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Description
I have a normal, happy life and will prove this by doing some gardening.

She pushed this thought through her head as she gathered her trowel, shovel and some plant bulbs from the shelf in the garage of her perfect, two-bedroomed house.  Picking up a pair of gardening gloves on her way out, she traipsed outside to her wilted flowerbeds.  Neither she nor her husband had been keen gardeners, but the flowers had seemed to just take care of themselves until recently.  She crouched down in front of them and noticed that they had been eaten away at by some sort of insects, aphids, most likely.  There were a few holes in the leaves that looked like they might have been eaten through by caterpillars before they cocooned themselves away from the world.

She knew she needed to remove the bad plants because they would damage the others, but just didn't have the heart.  From a distance, they still looked so beautiful, but they retained that damp smell of rotting foliage. She'd wanted to be a florist as a child, learning the names and meanings of flowers, although it was always the aesthetics that she found more pleasing, different shades and colours rainbowed in contained bouquets.  It was only now as she stood up and scrutinised her dying flowerbeds that she realised their cruel irony.  The ambrosias seemed to mock her: your love is reciprocated?  Yeah right.  Forget-me-nots: faithful love?  Evidently not.  If he had been faithful, he wouldn't have run off with…  It made her shudder to think about it.

It was so fitting that Ryan had failed at planting daffodils a few months ago: you're the only one?  Well, that hadn't been true, had it?  She supposed she should have seen it coming; the flowers had been a warning sign; antirrhinums: deception, begonias: beware.  But this was stupid.  Flowers couldn't have warned her about what was happening.

No matter what had happened and who was to blame for it, she still had to keep up appearances that everything was absolutely fine for the neighbours, stop them from talking.  She'd been feeding them excuses about her husband's disappearance for weeks: "oh, just another business trip.  I swear they work him too hard," "he and a couple of friends went to so-and-so for the weekend," "his father passed away and he's been busy with the funeral arrangements."  She was sure they looked down on him for neglecting his young son, but that was better than them knowing the truth.  He'd come to his senses eventually though, returning to her and their child.  It wouldn't be long now.

"Mommy!  Mommy!  Look at me!  I'm a pirate!"

Her beautiful little boy tumbled into her eye-line, sporting an eye patch, bandana and a plastic sword.  It was so endearing that she couldn't help but smile.

"And what a handsome pirate you are!"

"Can I dig for treasure?" he asked, eyeing her shovel.

It would make a mess, but she couldn't bring herself to say no to him.  She handed over the shovel and watched her son charge at a particularly flower-free patch of soil, thrusting the implement into the ground and tossing earth to the side.

"I've found something!  I've found some treasure!"

Unconcerned, she sat down next to him, assuming he'd found some dead bulbs that Ryan had buried there in hopes of them growing one day.  What she wasn't expecting was for him to unearth an old-looking tin that used to reside in Ryan's dressing table, bits of soil and plant roots clinging to it.  Her son brushed them off and wrenched off the lid, grinning frantically at the thought of claiming his prize.  His expression dampened as he saw the contents.

"It's just bits of paper with scribble on them," he announced, handing the tin to his mother.

It was with trepidation that she took it from him, recognising her husband's hectic handwriting before sending her child inside to play.  The paper inside was disorganised and half crumpled, words bleeding into each other, smudged with the haste of writing out each thought before it dropped from one's head.  She plucked out receipts, napkins, A4 lined paper, anything that would have been at hand at the time and readily written on, eyes widening as she caught snatches of the words that her husband had written for him but never managed to share.

"I'm afraid my son's growing up without a father: although I'm there, I'm not."

"I want to crawl inside your skin."

"I wish I loved my wife a tenth of how much I love you."

"If I weren't so selfish, I'd give up all of my senses apart from hearing, just so you would sing to me, but you're too beautiful."

"You give my words meaning and melody."

"Once, I said your name while screwing her.  She didn't say anything, but her name doesn't sound at all like Brendon."

"When I'm with you, it feels like I can finally breathe."

"You make the sun seem redundant."

"Sometimes it's hard to think about you because the image my imagination conjures of you can never come close to the real thing."

She could bear to read no more and threw the tin aside, papers splaying out over the soil.  It was at this moment that even the smallest hope she'd had of him coming back to her was buried too deep to resurface.  He wouldn't settle for her, not when he loved this other man so much.  He didn't even love her a tenth as much as he loved him?  What had she done wrong?

Maybe they had never been high school sweethearts after all, and them sleeping together had been a drunken mistake.  Maybe Ryan had only married her so he wouldn't have a bastard child.  She found herself overcome with the urge to rip and tear his words to make them meaningless, but she restrained herself, as she always did.  Replacing the lid on the tin, she pushed it aside to deal with later and ripped up all flowers in sight, tossing them behind her into something resembling a pile.  It was only when the soil was left empty and barren that she stopped uprooting and pulling, picking up the earlier discarded tin and taking it inside with her.  She left it on the kitchen worktop before heading back outside to take the plant corpses to the composter and start thinking about which new flowers she would like in her garden.

Description
I have a normal, happy life and will prove this by doing some gardening.

She pushed this thought through her head as she gathered her trowel, shovel and some plant bulbs from the shelf in the garage of her perfect, two-bedroomed house.  Picking up a pair of gardening gloves on her way out, she traipsed outside to her wilted flowerbeds.  Neither she nor her husband had been keen gardeners, but the flowers had seemed to just take care of themselves until recently.  She crouched down in front of them and noticed that they had been eaten away at by some sort of insects, aphids, most likely.  There were a few holes in the leaves that looked like they might have been eaten through by caterpillars before they cocooned themselves away from the world.

She knew she needed to remove the bad plants because they would damage the others, but just didn't have the heart.  From a distance, they still looked so beautiful, but they retained that damp smell of rotting foliage. She'd wanted to be a florist as a child, learning the names and meanings of flowers, although it was always the aesthetics that she found more pleasing, different shades and colours rainbowed in contained bouquets.  It was only now as she stood up and scrutinised her dying flowerbeds that she realised their cruel irony.  The ambrosias seemed to mock her: your love is reciprocated?  Yeah right.  Forget-me-nots: faithful love?  Evidently not.  If he had been faithful, he wouldn't have run off with…  It made her shudder to think about it.

It was so fitting that Ryan had failed at planting daffodils a few months ago: you're the only one?  Well, that hadn't been true, had it?  She supposed she should have seen it coming; the flowers had been a warning sign; antirrhinums: deception, begonias: beware.  But this was stupid.  Flowers couldn't have warned her about what was happening.

No matter what had happened and who was to blame for it, she still had to keep up appearances that everything was absolutely fine for the neighbours, stop them from talking.  She'd been feeding them excuses about her husband's disappearance for weeks: "oh, just another business trip.  I swear they work him too hard," "he and a couple of friends went to so-and-so for the weekend," "his father passed away and he's been busy with the funeral arrangements."  She was sure they looked down on him for neglecting his young son, but that was better than them knowing the truth.  He'd come to his senses eventually though, returning to her and their child.  It wouldn't be long now.

"Mommy!  Mommy!  Look at me!  I'm a pirate!"

Her beautiful little boy tumbled into her eye-line, sporting an eye patch, bandana and a plastic sword.  It was so endearing that she couldn't help but smile.

"And what a handsome pirate you are!"

"Can I dig for treasure?" he asked, eyeing her shovel.

It would make a mess, but she couldn't bring herself to say no to him.  She handed over the shovel and watched her son charge at a particularly flower-free patch of soil, thrusting the implement into the ground and tossing earth to the side.

"I've found something!  I've found some treasure!"

Unconcerned, she sat down next to him, assuming he'd found some dead bulbs that Ryan had buried there in hopes of them growing one day.  What she wasn't expecting was for him to unearth an old-looking tin that used to reside in Ryan's dressing table, bits of soil and plant roots clinging to it.  Her son brushed them off and wrenched off the lid, grinning frantically at the thought of claiming his prize.  His expression dampened as he saw the contents.

"It's just bits of paper with scribble on them," he announced, handing the tin to his mother.

It was with trepidation that she took it from him, recognising her husband's hectic handwriting before sending her child inside to play.  The paper inside was disorganised and half crumpled, words bleeding into each other, smudged with the haste of writing out each thought before it dropped from one's head.  She plucked out receipts, napkins, A4 lined paper, anything that would have been at hand at the time and readily written on, eyes widening as she caught snatches of the words that her husband had written for him but never managed to share.

"I'm afraid my son's growing up without a father: although I'm there, I'm not."

"I want to crawl inside your skin."

"I wish I loved my wife a tenth of how much I love you."

"If I weren't so selfish, I'd give up all of my senses apart from hearing, just so you would sing to me, but you're too beautiful."

"You give my words meaning and melody."

"Once, I said your name while screwing her.  She didn't say anything, but her name doesn't sound at all like Brendon."

"When I'm with you, it feels like I can finally breathe."

"You make the sun seem redundant."

"Sometimes it's hard to think about you because the image my imagination conjures of you can never come close to the real thing."

She could bear to read no more and threw the tin aside, papers splaying out over the soil.  It was at this moment that even the smallest hope she'd had of him coming back to her was buried too deep to resurface.  He wouldn't settle for her, not when he loved this other man so much.  He didn't even love her a tenth as much as he loved him?  What had she done wrong?

Maybe they had never been high school sweethearts after all, and them sleeping together had been a drunken mistake.  Maybe Ryan had only married her so he wouldn't have a bastard child.  She found herself overcome with the urge to rip and tear his words to make them meaningless, but she restrained herself, as she always did.  Replacing the lid on the tin, she pushed it aside to deal with later and ripped up all flowers in sight, tossing them behind her into something resembling a pile.  It was only when the soil was left empty and barren that she stopped uprooting and pulling, picking up the earlier discarded tin and taking it inside with her.  She left it on the kitchen worktop before heading back outside to take the plant corpses to the composter and start thinking about which new flowers she would like in her garden.