Page 192 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

"Knot in the Wedding Cards," Sawyer finishes, deadpan, and I snort.

The joke's older than either of us. It's what Marlowe and Juniper started calling this whole circus of mine months back, when it was still a punchline instead of a life — a knot in the wedding cards, four alphas and one very tired omega and a deck that keeps dealing me the same impossible hand. I never once thought I'd be the woman who found it funny. Turns out I am. Then his smile turns wry, and he tucks a curl behind my ear. "Though I'll say this. Right now, out of the whole hand you were dealt, there's exactly one alpha standing here actually proving that theory true." He lets it land gently, no venom in it, just fact. "So I figure we run with the one who showed up. See where the cards fall."

My grin fades a little at the edges. He didn't say Cade. He didn't have to. The empty seat is loud even when nobody names it.

I glance at the seating chart on my desk, then back up at him, and I lower my voice like the walls might carry it. "Sawyer. Do you think — honestly — do you think he's the one letting things slip?"

He doesn't answer.

He just steps in and wraps both arms all the way around me and holds on, chin settling on top of my head, and the not-answering is its own kind of answer, one neither of us is brave enough to say in a room with this many windows. After a moment he squeezes once and lets me go.

"Let me go get you your award-winning pickle concoction," he says, "before you gnaw through a fabric swatch."

I laugh, wet and grateful, because he's giving me the exit again, brushing the ugly thing aside so I can breathe. "Thank you, Sawyer," I say, and I mean it about more than the pickles. I mean it about the way he keeps turning up as a light in the middle of all this chaos, a steady warm glow to read the path by when everything else has gone dark and loud.

He pauses at the door. Then he comes back — just to cup my face in both his big hands, tilt it up, and look at me like I'm something worth looking at.

"You're the blossoming tree, Amber," he says, low and certain. "The one that bears fruit — love and longing and every blessing this sorry town doesn't deserve. I just get to stand under it. That's the whole job. Be here to remind you what a stunning gift you are, every single time you bloom."

Heat floods my whole face. "That's disgustingly poetic," I manage.

"I contain multitudes." He kisses me once more, quick and sweet, and finally lets himself out, the little bell over the door jingling behind him.

Then it's just me, standing alone in the beautiful wreckage of my office, surrounded by seating charts and swatches and the ghost of magnolia, staring down at a week's worth of plans that are about to move very, very fast. My hand drifts, without my permission, to my stomach. Flat. Ordinary. Mine.

Pregnant.The word tries the door.

I let it knock. I even let myself picture it for one reckless second — a positive stick, four stunned alphas, a nursery painted the color of the roses I carry to other women's weddings. The image is so warm it startles me. Then I set it down, gently, the way you set down a photograph that was never yours to keep.

I know better. I know the actual medicine of it — Dr. Greene sat me down years ago and walked me through my own body, the fertility numbers that run extremely low on a good day, the blockers she confirmed carry contraceptive weight on top of everything else. Two locks on one door. There's no version of the math where this is real. I've done a lot of math today. This one isn't close.

"Nah," I say out loud, to the eucalyptus and the RSVP cards and nobody at all. "Impossible."

I smirk, knowing this is just an amusing end to the week.

CHAPTER 38

Positive

~AMBER~

"YOU'RE PREGNANT!"

Juniper's shriek could strip paint. It ricochets off the tiles of my little bathroom, rattles the string lights we hung over the mirror, and probably carries clean across the marsh to wake half of Honeybell Harbor. I stare down at the plastic stick in my hand — at the two pink lines that have the audacity to be crisp, confident, entirely unbothered by my denial — and I shake my head.

"Nah," I say. "We have to do it again."

"Amber." Marlowe is sitting on the edge of my clawfoot tub with her arms crossed, unimpressed as a lighthouse. She's got salt and driftwood and warm copper coming off her in that steady way she has, the scent of a woman who hauls other people's forgotten treasures out of the sea for a living and does not have time for nonsense. "You have peed on three different brand sticks. Three. I watched you do it. I held your wine so you wouldn't spill it, which, by the way—" she lifts the untouchedglass of red I abandoned an hour ago and sets it pointedly on the counter, out of reach, "—you never drank. All night. Curious."

"Maybe they're expired," I try. "Maybe I got a bad batch. Maybe the drugstore in this town stocks defective?—"

"I bought them," Marlowe says. "Three stores. Three brands. One of them I drove all the way to Cutter's Bay for, because you insisted the local ones might be 'compromised.'"

"That was sound methodology."

"That was a woman in denial with a car and gas money."

"They all say positive, babe." Juniper is folded onto the bathmat in an enormous cardigan, cheeks already pink, eyes already shining because Juniper cries at long-distance commercials and dogs reuniting with soldiers and, apparently, at my urine. Juniper berry and lavender and sugared lemon float off her, gone soft and weepy at the edges. "Every single one. You are a hundred percent, no-take-backs pregnant."