Page 208 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

Every single one. It's not a crowd of hired extras.

It's my team in the front pews — Priya with mascara already ruined, Niall grinning like a fool, Tessa off her leave and sobbing openly. It's the handful of souls who held me together across the worst years of my life, gathered on white chairs in a tent full of my own flowers. Marlowe is there, arms crossed, scowling to keep from crying and failing badly at it. Then Juniper in the second row with both hands pressed to her mouth, tears streaming down a face lit up with so much pride I have to look away before it takes my knees.

Every chair in that tent holds a person who caught me on a night I was falling. I didn't invite a single one of them —I didn't know to— and yet here they all sit, dressed in their good clothes, clutching tissues, beaming at a bride who thought she was showing up to fake it for a camera.

Somebody built me a wedding out of the exact people who loved me back to life, and I never once felt them planning it. The care of that, the sheer secret labor of it, cracks something open in my chest that I don't think will ever fully close again.

This is real. This is a wedding.

This is my wedding.

I catch a movement to my left, close.

I turn, and my whole body goes tight.

My father.

Alistair Whitlock is standing at the end of the first pew in a charcoal suit that costs more than the tent, silver hair swept back, and he is looking at me with an expression I have not seen on his face since I was small enough to believe he hungthe moon. I try to school my features. I try to be the composed woman I've spent decades learning to be in front of this man.

My scent betrays me instantly — the apricot going thin and uncertain, spiking sharp at the edges, broadcasting every nerve in my body to anyone with a nose.

He steps toward me. Slowly. Like a man approaching a horse that has every reason to bolt. He does something I have genuinely never once seen Alistair Whitlock do in thirty years of being his daughter.

He offers me his hand, palm up. He lowers his voice to something only I can hear.

"I did you wrong, Amber."

I go very still.

"Not because you deserved it. You never deserved a single ounce of it." His jaw tightens, and I watch him force the words out like they're being dragged up from a place deep and rusted shut. "I told myself that if I was hard enough on you — hard enough on the men who wanted you — I'd guarantee you ended up with a pack worthy of a woman of your nature. That harshness was love. That control was protection."

His pale eyes shine, and he blinks it furiously back.

"All it ever did was make me heartless in your eyes, and rightly so. When your heart was breaking, I should have stood beside you. Instead I added to the wreckage. I know that now." He draws a breath that shakes. "This is not the place for the apology you're owed, and I won't insult you by trying to cram it into a whisper at an altar. But when you're ready…whenever that is, if it's ever…I'll be waiting. To talk. To listen. To prove I can learn to communicate like a father instead of a fortress, and to let time do what time does to old wounds."

His hand stays open between us.

"May I walk my daughter down her aisle?"

I stare at that open hand.

This cost him everything he has.

I know my father.

I know exactly how much pride a gesture like this burns off a man built entirely out of pride, and for him to stand in a tent full of my people with his palm up and his armor off — it staggers me. My pack did this. I understand it all at once, standing there.

They must have gone to him, must have said their piece and lit whatever fire under him got him into that suit and that pew. They gave me back my father for a day without ever telling me they were going to try, and I don't know whether to throttle them or love them past sense.

It should make me furious.

There it is again — a decision made about my life, in a room I wasn't in, without my say. That's the exact thing I swore I'd never tolerate a second time, the line I drew in permanent ink.

But standing here with my father's trembling hand held out like a white flag, I finally understand the difference. There's the kind of secret that's keptfromyou, to control you.

Then there's the kind that's keptforyou, as a gift, by people who studied your heart until they knew what it wanted before you'd ever say it out loud.

My men dealt only in the second kind.