Page 215 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

My stomach does a slow, cold turn.

"What about them?"

"August. The flower guy." Papers rustle on her end, like she's reading off something. "His shop, Bellamy Blooms, the pretty one on Main, got bought out. Today. Some big corporate money guy swooped in and put down top dollar, like an absolutely obscene number. Word is he caught some wedding infomercial that ran this afternoon and just had to have it. They're gonna gut the place, upgrade it, bring in a whole new CEO." She whistles low. "Nobody has the first clue what August's gonna do next, but a payout like that? That's set-your-grandkids'-grandkids-up money. That's never-work-again money."

I sit there with my mouth open.

August loves that shop. That shop is August, every inch of it, the soil under his nails and the light through the front glass. He'd sooner sell a kidney.

Unless he was already leaving.

The math starts assembling itself in my head, cold and clean, the way a bad diagnosis does. A business sold. Another business sold. A ranch handed off to a hand who'll keep it warm. A cottage — I glance up at the black windows again, and my stomach lurches. You don't liquidate a whole life in a single afternoon by accident.

You don't stumble into a clean, total exit like this one. Somebody planned it. Somebody very good at planning laid out every piece of it down to the hour, and I have a sick, certain feeling I know exactly which slow-talking wedding planner in a white suit that somebody turned out to be.

"What about Beckett?" I hear myself ask, and my voice has gone thin.

"Same deal, basically." Iris pops her gum. "Not sure if it's the exact same money guy or if there's a whole pack of rich vultures circling to buy up Honeybell Harbor one cute little business ata time, but Beckett took a buyout too. And get this, I heard he sold his ranch. The whole spread. Sold it clean to one of the old veteran hands who've worked it for him for years, told the guy he wouldn't be around to keep it running for the foreseeable, so it was his now." A pause. "Which, like. Who does that? Who sells a family ranch on a Tuesday?"

My heart skips, and then it drops, because I already know the answer to that.

A man does that when he's not planning on being anywhere near it.

I open the truck door.

I don't fully decide to.

My body just does it, moving on the same dumb animal instinct that carried me down that aisle this afternoon, and I step out onto the gravel and start walking toward the dark cottage with the phone pressed hard to my ear.

"Iris." My voice has changed and she hears it. "What are you saying? The way you're laying all this out — it makes it sound like they're about to vanish."

"I mean." For the first time, she hesitates, and the gossip drains a little out of her tone. "Okay, look, that's actually kind of why I called you specifically. People are starting to say it out loud. That Amber's leaving. Moving away from Honeybell Harbor for good, taking her whole pack with her. But I told them there's no way, because I haven't seen a single moving truck, not one, and this town can't sneeze without four people knowing. So I figured I'd go straight to the source." A breath. "But then you're telling me you're not even legally in the pack anymore, so... I mean, Cade. If that's true. They wouldn't exactly be obligated to tell you they were going, would they?"

I reach the porch.

My boots are loud on the wooden steps in the enormous quiet, the marsh hushing behind the house, the stars cold overhead. I put my hand on the door.

I try the knob. Locked. Solid. It doesn't give a millimeter.

When I turn my head, I finally see it — staked into the flower bed she used to keep so carefully, right there beside the porch, catching a thin blade of starlight.

A sign.

SOLD.

For a long moment I just look at it.

The paint's fresh. The little metal stake is driven in clean and straight, professional, recent — this sign went up today, maybe this very afternoon, maybe in the exact hour I stood in a tent watching her marry three other men and thought, God help me, that I still had a door left to knock on.

The flower bed around it has already begun to go leggy without her hands in it. Nobody's watered these in days.

My jaw comes loose on its hinges. I stare at those four white letters until they stop making sense and then start making a terrible new kind of sense, and the whole thing clicks into place all at once, cold and total.

She doesn't live here anymore.

She sold it. She's gone.

Where did she go — where did all of them go —