Page 147 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

A bachelorette party in matching sashes joins in without knowing what they're cheering for. A man I've never met in my life claps me on the shoulder like we served in a war together and orders "whatever the baby's having, but make mine a double."

This is the job — for eight hours a night you get to be a bit player in a hundred strangers' best moments. Usually I love it. Usually.

I finish her drink —six cherries, because I read the room— knowing with grim certainty I'll be muddling forty more of these before the hour's out.

I slide it across to the nearest of her Alphas, a big weepy thing who's got tears standing openly in his eyes and could not care less who sees them.

"On the house," I tell him. "Congratulations."

"Thanks, man." He takes the glass like it's spun from gold.

Then they're gone, sweeping her up and away from the crush toward a booth in the back, four broad bodies folding into a wall around her so that not one drunk tourist so much as brushes her in the chaos. Guarding her.

Not because a contract says they have to.

Because they get to.

That's the thing that catches under my ribs and won't let go. Not the pregnancy. Thejoy.The uncomplicated, full-bodied, nothing-held-in-reserve joy of it.

It's foreign to me.

I don't have a better word than that. I stand here and watch five people be that happy about afuture,and it's like watching someone speak a language I was never taught a syllable of.When exactly did I decide the future was a threat instead of a gift?

It shoves a thought at me I've never once let myself hold.Do I want that? A kid. A family that isn't a millstone. Would I be that man — spinning her off her feet in a crowded bar, out of my skull with happiness?I turn it over in my hands and it's strange and enormous and it doesn't quite fit anywhere I try to set it down.

For one reckless second, I let myself try to picture it.

Her.

Amber, glowing, mine, ours —

I can't.

That's the whole rotten heart of it.

I try to see Amber happy —Amber laughing in the middle of us, Amber choosing this, choosing me— and the only image my traitor of a brain will render is the other one.

The one burned permanently onto the backs of my eyes.

Amber in a white dress at the Lantern House, standing alone at the end of a long aisle, mascara cutting tracks down a face that has just understood, in real time, that nobody is coming. The picture I put there myself. The one I will never in this life un-see.

I frown down at nothing, scrubbing at a glass that's been clean for a full minute.

Why can't I see the good version? Why is it only ever the altar?I adore that woman.

I know it the way I know my own name — it lives in me like a second pulse, has for years. So why can't I conjure a single future where I'm the reason she's smiling instead of the reason she's on her knees in the wreckage?

It's a phase,I tell myself, the way I tell myself everything I can't afford to feel.Cold feet. You're tired. It's a weird, loud night.

I don't believe a word of it.

I never do.

But it's easier to swallow than the alternative, so down it goes.

"Iris." I flag my coworker down the length of the bar, already loosening my apron strings. "Cover me five minutes? I need air."

Iris takes one look at my face —she reads a room nearly as well as I do, and she reads me better than most— and just tips her chin toward the back.