Page 12 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

The document opens on a photograph I don't need, because I could draw this building freehand in the dark. The wide wraparound porch. The weathered cliff-gray shingles. The old ship's lantern burning gold over the door the way it has for a hundred years, the light that guided boats home, the light I once planned to be married under, and above the photograph, in elegant, expensive type, the name I have spent five years planning around, driving around, breathing around.

The Lantern House.

My hand goes still on the mouse.

Down the hill, the harbor breathes against the seawall, in and out, the way it does. The office clock ticks into the hush.

Under the neutralizer, under eleven hours of salt, sugar, and other people's joy, a sharp green note comes up off my skin, snapped stems, bruised fruit, grief with a bow on it, and there's no one left awake on Bellflower Lane to smell it.

Just me, a glowing office, and a client who is firm on the first choice.

The equinox is seventy days away.

The tide, as usual, is coming in faster than predicted.

CHAPTER 2

The House That Waited

~BECKET~

There are two kinds of broken.

The kind you can fix, and the kind you learn to build around.

The conservatory roof is the first kind, which is why I'm on it at five in the morning with a headlamp and a pry bar, pulling rotten flashing off the ridge before the sun or my staff can catch me at it.

Salt air eats everything on this cliff. Copper, cedar, iron, promises.

You can slow it down if you're stubborn, and I'm nothing if not stubborn, so I work the old flashing loose inch by inch, save the pieces worth saving, and sketch the replacement joint on the back of a receipt with a carpenter's pencil before I cut a single thing.

Measure twice. Cut once. Live with it forever.

The whole trade is just consequences you plan for.

Below me, the Lantern House sleeps, and from up here you can see both truths of it at once.

The east wing glows even in the dark, five years of obsessive restoration, every sash weight rehung, every baluster turned by hand to match the 1890s originals. The lantern itself burns gold over the front door the way it has for a century, the old signal light that guided boats home around the point, the reason the house has its name and half its legend.

That's the part guests photograph.

Then there's the rest.

The north corridor, closed. Two guest rooms, closed. The bridal suite on the second floor, closed five years, and when clients ask I say structural work, which is a lie I've told so many times it has its own key on the ring. There's nothing wrong with that room's structure. I checked the joists myself the winter I closed it.

The problem with that room is that a twenty-three-year-old in a yellow sundress once stood in the middle of it during an early venue tour, spinning slow with her arms out, laughing, telling me where the peonies would go, “right there, Beck, morning light, don't argue with me about the sightlines”, and I have not been able to stand in that doorway since without hearing it.

You deserve a life that is freely chosen.

Eight words.

I wrote them, the other two signed them, and I've had five years to learn what they cost, which is more than this whole house and everything in it.

I don't think about that before breakfast. House rule.

I climb down, coil the rope, and start the rounds.

The rounds are the best hour of my day, and I know exactly what that says about me. Boiler first, then the east-wing beams, and I inspect the old ones instead of condemning them, because a beam that's carried a roof for a hundred and thirty years has earned a look before it earns a landfill.