Page 2 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

Nothing else fits otherwise, because they certainely wouldn’t stand me up. Never…there's a hole at the bottom of the logic, and I keep stepping around it, the way you step around a loose board you have no intention of looking under.

"Where's my phone?"

"With the coordinator."

"Then get the coordinator."

"Abercrombie."

"Mother." I turn, and the crinoline turns a half second behind me like a ship coming about. "Beckett would have sent word. August would have called. Cade would have sent a photo of whatever ditch he's in, grinning. Somebody would have reached out to me by now. Give me my phone."

It’s rare for me to have some damn backbone when it comes to my life, but enough is enough. Either something is wrong, or I’m truly being stood up by the men of my life.

For half a second, something moves behind my mother's flawless face. Then it's gone, buffed out like a thumbprint on silver, and I understand two things at once.

She knows something.

She has decided I’m undeserving of knowing exactly what that is.

The saddest part is I’m not surprised in the least.

"The last thing this family needs," she says, "is you sobbing into a phone where three hundred guests can hear you. Whatever this is, we will manage it quietly."

Whatever this is...

There's the confession, tucked inside the crackdown, and my body catches it before my brain agrees to.

My scent goes first. All day it's been behaving, sun-warm apricot and garden roses, sweet, bridal, appropriate, and now the rose note snaps green and sharp, stems broken in a fist, and it floods the suite so fast my mother actually steps back.

Panic has a smell.

Mine, apparently, could clear a room.

"Marisol." She snaps her fingers at the maid by the door. "The neutralizer. Quickly, before it reaches the hallway."

Before it reaches the hallway.

Not before my daughter falls apart. The hallway. I stand with my arms out while a maid I've apologized to twice today mists my throat, my wrists, my shoulders, erasing me one polite spritz at a time, and her eyes say sorry, while her hands keep working, because her hands answer to Helena, same as everything else in this hotel.

The apricot dims. The broken-green sharpness goes quiet.

What's left is a bride with no smell at all, which in a room full of Alphas and Omegas is the same as a bride with no feelings, which I suspect was the goal.

"Better," my mother says.

"For whom?"

She's already turned to the mirror to fix her lipstick.

By quarter past five, the quartet has moved on to Vivaldi, which means even the musicians have stopped pretending, and I've given up on the phone and moved on to bargaining.

It's quite a production, the bargaining.

I'd be embarrassed if anybody could see in.

Beckett's truck broke down, except his truck has never broken down. He rebuilds the engine for fun, the way other men do crosswords. August lost the rings, except August has carried the rings in his breast pocket for two weeks and pats them when he thinks nobody's watching, right over the tattoo of three flowers growing from one root, the one that's supposed to getits fourth bloom inked after tonight. Cade got pulled over. Fine. That one I'll allow.

That one has happened twice since I've known him.