Page 29 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

Pippa's in the doorway with the order tablet against her chest, and I didn't hear her come up the stairs, which tells you where I was. Nineteen, sharp as secateurs, three years on this farm, and she knows exactly two things about that book.

That it stays locked, and that the one time she saw it open, the planner from Golden Hour Vows had just declined, through her, for the fifth consecutive year, to attend our open house.

Pippa is the bridge, has been since she was hired. Every order from Bellflower Lane comes to Pippa, every delivery goes out with Pippa, and she has run that ferry for three years without asking why the harbor's mined, because she's kind, and because she's smart enough to have worked out most of it from the town's ambient hum.

"The equinox brief came in," I say. "Golden Hour Vows is planning it."

"I know. It's why I came up."

She stays in the doorway, respectful of the room, but her chin's set, and I brace, because Pippa deferential and Pippa with her chin set are different weather systems.

"Boss. Can I ask you something, and you don't fire me?"

"You know better than that."

I roll my eyes, knowing exactly what’s going to be asked.

"Are you going to use this? The wedding. Ten weeks of meetings and walkthroughs and her having to stand in your fields because a client's making her." The tablet comes down to her side. "Because I've carried five years of orders back and forth, watched her write your company's name in a hundred beautiful thank-you notes and never once your name, and if this booking is going to be the world's most expensive apology ambush, I'd honestly rather we lose the money. She's…I like her, August. She learned my mom's surgery date, and she sends soup. No explanation or expectation. Just helpful gestures in the most vulnerable aspects of one’s lives without yearning for gratitude or thanks in return."

She sends soup.

Five years, I've been collecting these, the small verified sightings of who Amber became, ferried back unknowingly by the girl I hired, partly.

Let's be honest all the way for once, because Golden Hour Vows would never deal with me directly, and someone had to hold the door open. Even my kindnesses have architecture.

That's the thing I know about myself now that I didn't back at twenty-six.

"No apology," I tell her. "Not in a meeting she can't leave. Not folded into business where she'd have to be professional aboutreceiving it. That's not an apology if you ask me. That's a hostage situation with flowers."

I close the book, both hands flat on the cover a second, then lock it away, because Pippa's watching and some doors you shut so other people know they can trust you with theirs.

"Here's what happens instead. I send a proposal today. Pricing transparent to the stem, full local seasonal plan, and the names of two other growers, Fern & Anchor and the Kowalskis, pre-vetted, either one capable, so if she wants Bellamy quality without Bellamy, she has real options one email away. I don't attend planning meetings unless she requests it in writing. If she'd rather I never appear at all, the farm supplies wholesale through you and my name stays off every document. Her call, at every fork, forever."

Pippa takes this in with the frown she uses on stem counts, checking my math.

Then she asks the question, the one I've been not-asking myself since Tuesday, and she asks it gently, which makes it worse.

"Okay. But is that respect, or is it just the deluxe version of what you've been doing for five years?" She shifts the tablet. "Because from where I ferry, boss, hiding behind me, routing everything through paperwork, making sure she never has to see you, giving her all the levers so you never have to walk up and face what's on her face when she looks at you. I can't tell if you're honoring her distance or renting a room inside it. Which is it?"

The design room is quiet.

Down in the yard, Milo's truck door slams, the dogs announce it. Ordinary farm sound going on under the question like ground cover, and I stand there with the key in my hand and no answer, because both things are true and I don't know the mixture.

The last time I couldn't tell the difference between protecting someone and protecting myself, I was standing in a hotel hallway at half past two in the afternoon, five years ago, hearing Beckett say we verify the documents before we do anything. Cade was already gray at the wheel of a car downstairs, and I, the one who said, out loud, I'll grant myself that single crumb, we have to talk to her first, she's right upstairs, this is hers to know.

I said it…Beckett said we couldn't put it on her until we knew what was real, that if Alistair had built the trap, the worst thing we could do was spring it blind, and he believed it.

He's never once lied to protect himself, that's his particular ruin. Cade was coming apart in the driver's seat, keeping the joke going the way a man holds a wall up. There was a staircase forty feet from me. There was a phone in my pocket. There was a window of about eleven minutes in which one man walking upstairs in a tux and saying three sentences to the woman we loved would have changed every life it touched.

I let two frightened men outvote the one thing I knew, which is her, which was always her, and I got in the car, and the specific charge on my sheet isn't that Beckett led us wrong. Beckett gets his own courthouse. Mine reads, in small clear botanical script: he saw, understood, surrendered his conscience to the pack's fear, and called the surrender love from afar.

"I don't know," I tell Pippa, because she asked for the truth and she's earned it. "I genuinely can't tell you which it is. But her having the levers is right even if my reasons are only half clean, so we do it, and I keep asking myself your question until it has a better answer."

"That's fair." She turns to go, then stops in the doorway, softer. "For what it's worth, the proposal thing. The other growers' names in your own bid. That's not hiding. Hiding doesn't offer replacements."

She leaves me to write it, and I write it clean.

Two pages.