Page 31 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

The Wedding Of The Year

~AMBER~

You can tell how famous a client is by which door you're asked to use.

Front door, they're rich.

Side door, they're known.

This morning the Salt & Honey Inn sent me a hand-drawn map of the kitchen entrance with a time window and the sentence Felix will meet you by the herb boxes, which means the people upstairs are a different category altogether, the kind you measure in doors.

Felix Arden is waiting among the rosemary at ten sharp, silver-haired, aproned, co-owner of the inn since before I moved here, holding the screen door like this is all perfectly ordinary.

"Miss Whitlock. Priya. Lovely morning for espionage."

He walks us in through his own kitchen, past bread coming out of ovens and a stockpot going low and sweet, narrating like a docent.

"We've closed the east wing, told the town it's a plumbing issue. Nora's handling the lobby." His mouth twitches. "Threeof this morning's check-ins are entertainment press pretending to be leaf-peepers. It's July. Nora identified all three by their shoes before they'd signed the register, and she's currently recommending them a scenic drive that terminates two counties away."

"Remind me never to check in here under a false name," Priya murmurs.

"Oh, you couldn't," Felix says, with real warmth. "Nora's father reads the cliffs for the Lantern House. She reads people. It's a Pike thing."

Priya flew in on the red-eye for this, pressed and calm in city black with the good pen already out, and I'm in peach linen with my hair pinned up off my neck.

Under the linen, at my throat and both wrists, I'm wearing more neutralizer than I've worn since a certain hotel suite five years ago, because in the next hour somebody at that table is going to say the words Lantern House out loud, several times, conversationally, and I do not trust my own skin not to answer.

My body has opinions about that name…and frankly, it doesn’t get a seat at this meeting to screw things up over past trauma.

The east parlor has been arranged for exactly five people, sea light through old glass, coffee, a plate of Butterbell pastries someone ordered with excellent taste, and Paloma Crane rises to meet us, and she is precisely her emails, silver bob, architectural suit, a handshake calibrated to the newton.

"Ms. Whitlock. Thank you for the discretion of your arrival." Behind her, a couple gets up from the window seat, and I get my first lesson of the day, which is that everything I braced for was wrong.

I braced for wattage.

I've planned for famous people before, the minor kind, and they arrive switched on, trailing assistants, performing even their humility.

Sloane Carroway stands up like somebody's tired niece. She's smaller than screens make her, barefoot in rolled linen trousers and an enormous gray cardigan clearly belonging to the man behind her, dark hair in an unfamous braid, and she is beautiful the way the whole world knows and exhausted in a way I suspect very few people are allowed to see, a woman worn thin not by work but by watching, by being watched, the particular erosion of ten thousand lenses.

She smells faintly of nothing.

Scent blockers, the heavy professional kind, standard-issue armor for people whose bodies get reported on, and the blank of it lands on me strange and familiar at once, because I'm wearing the same armor for different reasons, and for one second we're just two women in one room, both chemically declining to be perceived.

"You're the beach wedding," Sloane says, instead of hello. "The one with no canopy. Nolan showed me the pictures a friend took, and I made him scroll back up four times." Her voice is quiet, a little rough, famous from the radio and smaller in person. "Everyone in it looks like a person. Nobody's posing. There's a little boy holding up a ring and screaming, and the bride is laughing so hard she's gorgeous-ugly. Not actually “ugly”. But you know the genuine raw beauty that everyone else who encourages fake beauty standards and ten layers of makeup would deem as real-ugly. I thought to myself, whoever built a day where a bride is allowed to make that face is the one."

She stops herself, glances at the man beside her.

"Sorry. I rehearsed a normal greeting in the car and clearly failed."

"It was a great face," the man agrees with the conversation, with the smallest but prominent smirk.

Nolan Reeve in person is a surprise of a different kind; hood down, unfamous glasses, handing me a coffee before Felix can, and then he does the thing I'll be turning over for days.

He sits back down slightly behind Sloane's chair, angled toward her, and goes quiet.

Not absent.

Attending.