Page 42 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

He lifts a bound document from the table, thick as a novel, and holds it out, not to Priya, to me.

"Full structural and engineering survey, commissioned in June, every deficiency I just listed plus nine smaller ones, cost estimates, timelines. The only thing this house has ever been going to sell you is the truth about itself."

I take the report.

It's heavy.

Everyone watches me take it, and I put it under my arm like it's routine, like my pulse isn't audible, or the fact I feel lightheaded just being near this man for as long as this meeting has run.

I send the team ahead to walk the south lawn tent option, Priya with the capacity math, Niall with his tape, Juniper towing Marlowe, who goes with one long unreadable look back at the two of us, and then it's just Beckett Shaw and me in a glass room with the sea beyond it.

Alone for the first time in five years, if you don’t count the elevator that surely meant nothing to him. This surely wasn’t the plan either, which is why I keep my clipboard between us like a fence.

Fate loves to put me in odd situations, doesn’t she? At this rate, I should get a tarot reading and ask the cards why theylove to see me tortured when I’m surely the victim in this grand predicament of things?

"You knew," I say. "Before the estate answered a single email. You knew I was the planner."

"Yes."

"Is that what this is?" I keep it flat, professional, terms-and-conditions. "The wedding. The consent theater, the reports, the her-call-every-step. Is this an opportunity, Beckett? Ten weeks of manufactured proximity, because the direct approach was never going to get past my front desk?"

"No." There’s no heat to it. No wound performed at the suggestion, which lands stranger than denial.

He sets the rolled plans down on the table, and stands there with his hands empty, a big man being deliberately, visibly harmless, and answers like a man who prepared for the deposition.

"The couple chose the house before anyone knew the planner. Frankly, they chose the planner…you…before I knew anything at all. I've had one decision in this, whether the estate answers, and I answered because it's your project and the house can serve it, and because I owe you the truth about every part of this property."

A breath.

"Nothing more is owed to me. I know that."

It's a good answer.

It's a suspiciously complete answer, subordinate clauses all standing at attention, and I've spent five years across tables from people who rehearse, so I say it before I can decide not to.

"Did you rehearse that?"

Something crosses his face, the first unmanaged thing all morning, gone fast.

"I've rehearsed hundreds of things," Beckett says. "Five years of them. Most I've got no right to say, so I keep the ones aboutdrainage." He looks at me then, all the way, gray eyes level, and for one held second the glass room is very small. "That one I've had ready since June."

The sea folds itself against the rocks below us, patient.

My hands are cold on the clipboard, my heart is going like a hummingbird in a jar, and I stand in the ruins-adjacent conservatory of my own almost-life and do the thing I actually came here to do, the real agenda item, the one that was never on Priya's tabs.

I despise how calm he is. How this probably is an every other day conversation for him versus me, where I’m projecting clarity at the brink of a professional crash-out, while on the inside, I’m malfunctioning in all areas of emotional self-sabotage.

None of this is fucking fair.

"Then here's the first rule, and it's not negotiable. It goes for all three of you, and I'll say it once."

I keep my voice in the register I use for contracts, because that's what this is.

"You do not get to use this wedding to ask me for forgiveness."

"Agreed," he says.

Immediately. No flinch.