Page 213 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

Which leaves me exactly one card. One.

I've turned it over in my head the whole way here, and it's a bad card, a long shot, a Hail Mary from a man with no arm left to throw it — but it's all I've got.

I'm going to go to Amber. To them.

I'm going to stand on that doorstep, and I'm going to plead, uglier and lower than I have ever pleaded for anything, and I'm going to beg them to let me back in.

Not because I deserve it. God knows I don't.

But because I have nowhere else on this earth left to go, and a drowning man doesn't get to be picky about the hand that pulls him up.

I rehearse it on the drive, the way I used to rehearse a pitch for a difficult client. I'll tell them I'm sorry.

I'll tell them I know it isn't enough. I'll tell them I'll take any corner of any room, any scrap of a role — dishwasher, driver, whatever a man with nothing left to offer can still offer. I'll tell them I finally understand what I threw away.

The words line up neat and desperate in my mouth, a whole polished, pathetic speech, and not one of them is ever going to matter, because you cannot apologize your way back through a door that's already been sold out from under you.

I just don't know that yet.

She said I could come by. This morning, in that wrecked tent, cold as clean glass, she told me the door was open at her cottage if I wanted to talk logistics like an adult.

It's the only opening anybody's given me in months, and I'm going to crawl through it on my knees if I have to.

Seabriar sits at the end of its long gravel lane the way it always has, low and shingled and pretty under the stars, the marsh whispering low behind it.

Every light is off.

I slow the truck to a crawl, tires popping over stone, and I frown at the dark shape of it. It's a strange thing to see. Amber is a woman who fills a house with lamplight, low and warm and gold in every window, the kind of glow that makes a place look like it's holding its breath just for you.

Tonight it's a black cutout against a blacker sky.

No warmth. No movement behind the glass.

It's hard to even be sure anyone lives there at all, without that light.

I cut the engine and sit.

She lived here alone.

The thought arrives from a place I don't examine too closely.

She lived in this little dark cottage for years, on her own, out at the lonely end of a gravel road, and she built an entire wedding empire from a laptop at that kitchen table while she grieved the three men who left her holding a bouquet on a church step. She did that by herself. In the quiet. In the dark.

I have the gall to be here tonight, hat in hand, asking her to make room.

I really hurt her.

I've said it to myself before, but it lands different sitting in her cold driveway. It's not an abstraction. It's this house, these unlit windows, the years of solitary strength it must have taken to keep them lit at all — and I'm one of the men who put out that light in the first place.

I guess this is what paying for it feels like.

Not a lecture, not a punishment handed down from on high, just the slow, real-time understanding of the size of the thing you broke, arriving years too late to do anybody any good.

My phone goes off in the cupholder, buzzing and lit, and I nearly jump out of my skin. I snatch it up, some wild useless part of me hoping, but the name on the screen isn't hers.

It's Iris.

I groan out loud and answer anyway, because a man this alone doesn't turn down a ringing phone.