Page 19 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

"It's not meant to be fair, it's meant to be accurate."

"She's not a beam, Marlowe."

"No. She's the strongest structure either of us knows, and I'd like her to price herself accordingly." Marlowe says it without a flicker, matter-of-fact as a lumber invoice, and it goes through me sideways, because Marlowe deals compliments about as often as the county repaves our road, and you feel each one for a year.

We try the obvious exits.

Juniper proposes the Seabriar orangery, the point lighthouse, the cranberry bog that photographed so beautifully,and for a few minutes it's almost a normal vendor meeting, three professionals problem-solving over pastry.

Then I tell them the part I've read eleven times since last night, the line in Paloma's follow-up about the venue being non-negotiable for reasons personal to the bride, childhood significance, and Juniper deflates, because you can fight a publicist's preference, but nobody in this kitchen is going to war against somebody's childhood.

"Eat a peach," she says finally, defeated, pushing the tray at me. "Whatever you decide, you're not deciding it hungry, I've seen your mints."

The peach is, for the record, extraordinary.

Rena watches me eat it and mutters that it would be just as extraordinary without the gold, and Juniper says through a mouthful of her own inventory that the gold is load-bearing, and I leave them to it and walk up Bellflower Lane to my office with a mahogany frame in the van and no answer anywhere on my person.

Golden Hour Vows on a Monday morning runs like a well-fed clock, which this Monday means Niall has reorganized the vendor deliveries into a system involving three colors of tape and a map of the county annotated in a legend only he can read.

He walks me through it with the pride of a man unveiling a cathedral. Green is floral, blue is rentals, pink is, and I quote, vibes-dependent. I tell him it's brilliant, because it is, provided he never takes a vacation, gets sick, or dies, at which point the business collapses into interpretive dance. He takes this as a compliment.

In fairness, from me it is one.

Tessa is at her desk, which is the morning's first genuine problem, because Tessa is supposed to be at home until Thursday and instead she's here, pale as printer paper, runningclient calls with a blanket over her knees like that's a normal accessory for July.

My assistant is twenty-six, terrifyingly organized, the person who stands over me with protein bars, and she has been fighting the same bug for three weeks with the strategic approach of simply refusing to acknowledge it.

"Go home."

"I'm fine."

"You're gray, Tess. You're the color of a March sky. Go home."

"I have the Delacroix tasting sheet to finish, the rental audit, your Thursday—" She stops to cough, which undermines the argument's structure considerably, then levels a look at me that would be more intimidating from someone not wrapped in fleece. "Also, respectfully, you're lecturing me about rest. You. I found you asleep on the fabric wall in April. You were holding a stapler."

"The stapler is irrelevant to this conversation."

"You'd scheduled your own lunch as a meeting and then declined it."

"That was one time, and I rescheduled." I did not reschedule. We both know I did not reschedule, and Niall, taping the county map, radiates the silence of a man staying out of it, and the standoff resolves the way it always does, with Tessa staying put and me losing while appearing to negotiate, and I make a private note to call her mother, which is the nuclear option, and I'm not above it.

Priya joins us on the screen at ten, remote from the city, sharp-eyed, headset on, the good pen already out, and walks the three of us through the celebrity contract with the calm of a woman defusing something.

Total confidentiality, binding from signature, extending to every vendor, every delivery driver, every teenager with a phone.

A location-security bonus on top of the fee, and the bonus alone is more than last year's gross, and she says the number without flinching, which is why Priya handles money and I handle flowers. The couple wants local, that's in writing, local bakers, local florists, local everything, no imported luxury vendors flown in over the town's head.

And if it goes well,Priya says, taking off her headset at the end the way she does when she's about to say the true thing,this stops being a wedding.

This is Honeybell Harbor debuting as an international destination, this is you hiring permanent staff, this is the apprenticeship program, the retreat, the whole file you keep meaning to show me.

One wedding, Amber.

It's the door.

It's also, no one on this call knows, a door with the lantern still burning over it.

I sit in my sunlit office hearing opportunity with one ear and responsibility with the other, because if I take this, I'm not just walking myself back onto that cliff, I'm carrying the whole town's autumn up there with me.