Page 26 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

That's the whole problem, and it bothers me: no fee for the extra weight, and I'm in the jet-bridge line with four hundred strangers when the phone buzzes against my chest.

Paloma Crane's office, three lines, no greeting, the syntax of expensive certainty.

Planner consultation confirmed.

Honeybell Harbor. Forty-eight hours.

The line shuffles forward.

I put the phone away and hand the agent my boarding pass with the smile that works on everyone, and she smiles back, four great seconds, and then I'm walking down the tunnel toward the one town on earth where everybody already knows what's under it.

Home, then.

Where the drawbridge is up, where my mother is airing out my old room, where a woman with apricot in her scent holds a pen over my whole future, and where charm, the only currency I've ever carried, has never once been legal tender.

CHAPTER 5

Flowers That Remember

~AUGUST~

Flowers tell you everything a full day before they say it out loud.

You just have to be the kind of person who listens at the right volume.

Five-forty in the morning, the fields still holding their night cool, and I'm moving down the dahlia rows with the snips and the buckets while the light comes up soft off the water, that first pale gold that photographers chase and never quite catch, because it doesn't photograph, it has to be stood in.

The farm is mid-conversation with itself this time of year.

High summer's still talking, peach roses, cosmos, the last trailing sweet peas gone leggy and generous, but early autumn has started answering from the far rows, rust dahlias, burgundy foliage, the first marigolds burning low to the ground like coals someone banked in June. Two seasons in one field, one arriving as the other packs.

Every year I think there's a lesson in it, and every year I decline to learn it before coffee.

Third row in, I stop at a Café au Lait that looks perfect and isn't. Nothing visible. Leaves up, head full, a flower any market in the county would take, but the stem's gone dull at the collar. Half a shade, no more, and the leaves have that faint held-breath stiffness that comes two days before the wilt shows.

Stressed at the root.

Watering won't fix it, cutting would waste it.

I flag the stake with orange tape for Milo and move on, and I clock, the way I always clock it, that this is the entire inventory of my gifts. I can read distress in a dahlia forty-eight hours out. Subclinical. Pre-symptomatic.

I have an early-warning system for living things that cannot speak, and five years ago I stood in a hotel hallway beside a woman whose whole scent had gone sharp with fear for a week, who I read like weather, whose distress I diagnosed accurately and in detail, and I got in a car anyway.

So no.

Attentiveness was never my missing part. People forgive me by calling me oblivious, gentle August, head in the petals, and I allow the gossip to reign, even if it's a lie.

Being observant is my biggest superpower.

Seeing was supposed to be the same as loving, and it turns out you can do the first with your whole chest and still fail the second in one afternoon.

The cutting takes till seven.

I choose the way my grandmother taught me, which stems will forgive the truck, which wants two more days of field, which should never be cut at all because some flowers are better as a place than a product, and I'm rinsing buckets at the barn spigot when Milo comes across the yard with the clipboard and the particular walk he walks when numbers have misbehaved.

"Corvane canceled." My cousin says it the way you'd report a death in the neighborhood; quiet, hat literally in hand. "Thewhole autumn contract. Sixty arrangements a week through November, gone. Their events division got restructured. All for somebody's nephew friend with a warehouse of silk flowers."

"Silk?" I let the word sit there where we can both look at it.