatly lined the pale grey pavement of the sidewalks in their neighborhood. They arrived on the front steps up to the porch where her husband and her liked to sit in the summertime, drinking sangria and talking about the news and the crazy idea of having kids. The flowers were in a glass vase with a thick and sparkling gold bow wrapped around it’s neck. It was a bouquet of simple, bright red roses, and there was no note or indication as to who they were sent from. Her husband was the first to notice them when he got home from work, (he had the early shift so he was usually done around two) and he thought that it was curious because he was not the one who had sent them to her, but did not think anything of it really because when she got home she seemed to be just as surprised by the bouquet as he was. He cooked her dinner that night and they did not think about the flowers at all, and after a couple of days they forgot about them altogether.

The week after this, another bouquet arrived, this one with pale yellow roses and large white flowers, and a silky white bow. When he came home from work he was reminded of the previous bouquet the week before, and then could still not understand why on earth someone would be anonymously sending his wife flowers. But when she got home from work that day she seemed just as equally confused, so he didn’t worry about it. They had dinner and went to bed like every other night and in the morning they went off to work for another normal week.
The flowers kept arriving every week though, and each week they began to get more and more elaborate. There was still no note, and they still both said that they did not understand what was going on and who the flowers were from. But he wasn’t so sure if he believed her anymore. The flowers were like a poison, each consecutive week that they appeared he began to become more and more suspicious that she was not telling him something. Clearly, a stranger wouldn’t just continue to send a stranger flowers anonymously for a month, and then two months, and then two and a half months. This is what he thought each time he arrived home and saw them there on the porch, awaiting her arrival. He began to keep tabs on where she was going, to see if she was cheating on him perhaps, meeting with other men sometime during the days in which they were apart, leading them on and causing them to constantly send her flowers to vie for her heart. He stopped being so open to her, and each time the flowers came and she again said that she didn’t understand what was going on, he slowly began to boil inside.
By the third month of the weekly flower deliveries, he was sure that she was having an affair. He had come to believe that only a man who wanted to show off his connection to his wife would so openly send flowers directly to their house, and he was enraged. Each week when they arrived he wanted to believe her, he wanted to believe that she didn’t know what was going on, but something about the consistent “unwanted” buds made him question every aspect of his life. With each flower that he saw his paranoia was heightened. He started leaving work early, so that he could get home before the flowers were delivered to see if there was any sign as to who was sending them then. However, each day that he got home early, the flowers were already sitting there on the porch steps, mocking him and waiting patiently for her. 
He continued hoping in vain that the man that his wife was sleeping with would have the decency to stop sending her flowers that he could so openly see that she was receiving. He also continued hoping that she would just tell him that she was having an affair with one of her coworkers, that that was why she always got home between five and six and why she was never home early, and he also hoped that the trash man came more frequently because he hated knowing that the flowers were in his house for the few days before the garbage was collected. He never outright said any of this to her though, as he had taken to not really speaking in detail when she came home and was usually already into his third beer and watching TV when she tried to talk to him anyway.
The paranoia and ideas of her had taken over his mind. He couldn’t sleep next to her without feeling disgusted, so he slept on the couch and pretended that he was asleep until he was sure she had left for work and was out of the house in the morning. He no longer wanted to give her the chance to tell him exactly what was going on with the flowers, because he had painted an image in his mind and was almost surely positive that that’s what was happening. She was cheating on him with her co-worker Steve, and he hated Steve with every fiber of his being. Steve was from a well-endowed family and Steve could afford to send hundreds of bouquets to all the women that he slept with. Steve drove a nice car, and he even sent Christmas cards to their house every year. It did not matter to Steve that he was married and sleeping with a married woman, Steve did whatever Steve wanted with no regards to anyone else. Each time he saw a flower, he thought of his wife f***ing Steve. And each week in which the flowers continued arriving, his hatred for his wife and for Steve grew.
By the end of the year, he couldn’t talk to or look at his wife without being drunk and he was sleeping on the couch every night. His boss was sending him frustrated emails as to his weak performance lately, and when his wife tried to touch him he would become rigid and cold. He was going insane, he saw flowers everywhere he looked, he saw bows wrapped around everything in his house, and he saw his wife sleeping with various shadowed strangers on every surface in their house. These flowers and shadows would whisper to him softly, saying that it was their house and not his. He didn’t even think it was just Steve that his wife was cheating on him with anymore, it was the whole world. It was the mailman who always seemed to deliver the flowers when he wasn’t home, it was the dog in the neighbor’s yard next door that came up to bark at him through the fence as he came home from work, it was the shoes that his wife slipped on everyday before heading out the door, it was every drop of rain or ray of sun or cloud in the sky at a time. He needed help, his ideas and suspicions and thoughts were consuming him. And one day, finally, he cracked.

When he heard her key in the lock of the front door as she got home, he waited patiently in the kitchen, knocking back the last of the beer in his hand and running the kitchen knife that he held in his hands against the sharpener, seeing flowers blooming from the silver knobs rolling back and forth, sharpening the silver of the blade. She came into the kitchen and looked at him, then stopped when she saw the silver of the knife reflected in the madness of his eyes. Her face turned white as her eyes darted quickly from his eyes to the empty beer on the counter to the knife in his hand. She tried to turn away, but it was too late, she was covered in flowers. The flowers were everywhere; in his eyes, his brain, his blood. He didn’t even feel what he was doing until he was holding her limp, bleeding body with his own hands, the kitchen knife coated in red on the floor.
They took him away that night, the neighbor had called in a complaint about a man incessantly screaming, and when the police knocked down the door and rushed to where the wailing was, they saw the knife and two bodies soaked in red, one moving and one unnaturally still. The flowers were everywhere all at once, and the only time they faded away for a second was when he looked at her, dead, still in his arms.

At his trial, her co-worker Steve testified to his suspected insanity. Steve told the court that that he had always been a quiet and kind man, but that his wife had been coming to work worried about him lately. He said that she was worried that he drank too much, and didn’t know why, and she was also worried that the flowers she had been sending him secretly in celebration of their sixth year being married to one another were not helping their love life at all. She had become emotional at the office, and said that she was worried that he didn’t love her anymore. Steve said that she still waited every week for him to leave the house for work so she could drop off the flowers on their porch for him, but every week she realized that he wasn’t as surprised by them and that her secret acts of love were met with more aggression than curiosity. Steve testified that he did not understand how a man could fall out of love with a woman who sent that man flowers every week, and Steve went on to explain how much Steve appreciated it when his husband brought him home flowers or left him gifts from a ‘secret admirer’. Steve also said that only someone truly out of their mind could have spiraled out of control and killed their wife for showing her love too much.

After he was sentenced to a life sentence served in a mental institution, with constant surveillance and therapy sessions, the case was closed and everyone else went on with their lives. Steve went home, cooked his husband dinner, had a beer, watched the game, and kissed his husband and kids goodnight before going to bed. The next day was sunny and smelled like spring, and as Steve walked from his car into work he admired all of the beautiful, bright flowers that had begun to bloom along the edge of the sidewalk.