Page 48 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

Priya.

Then Priya again.

Then a text from Priya that just says answer, which from Priya constitutes a fire alarm.

I take it in the clinic parking lot, leaning on the truck in the July sun.

"Three things," Priya says, no greeting, her triage voice on. "None of them are good, all of them are survivable. Do not schedule-spiral until I finish. One. The security vendor is out. Meridian Shield, the one Paloma's office pre-vetted. Somebody senior over there discussed the, quote, possible celebrity booking in Honeybell, with a subcontractor on an unsecured call. The subcontractor mentioned it at a dinner; it got back to Paloma within eighteen hours because everything gets back to Paloma, and she terminated them this morning with prejudice. Which, silver lining, tells you the confidentiality apparatus works. Less silver, we now have no security vendor and a proof-of-concept that leaks are real."

"Two?"

"Two, I called Fern & Anchor to warm them up as the floral alternative, per your instructions, and they just accepted a two-hundred-guest destination event in Bar Harbor, same weekend, signed yesterday. They were apologetic. They were also, and I quote, thrilled, so that door's closed. The Kowalskis can do farm tables and bulk greens, they cannot do two hundred arrangements with a color transition, they said so themselves, with what I'd call relief."

"Three."

"Three, the storm that's been sitting off the Carolinas ate the linen shipment. The imported ones, the Belgian mill order, delayed three to five weeks at the port, which puts custom dyeing behind the wall. Solvable, we go domestic, or we adjust the palette sourcing, but it needs a decision this week and a coordinator to run it, and Amber."

Priya pauses, and I hear her take her headset off, the tell, the true-thing tell, tinny and distant for a second before her voice comes back close.

"I did the board this morning. Ten weeks out, here's the honest inventory. No security-hospitality specialist. No florist at scale. A venue that's approved, conditional on six weeks of construction. No senior coordinator, because Tessa's gone, and don't tell me about Niall. Niall is wonderful, and has been full-time for eight months. That's four load-bearing holes, and I can fill exactly one of them from the city, the linens. The other three."

She stops. She doesn't say it.

She's kind enough, or smart enough, to let the map speak, because we both know what it’s projecting.

The best structural venue man on the coast. The best florist in three counties, with two hundred arrangements' worth of field already in the ground. The one celebrity-hospitality specialist in America the Groom personally trusts.

All local.

All willing.

All contractually muzzled, awaiting my word.

The universe is not subtle.

Clearly, the universe has been reading my mail.

"Send me the board," I say. "I'll have decisions by tomorrow."

"Amber—"

"By tomorrow, Priya. I have to visit a crib first."

I do not visit a crib.

I drive to the office, put my phone in the drawer, spread eleven weddings plus one celebrity equinox across two monitors and the fabric wall, and start doing the thing I do, which is solve it, alone, with arrows.

If I take the Hendricks anniversary myself, move Niall to the Delacroix tasting, run the Lantern House walkthroughspersonally on Tuesdays and Thursdays, cover Tessa's vendor calls between six and eight a.m., the whole apparatus holds.

It holds on paper…

Holds the way I’m barely holding on, which is to say, publicly, survivable.

I'm assigning myself the third overlapping Saturday in August when the bell over my office door rings and my two best friends walk in carrying a bakery box and the unmistakable air of an intervention.

"We brought dinner," Juniper announces, setting the box on my desk directly on top of the master timeline, which is a statement. "Savory. Ham and gruyère hand pies, tomato galette, and before you even start, I know you, cake is not a meal, Amber, cake is snack, but I know you don't think so, so, hand pies."

"I ate."