Page 207 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

God, this morning.

We pulled it off at first light, in a tiny stone chapel four counties out, twelve guests and a sunrise pouring gold through old glass, everything hushed and holy and perfectly, blessedly quiet. Nobody in the world thought we'd hold a celebrity wedding in the sleepy hour right before a county fair swallowedthe whole town — which is precisely why it was the one hour nobody was watching.

By the time Cade lit his little fuse this afternoon, Sloane and Nolan were already married, already gone, already miles up over the clouds in a private jet, bound for an island whose name lives in exactly four heads.

The whole leaked "wedding" the mob came screaming for was a stage set, a beautiful decoy, a wedding-shaped hole for a rat to fall into.

I felt for Nolan this morning, I did.

There's a particular grief in learning your betrayer is the man you trusted the most, and I watched it move across his face when Sawyer told him. But then he turned back to Sloane. He kissed his brand-new wife under that gold light, with nobody in the world able to touch them, and the relief that broke open in his eyes was a thing I'll carry a long time.

We did that.

We gave them the one morning that was truly theirs.

Even that can't hold a candle to what's moving in my own chest right now.

Relief that I get to stop. Relief that I get to rest.

To grow this baby.

To let three good men spoil me rotten while I finally build a future instead of managing everyone else's for a change.

The house is ready. Everything's set.

By the end of today, Honeybell Harbor won't be seeing much of us for a good long while.

It isn't a goodbye, though. It's a see-you-later, whispered to a town that took a heartbroken runaway bride five and a half years ago and let her build a whole life out of other people's happy endings.

I owe this place more than I can say.

I stop before the tall white doors of the second tent, and two ushers in dark suits step forward and bow, one to each door, their hands settling on the brass to open them.

I lift my chin. There are cameras in there, I remind myself. This is a shoot. A campaign. A mock. Chin up, shoulders back, let them fall in love with the fantasy.

The doors swing open. The music crests. A live organ — a real one, wheezing and glorious, the kind you'd never hire for a magazine ad — pours its whole heart into the peak of the song.

Then I see who's waiting for me at the end of the aisle.

Sawyer. August. Beckett.

My feet forget how to work.

They're standing at the top of a low, flower-drowned platform, all three of them, turned toward me with their faces open and shining.

Sawyer in the pure white suit I thought was a costume.

Beckett enormous and solemn beside him, his hands folded, his jaw already working like a man losing a battle with his own eyes.

August in the middle-left, a sprig of ranunculus in his lapel, smiling at me the way he smiles at a first bloom in spring.

Their scents reach me all at once, braided down the length of the aisle — Sawyer's magnolia and black pepper, Beckett's cedar and smoked vanilla, August's iris and green sage — the exact combination I wake up wrapped inside every single morning, the smell my whole body has learned to read assafe.It hits me harder than the sight of them does. You can dress up a decoy. You cannot fake the way three Alphas smell when they're looking down an aisle at the one person they'd set the world alight to protect.

This isn't a shoot.

I stand frozen under the arch, my bouquet trembling in my grip. I let my eyes travel the tent, and every place they land undoes me a little more.

I know these people.