Page 137 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

"The cosmos are already gossiping." I nod at the trembling pink things. "Terrible little gossips, cosmos. No discretion whatsoever."

"It's the rosemary I don't trust. Sharp-tongued herb. Always has been."

A laugh gets out of me before I can stop it — a real one, startled loose — and his whole face lights at the sound like I've handed him a gift he wasn't expecting.

I hold up two stems, weighing them against the arrangement.

"It needs more of the burgundy. It's too sweet as it stands — it needs something to argue with."

"It's awedding,Amber. Not a debate club."

"Every good arrangement needs a little conflict. A little something dark to make the sweet parts mean anything at all." I tuck the burgundy foliage deep, right into the heart of it, and step back. "There. Now it has a spine."

August studies the arrangement, then me, and something soft moves through his eyes.

"You're not wrong. You never were, about this." He settles a second dark stem in beside mine, careful. "A little something dark to make the sweet parts mean something. I'm going to remember you said that."

We work like that as the light goes molten and low.

At some point I couldn't name, I notice our scents have done the thing they always used to do. His iris and pear blossom, my apricot and rose, braided together in the warm air until it's one single perfume and I can't pull the threads back apart.

It smells like a version of my life I stopped letting myself remember.

The words come out of me before I've decided to say them, soft, nearly lost in the hush.

"We were a good thing, weren't we?"

August goes still.

He sets down his shears. He looks at me across the half-built centerpiece, across five whole years, and he doesn't rush it, because he has never once rushed a thing worth doing.

"We were," he says quietly. Then, softer, with a weight that settles right in the center of my chest, he adds, "We were a good thing, Amber. And I think…if you let it…we could be one again."

I stare at him.

The sincerity in his face is almost too much to look at head-on, like the low sun through the glass. He smiles, that slow and careful August smile, and reaches across the table with his palm turned up.

An offering.

I arch an eyebrow at him. Then I put my hand in his anyway.

He turns it over gently, like he's handling one of his own fragile blooms, and lifts it to his mouth. He presses a soft kiss to my knuckles, and against my skin, low and warm, he whispers his own name.

"August Elias Bellamy."

Like he's introducing himself. Like we're two strangers meeting for the very first time in a greenhouse full of flowers, like everything that came before this never happened, like we get to start the whole thing clean.

My heart does something traitorous and slow. I decide to play along.

"Amber Rose Whitlock," I offer, matching his gravity, and I watch his eyes crinkle at theRose.

"Rose," he repeats, delighted down to his boots. "All these years, and you never once told me your middle name was Rose. In a room full of them, no less."

"A girl keeps some mystery."

"Then let me solve a little of it." He hasn't let go of my hand, and he makes no move to. "Amber Rose Whitlock. Is your favorite color still pink?"

I laugh.