Page 3 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

They would never leave me.

I press that one flat against the panic like a hand over a cut and hold it there.

Then somebody knocks.

That's the detail I'll keep out of the whole day. The knock.

People have been sweeping in and out of this suite since dawn without knocking, because a bride, it turns out, is a public installation, so a knock means someone who isn't sure she's allowed in.

It's Nina, the young attendant with the crooked name tag. Last month, I sat with her for an hour going over linen counts because she was new and drowning. Everyone else kept snapping at her, and it costs nothing to be decent to a person who's drowning. She's white as the tablecloths. Her hands are shaking around a cream envelope.

"Miss Whitlock. This was left with the concierge. It's addressed to you, and nobody was going to— I thought you should have it."

My mother crosses the room fast.

"Give that to me."

"It's addressed to her," Nina says, and then goes pale at her own daring, because she has just contradicted Helena Whitlock in a private suite, and jobs in this building have ended for less.

I get there first.

My name is on the front in Beckett's blunt carpenter print, square, certain letters, built like everything he builds.

Amber.

Not Abercrombie.

Amber, the name I chose for myself at nineteen, the one he always wrote like it was the truest fact he knew about me.

"Thank you, Nina," someone says in my voice, very calm, from somewhere up near the crown molding. "You did the right thing."

Hotel stationery. Three lines. Three signatures.

We cannot do this today. You deserve a life that is freely chosen. We are sorry.

Beckett. August. Cade.

I read it four times, and it gets worse every pass, and here's why.

It doesn't say we don't love you.

I could have built a life on we don't love you.

Clean wounds close eventually.

What it says is you deserve, which means the three of them sat somewhere, my pack, my whole planned future, and held a vote about what my life should be, and the meeting adjourned without anyone thinking to invite the life in question.

They didn't leave me. Leaving would at least be honest.

They gave me away, to myself, like a gift I never asked for, and signed it like a card.

The neutralizer doesn't stand a chance.

My scent comes up through it like water through a paper towel, apricot gone bruised, roses off at the root, and under everything, the vanilla curdling into a thing even I can smell is grief.

"Abercrombie." My mother's hand closes around my wrist. "Breathe. Not one sound. Do you hear me? Not one."

The door opens. No knock this time.