(no subject)

 I am having one of those moments where a fragment of fiction has surfaced in my head, offering up detail but completely refusing to let me remember what it's from.  The last time this happened it was a bit from the 1999 Mummy film, and took me days to work out.  

This time it's a young man in a garden at night, speaking with his mother.  They're at odds, somehow, but they're not fighting; and when he leaves her, he folds her hand around a rose, from which he has stripped the thorns.  Is it a Regency romance?  Fanfic?  Fantasy?  I can't tell.  It's not new, certainly.