Page 177 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

"Good quiet," I say, and I mean it so much my voice almost gives. "Very good quiet."

He smiles at me, small and private, the smile he saves for when he's decided not to fuss.

"Okay, Amber. Eat your breakfast."

The dishes come after, because someone has to be the adult, and it turns out that someone is a rotating committee. I take the drying towel.

Sawyer stations himself at the open cabinet, stacking clean plates onto the shelf as I hand them up. Beckett wipes down the table with the focus of a man defusing something. August leans against the counter by the window, thumbs moving overhis phone, murmuring something about a delivery of ranunculus that came in short.

It's the most ordinary tableau in the world, four people cleaning a kitchen, and I am so full of it I can barely hold the plate steady.

Then the front door opens.

Not a knock. The door.

The particular scrape-and-swing of the heavy front door. A gust of outside air. A scent riding in on it — spiced rum, blood orange, sandalwood, the salted-caramel warmth I'd know anywhere. Cade.

Threaded through it, faint but unmistakable, is somebody else's perfume.

Something floral and not mine…

The kitchen doesn't stop, exactly.

It just changes key.

Beckett straightens up from the table, cloth still in his hand, and looks toward the entryway with an expression I can't quite read.

"Where've you been? You're just now getting home?"

Cade comes into the kitchen doorway looking rumpled and easy, hair mussed, a day's worth of bar on him. He rubs the back of his neck and gives us all a loose, unbothered smile — the reading-the-room grin, except this once it's misreading the room entirely.

"Yeah, sorry." He yawns. "Bar got slammed after close, so I stuck around to help Renzo break it all down. Then Iris' car wouldn't turn over in the lot — dead as a doornail. I tried to jump it off mine, but the battery's just gone, so I ran her home instead." He shrugs, wandering toward the coffee pot like this is any other morning. "By then I was dead on my feet. Didn't want to drive all the way back out here half-asleep. She said crash onher couch, so I crashed on her couch. Got a couple hours in and headed back."

He says it the way you'd report the weather.

I stop drying the plate in my hands.

Down the counter, Sawyer goes still with a clean plate held halfway to the shelf, the muscle in his jaw ticking once.

By the window, August's thumbs stop moving. He lifts his head slowly, phone forgotten, and there's a careful blankness settling over his face that I've learned to recognize as the most dangerous thing August does.

"Wait." August's voice is very even. "What?"

Cade turns, the coffee pot in his hand, and blinks at us like we're the ones being strange. His forehead creases. He genuinely doesn't understand, and that — that's the part that lands like a stone in my stomach.

"I said Iris' car broke down," he repeats, slower, as if we've all simply failed to hear him the first time. "So I slept on her couch and came back this morning. It's not a big?—"

Beckett sets the cloth down on the table.

He does it quietly, folding it once, and somehow the softness of the gesture is louder than a slam. He lifts one hand and points, past all of us, at the door Cade just walked through.

"Out."

Cade laughs, short and confused.

"Huh?"

"Out." Beckett's voice doesn't rise. It goes the other direction, down into bedrock. "Go stay at your mother's for the day. Sit with what you just told us. And when you've actually understood it…every word of it…you can come back."