Page 35 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

No I'm glad…

No it will be good…

Not one syllable off the clipboard. I sit looking at its perfect professional blankness and feel the same infuriating thing I felt in my dark office a week ago, seen, by omission, by a man fluent in exactly what not to say.

Five years building walls, and he answers in brick.

I close the laptop, fighting the hum of fury in the depths of my gut.

You can’t be angry. They’ve moved on…just like you. We might as well be strangers. Our past clearly means nothing. It didn’t leave a permanent indent in their hearts as it did in my shattered one.

It’s hard to realize you may still be a fool despite all the dealing you’ve done to not be one.

I gather my bag, binder, and dignity before I thank Felix in the kitchen. Taking the back corridor toward the service exit the way I came, past the linen room and the humming ice machine, I'm reaching for my keys when the service elevator at the corridor's end chimes.

Doors sliding open on their old brass tracks, and my entire life stops being theoretical.

Beckett Shaw is standing in the elevator.

Rolled architectural plans under one arm, site drawings, the conservatory. I'd know the papers anywhere, here, obviously, forthe same logistics meetings, routed through the same discreet back corridors by the careful innkeepers.

Five years of choreography undone by a scheduling overlap, and he is bigger than my memory kept him, grayer at the temples than twenty-nine, and his eyes find me and go still the way the whole man goes as solid as a held structure; a beam mid-load.

The scent hits the corridor a half second later; cedar, black tea, rain on stone, five years, and my knees hear it before my brain files an objection. I’m just barely keeping them from buckling like a submissive fool.

Neither of us speaks.

The doors, indifferent to literature, begin to close.

His hand comes up and stops them.

One scarred carpenter's hand flat against the rubber edge, holding the doors apart without stepping forward, not one inch of him crossing out of that elevator toward me, and he says, in the voice I have not heard in five years, low, even, careful as a man setting down glass:

"Do you want me to get out, or do you want the elevator?"

That's all.

No Amber. No you look, no it's been XYZ, no weaponized softness.

Two options, and the machinery of the building literally waiting on my answer.

I stand in the corridor with my heart going like a wire in the wind, understanding that whatever I do next, I am doing it on my own accord. No influence. No false encouragement. Nobody is controlling the narrative, which is the entire revolution in itself, with this signature moment being handed to me in a service hallway by the man who taught me to stop expecting it.

I step inside.

CHAPTER 7

The First Rule

~AMBER~

An elevator is eight feet by six.

I know because I spent the longest ninety seconds of my adult life measuring this one.

Beckett has put himself in the far corner, back against the brass rail, rolled plans held in front of him like a man carrying his own alibi, and he has left me the entire remaining acreage of the car, which at this range is a gesture you can feel.

The doors close.