Page 27 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

"I know."

"For harvest galas?"

"I know, August." He flips pages. "We're fine. I want to say that first, we're not in trouble. The subscriptions carry us, and the wedding season was strong. But fine has a shelf life, and losing Corvane puts a draft under the door for spring, and I'd feel a lot better about the winter with one big anchor booking."

He doesn't look up when he says the next part, which is how I know he's been rehearsing it since the kitchen.

"The confidential inquiry. The equinox one. That's anchor money, cousin. That's three Corvanes in one weekend."

"I answered them on Tuesday. Available, pending the planner's approval of the vendor."

"Pending the planner." Milo does look up now. He's twenty-six, grew up on this farm, and knows exactly one thing about my history, which is the shape of the hole it left. "You put a condition on the biggest contract this farm has ever sniffed."

"Yes."

"Okay." That's Milo's entire. He'll push a number to the wall, but he's never once pushed me, and he makes a note and heads for the greenhouse, and I get four minutes of peace with the buckets before my mother arrives, because my mother can smell an opportunity going unmaximized from her kitchen half a mile away.

Celeste Bellamy comes down the barn lane in linen and intention, silver hair pinned the way it's been pinned since I was born, and she has a tablet with her, which is how I know this is a meeting.

My mother ran this farm's business side for thirty years and ran it brilliantly, and retirement has not so much slowed her down as concentrated her.

"Milo told me about Corvane."

No good morning.

Good mornings are for people without agendas.

"He also tells me the equinox inquiry is real. August, do you understand what this is? A wedding at that level, our flowers in every photograph, and photographs like that circulate for a decade. This is the Hastings account back. This is the city clientele back. This is Bellamy Blooms restored to what it was before—" and she stops herself, but not really. My mother never stops herself by accident; the pause is the sentence.

Before.

Before the scandal.

Before three local boys jilted a Whitlock in front of half the eastern seaboard's society pages and every elite account this farm serviced evaporated inside a season, taking her twenty-year project of climbing with them.

I turn off the spigot so the next part happens in quiet.

"Mom. I'm going to say this once, kindly, and then we're not going to do this language again. There is no restored. There's no leverage, no visibility, no getting back what the scandal cost. If this booking happens, it happens as flowers for a bride, full stop, and the planner running it is not a door back into society. She's a person. Her worst day is not going to be an asset on this farm's balance sheet twice."

"That is not what I?—"

"It's near enough to what you said."

My mother sets down the tablet, and her chin comes up, and there she is, the woman who held this farm together through the worst year of its life with sheer starch.

"You speak to me as if I profited. August, we suffered. All of us. I watched forty years of this family's standing burn down in a summer over a decision I wasn't consulted on. Your father's health, the accounts, the way the Pembertons looked at me at the regatta, you have no idea what I absorbed so this farm could keep its dignity, and if I want one good thing to come out of?—"

"We suffered consequences, Mom."

I keep my voice where I keep it for frightened animals and grieving brides, low, level, no sudden movements.

"Consequences aren't the same as being wronged. What landed on this family, I dropped on it. Me, Beckett, Cade. The Pembertons at the regatta, that was the bill for something we did, and it was correctly addressed. Amber Whitlock got wronged. There's one person in that whole wreckage who did nothing to earn her share, and she's the one who paid the most, and I will not stand in my own barn and let us bill her for our restoration on top of it." I pick the buckets back up because my hands shake when I do this, and the buckets hide it. "The flowers will be the best work of my life if she allows them. That's what this farm gets. It's already more than we're owed."

She looks at me a long moment, my mother, and something moves behind the starch that might be hurt and might be recalculation and is probably, knowing her, both at full strength.

"You never used to contradict me," she says, which is true, and is its own small indictment of the man I was. She takes her tablet up the lane, and I notice I did it in an empty barnyard, at seven in the morning, with no witnesses.

Five years of practice, and I can finally hold a line, as long as nobody's watching me hold it.