Page 99 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

August holds my eyes a beat longer than the lie has earned.

He knows. I'm nearly certain he knows, or half-knows, or has decided the knowing costs more than the not.

Then he nods, once, and turns to Cade.

"West lot," he says. "And do not ask me one stupid question the entire way there."

He looks back at me. Whatever crossed between us a minute ago is folded down and put away, and what's left is a man asking a rival for a favor because the woman outweighs the pride.

"If you find her before we do—" he stops, corrects himself, honest to the bone even now "—if you so much as hear where she is before we do, tell her something for me. Tell her we'll do whatever it takes to be worth a second chance. That we'll start atthe very beginning, if that's what it takes to learn how to love her right." He pauses. "And tell her we'll be here tomorrow. Before 8:17. On our feet, not running. She'll understand the time."

I nod, slow.

"I'll hold you to it, Bellamy." I mean the name and the promise both. "Don't you dare let her down again."

Cade hits the gas before August can answer.

The truck lurches back onto the road and pulls away, taillights shrinking into the dark. The last thing I catch is August's face turned half toward his own window. The look on it isn't strategy. It isn't performance. It's longing cut with conviction, sharp enough to draw blood.

That man meant every word.

Out of the three, he's the one who actually meant it.

Which is going to complicate my entire life. Noted.

I wait until their lights are gone from the last curve.

Then I ease off the shoulder, roll slowly down the road, and turn at the first side lane — a rutted track between two stands of pine where nobody goes after dark. I cut the engine. The night comes down soft and complete. I push my seat back on its runners, as far as it will go, and I look down into the footwell.

She's wrecked.

Amber Whitlock, who ran a public hearing this afternoon without her voice wobbling once, is curled in the dark at my feet with her cheeks slicked silver and her bottom lip trembling like the last leaf before it lets go of the branch.

She heard all of it.

Every word.

The cowards and the snow globe and the stem and the petals and the man in the back seat swearing he'd burn his own pack to the ground before he'd lose her again. She heard the men she loved finally say the true things — five years and one dark road too late, to a stranger, while she hid beneath his steering wheel.

I've talked my way out of every disaster I have ever met.

I have nothing for this one.

There isn't a sentence in the language that fixes what her face is doing.

So I do the one thing I'm actually good at, underneath all the words.

I open my arms.

That's the whole of it. No speech. No angle. I open them. I wait. I let her be the one to decide.

She reads the sign the way she reads everything —fast, complete— and she comes apart on the way up. She unfolds from the footwell, climbs over the console into my lap, presses her wet face into the crook of my neck, and finally, finally, lets it out.

The sob that leaves her is the ugly kind.

The real kind.

The kind a person only lets you hear once you've quietly stopped being a stranger without either of you deciding when it happened. I wrap both arms around her and I hold on.