Page 104 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

Back in Charleston, my grandmother used to say you learn everything worth knowing about a person in the first ninety seconds after they've been surprised in their own home. Not the version they've rehearsed for the front porch.

The real one.

The one that leaks out sideways while they're kicking a stray shoe under the couch and praying you didn't clock it.

I've been standing inside Amber Whitlock's cottage for exactly ninety seconds. I am learning a great deal.

"Okay," she says. Not to me. She says it to a throw pillow, which she fluffs with the violence of a woman defusing a bomb. "Okay. This is fine. Everything is completely fine."

"You keep saying that," I note from the doorway, where I have been instructed — with a flat palm and zero eye contact — to remain. "In my experience, when a person says fine that many times, the building's usually on fire."

"The building is not on fire." She snatches a mug off the coffee table, then a second mug, then a folded blanket, andstands there clutching all three like she's forgotten which crime she meant to hide. "The building is immaculate. The building is a magazine spread. Sit down. No — don't sit down, that cushion has a broken spring, just — stand there. Look at the wall."

She is unraveling in real time, and it is the most charming thing I've witnessed in five years.I look at the wall. The wall has a watercolor of the harbor and a small brass hook holding a single key. I approve of the wall. I approve, if I'm honest, of the whole cottage — the low beams, the couch that's swallowed a decade of good evenings, the bookshelf organized by a system only its owner could love. It smells like her. That's the emergency she's currently sprinting to solve.

Because Amber Whitlock, rattled, smells like a garden that's decided to bloom all at once and out of season. Apricot first, sun-warm and a little sticky-sweet. Then the roses — not the tidy florist kind but the overgrown ones climbing the trellis outside, gone slightly wild. Under all of it, vanilla and a low amber warmth, like a lamp somebody left burning in a window. Nerves have cranked the whole bouquet up to a volume I'd wager she can't stand. I could stand in it for a week and call it a vacation.

She catches me not-not-noticing. Her whole face goes the color of the roses.

"God, I'm sorry," she blurts. "It's — I know. I know it's a lot. Give me one second, I have neutralizer, I just have to—" She's already gone, banging into the kitchen, yanking open a cabinet.

"You don't have to do anything," I say, following as far as the kitchen doorway.Permission first. Always. Especially in her house."May I come in? Or is the kitchen also a look-at-the-wall situation?"

"The kitchen is—" A cabinet door thunks. "The kitchen is fine, come in, don't look at the sink."

I come in. I look directly at the sink. There is one clean bowl in it.The woman renegotiated a five-person federal packdeclaration this afternoon without her pulse changing. A single bowl is the thing that undoes her.

She surfaces from the depths of the cabinet with a canister in each hand, holding them up to the light and squinting between them like she's defusing that bomb after all. One's a matte lavender. One's a clinical, pale green.

"Which—" She turns one to read the back. "I can never remember which of these is the — one's for the room and one's for skin, and if I get it backward I smell like a hospital ward for six hours, and—" She trails off. "Why are you looking at me like that."

"Like what?"

"Like I'm funny."

"You're a little funny," I admit.

I cross the kitchen before she can pick a can and pull the trigger. I take both of them out of her hands — gently, the way you take scissors off a kid — and set the whole matched set on the top shelf of her open cabinet. It's a good shelf. It's an excellent shelf. It is, by my estimate, a solid seven inches above anything Amber Whitlock is reaching without a stepstool and a running jump.

She stares up at the canisters. She stares at me.

"Put those back."

"No."

"Sawyer."

"That's rather the point of a high shelf," I tell her, and I have the nerve to wink. "Little far up, aren't they."

"I need those." She plants both hands on her hips. It would land harder if the top of her head cleared my chin. "I have a guest. You don't spray a guest in the face with your—" she gestures at herself, at all of it, the whole blooming catastrophe of her "—your everything."

"This guest," I say, "would like it entered into the record that you smell just fine."

"That's not?—"

"In fact." I lean back against the counter and settle in, because this is a conversation I've decided we're having whether she scheduled it or not. "I've been curious about it all week. Every single time I've been within ten feet of you, you're either scrubbed down to nothing or you're lunging for a can. The store. The sidewalk. That federal office. Why? Who taught you to do that?"

The question lands in a tender place it wasn't invited. I watch it land. Her hands come off her hips. The bouquet in the room shifts under me — the apricot pulling thin, the roses folding inward, a green snapped-stem note threading through the sweetness like a bruise coming up under skin.