Page 139 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

He doesn't flinch from it.

That's the thing about August. He's never once flinched from the hard, true things — only from his own guilt.

"Then it's normal to be afraid," he says. "It should be frightening. Terrifying, even. Because the last time that heart got handed over, the person holding it didn't treat it with the care something so precious deserved. They dropped it."

He sets down his shears entirely and gives me his whole, undivided attention.

"But that fear isn't weakness, Amber. It's wisdom. It's the heart learning."

His voice goes low and certain, and it doesn't waver.

"So here's what I'd tell that person. You don't have to hand your heart back over the second someone asks for it. You don't put something that fragile into unproven hands. You make them earn it first — make them show you, slowly, in a hundred smalland patient ways, over as long as it takes, exactly how careful they've learned to be. Let them prove they're worthy of you, long before you ever open that final vault and let anyone all the way inside." A pause. "The power to grant that access was always yours to begin with. It never once stopped being yours."

He has no idea he's just described, nearly word for word, the exact thing Marlowe and Juniper made me swear to on my living room floor last night. Or maybe he does. Maybe he's known me long enough to know precisely what I needed to hear.

We hold the look a beat too long.

Then August reaches across the small distance left between us — slow enough that I could stop him, if I wanted to, and I find that I don't — and tucks a few loose strands of hair back behind my ear.

His fingertips barely graze my cheek on the way.

"You really do look stunning with your hair down," he murmurs. "I've been thinking it since the moment you walked in." His hand lingers at my jaw. "Wear it down for our date."

I arch an eyebrow, my pulse doing something entirely undignified.

"Date?"

"Date."

He nods, like the matter's already settled, like it's the most natural thing on earth.

"You and me. Next week."

I search his face for the catch — the angle, the too-good-to-be-true. I find nothing but August, open as a thrown window, looking back at me with five years of regret and a fresh, careful, terrifying hope. My oldest instinct is to hedge. So I hedge.

"I'll make sure I'm free," I say slowly, "as long as it doesn't interfere with anything on the?—"

"I already checked."

I blink.

"You what?"

"I already checked." He says it so simply it takes a second to land. "You'll have Friday off next week. Sloane's out of the country — some benefit concert — and Nolan is performing the same night, so there's nothing on the wedding calendar that needs you. Every other arrangement for that day is already handled." He ticks it off, gentle and thorough, the way he ticks off a stem count. "I spoke with Marlowe. And Juniper. And Paloma. They're each covering a piece. You're free, Amber. Morning to night."

I stare at him, my mouth actually falling open.

"You handled all of that. Already."

"This morning."

"This morning," I repeat, faintly.

It undoes me a little, the sheer thoroughness of it.

Not a grand gesture — no roses by the dozen, no speech rehearsed in a mirror. Just a man who noticed the exact shape of my life and quietly went and cleared a path straight through it, so that I wouldn't have one single excuse left to tell him no.

That's the whole trick of him, and it always was. He doesn't sweep you off your feet. He removes, one by careful one, every reason you had for keeping them on the ground.