Page 40 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

I bite my bottom lip, reminding myself that this is my new reality.

Outside, the world waits…and the reality is, this man doesn’t love you like he did five years ago…

Five years of celibate nights and careful distance in trying to be with anyone else…as if no one else seemed worthy of bringing me pleasure…all for what?

All because I yearn for only their touch and no one else?

I mentally have to shake my head out of this, thankful that this ride is over, and I can tuck the past back in that hidden box of myself.

I need to move on…the past…these men… their lives are simply not in the cards for me.

When the doors open on the lobby level, he waits, unmoving, until I'm out and clear before he follows.

We go to our separate trucks like two people who did not just survive something in a brass box, only I’m the only one who’s surely clinging to the past.

Thursday, ten a.m., I arrive at the Lantern House gates with an army, which is the entire point of the army.

Priya, flown back for forty-eight hours, contract tabs ready. Marlowe, for structure and décor, and because her face is the best lie detector on the coast.

Juniper, officially for catering-and-cake logistics, unofficially riding shotgun as morale and menace. Niall, clipboard, three colors of tape.

If Beckett Shaw imagined a reunion, some quiet corridor moment, two people alone with a view, he can enjoy watching me deploy four professionals across his lawn like a landing party.

The version of this where it's private doesn't exist.

I built the guest list to make sure.

The gates open on time. The drive curls up through old hydrangeas gone blue as gas flames, and then the house comes out of the trees, and I make myself look at it straight on, because I've been practicing in my head all week.

Weathered gray shingles, the wide porch, the lantern over the door burning even at midmorning, gold against the sea haze, and it's beautiful, it was always beautiful, that was never the problem, and my body runs its little rebellion, throat tight,palms cold, and my neutralizer holds the border, and I get out of the van with my clipboard and my people, and the machinery takes over.

Thank God for the machinery.

You can walk through nearly anything, I've found, if you walk through it taking notes.

Beckett meets us on the gravel with Lena Flores, introductions handled in under a minute, professional as a permit office, and then he gives us the house.

He gives it the way I'd forgotten he gives things, thoroughly, honestly, wear and all.

The ballroom first, restored down to its bones, herringbone floor refinished by hand, the original plaster medallions cast and repaired, and Juniper actually whistles, and Marlowe drifts off from the group to lay her palm flat against the wainscoting like a doctor taking a pulse, and pronounces it, high praise, "not ruined."

The conservatory next, that long glass spine off the east wing, and here he stops us at the door and points up before anyone steps in.

"Temporary bracing," he says, and there it is, honest steel scaffolding holding the ridge where the old glazing bars have gone soft. "It's safe to walk. It is not safe to hang a hundred pounds of florals from it, and it won't host two hundred people until the steel's replaced. I'll get to the full list at the end. I want you to see problems in daylight, not find them in a contract."

Priya makes a note.

I make a different one, private, which is that I came braced for a sales pitch and I'm getting a confession, room by room.

The cliff gardens take twenty minutes because Juniper keeps stopping to gasp at things, and in fairness, the gasping is warranted.

Old roses gone half wild along the stone walls, the long lawn running out to the cliff edge where the sea lays itself out like a delivered promise, borders that somebody, and I know exactly which somebody, has kept in the loose romantic style the house had in its photographs from 1910, nothing municipal, nothing clipped into fear.

Sloane's golden-hour ceremony will happen on this lawn or nowhere else.

The light out here at six p.m. will need no equipment at all. I write light: free in my notes and underline it, planner shorthand for the thing money can't buy being included.

Then the library with its ladder rails and its smell of a hundred years of paper.