Page 30 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

Transparent pricing, a seasonal plan that follows the real fields week by week into the equinox, Fern & Anchor and Kowalski Flower Farm with contacts attached, the meeting clause, the wholesale-anonymous clause, and the last line, which I rewrite nine times until it carries no weight it hasn't earned:No materials, varieties, or design elements from any prior Golden Hour Vows or client history will be referenced or reused without written direction.

She'll know what it means.

Nobody else reading the file ever would. That's as close to speaking as I have any right to get. No apology goes in. I want to put one in the way I want water in August, and that's exactly why it stays out, because an apology folded into a contract is a bill that demands a receipt.

Forgiven or declined, in a document she has professional reasons to sign, and I have manipulated exactly one decision of hers in my life, by absence, and I'm not going to balance the books by manipulating one by presence.

Send.

Seven minutes past noon.

Her answer comes at 4:51, while I'm in the greenhouse misting the jasmine, through the general inbox, not Pippa, which means she typed my company's address herself, and it's three sentences long, and I stand among the flowers and read it until I could prune it from memory.

I will inspect the farm before deciding. Thursday at six. Keep the meeting professional.

Fourteen words.

Five years of architecture, both of ours, hers built for distance, mine built for hiding, and she just walked through all of it in fourteen words, because that's who she became while we weren't allowed to watch.

She's coming here…

Thursday.

To stand in my fields with a clipboard and decide, on her own terms, in her own person, with the meeting rules set in advance like a boundary fence she strung herself, and the relief and the terror arrive so exactly together that my scent blooms out over the misting bench and the jasmine can just cope.

I type Understood. I delete a second sentence four different times;thank you, I'm glad, you won't regret, each one a hand reaching where no hand was invited.I send the one word, put the phone in my pocket, and stand there while the greenhouse drips.

Then I look down the glass length of the house: through the open end, out to the west field, where forty yards of apricot garden roses are coming into their second flush.

The display beds, the ones we walk every client past on the way from the parking area because they photograph like a sunrise and sell like one too, the exact cultivar, the exact color, her color, six of them pressed in a locked book upstairs.

Four hundred of them standing between the gate and my barn, where she will have to walk past every single head on Thursday at six, and there is no version of that walk in which she doesn't wonder, even for a second, whether I grew them for her.

Whether the whole field is a message.

Whether August Bellamy has spent five years farming a shrine, and the honest answer is I don't fully know, and she should never have to stand in a field doing that math, wondering whether she belonged only in the past or deserved to be in our futures.

If we hadn’t been cowards, the answer would have bloomed and created something magnificent that this town would be forced to acknowledge and admire.

Instead, we let our love wilt and die…

All for the sake of protection?

Sometimes I can’t help but laugh at the reality.

We truly are a bunch of cowards…

I get the snips and the big buckets, all of them, and I go down to the west beds in the last of the light, and I start cutting.

Every apricot rose in the display rows.

Four hundred stems at peak, thousands of dollars of flowers, into water, bound for the hospital, the church, Mrs. Okafor, the Driftglass bar top. Anywhere, everywhere, gone by Wednesday, and Milo comes out at some point and stands at the end of the row watching his profit margin fill bucket after bucket.

To his eternal credit as a Bellamy, he asks no questions.

He just picks up a pair of snips and starts on the next bed over, and we cut her color out of the farm together in the dark.

CHAPTER 6