Page 136 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

He always did look most like himself surrounded by things he was coaxing into bloom.

The greenhouse tips something loose in me, the way it always does. A memory I don't so much reach for as fall straight into — a field, years back, out past the far rows where the cutting flowers grow half-wild.

The two of us.

A sunset going down like the whole sky had caught fire. The crush of stems and warm petals beneath us, the reckless, laughing, wide-open freedom of it. It had felt frisky. It had also felt like being handed back a piece of myself I hadn't known was missing.

That's the thing about August the other two never quite had. He has never once been afraid of beauty, or of wanting it out loud. I remember the way he looked at me afterward in that field, petals caught in my hair, like I was the finest arrangement he'd ever built and he couldn't quite believe he got to keep it. Nobody has looked at me like that since. I've told myself, for five years running, that I didn't miss it.

I've always felt a particular pull toward him, and it isn't a secret to anyone.

Where Beckett offered me safety, and Cade offered me charm, August offered me this — the sense that being loved by him meant being seen as something worth arranging with great care, worth the good light and the good vase.

He appreciates beauty in the finest, smallest things. For a long stretch of my life, a while ago now, he appreciated it in me. Standing in the doorway of his cathedral this afternoon, I feel that old pull as sharp as I ever have.

He looks up then, as though he's felt me thinking about him, and the frown melts clean off his face.

"You came."

"You asked me to."

I let the door swing shut behind me, sealing us into the warm green quiet.

"Something about a color transition that apparently can't be decided without my divine input."

"It can't." He says it with total sincerity, which is the whole trouble with August — he means it, every time. "You have the final word here, Amber. I'm not sending a single stem to that wedding until you've put your hands on it and told me it's right."

He gestures me toward the table.

"Come. Help me choose."

So I cross to him, and we begin. It comes together the way it always did between us — easy, wordless at first, then not wordless at all.

I reach for the apricot roses first, because they're the heart of the entire thing: the exact warm blush of a peach with the sun behind it, their scent soft and old-fashioned.

They smell, embarrassingly, a little like me. Blush cosmos come next, delicate as tissue paper, trembling on their thread-thin stems. Coral dahlias with their impossible geometry, petal stacked on petal stacked on petal. Then the darker notes to give the whole thing weight and honesty — burgundy foliage, deep asspilled wine; sprigs of rosemary that release their sharp green scent the instant I bruise them between my fingers; fig branches still smelling faintly of their own fruit; and long, feathered plumes of gold grass to catch and hold the light.

It's a sunset in a vase, is what it is.

The palette moves the way an evening does — warm and open at the top, going deep and burnished and quiet toward the bottom.

The bride asked for "romantic autumn." What she's getting is the exact color of the hour I've started to love.I keep that part to myself.

"Apricot roses," August murmurs, approving, already reaching for the very same bunch I'm reaching for. Our fingers collide over the stems.

"Sorry—"

"Take them." He draws his hand back, smiling. "You always did have the better eye for roses."

He trims while I arrange.

That's how it settles between us, unspoken and immediate — he takes up his shears and cuts each stem to the length I need, I build the thing in my hands, and we pass flowers back and forth across the zinc table in a rhythm that feels rehearsed even though it's been five years since we last danced it.

Our hands keep finding the same blooms at the same moment.

The fourth time it happens —both of us lunging for the last coral dahlia— he lifts an eyebrow.

"We've got to stop meeting like this," he says, dead serious. "People will talk."