Page 49 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

"Name the?—"

"Don't do that bet."

"Then eat the pie." She physically puts one in my hand.

Behind her, Marlowe has drifted around the desk in that silent salvage-house way of hers. She stands reading my screens for a slow ten seconds, both monitors, the color-coded arrows, the August Saturdays, and then she reaches out, closes the laptop, picks it up, and carries it across the room to the top of the fabric shelves, where I would need a ladder.

"Hey—"

"You assigned yourself three simultaneous events on the twenty-third," Marlowe says, resuming her spot by the desk, unhurried. "You were mid-keystroke on a fourth. I've impounded the vehicle. You can have it back when you're sober."

"That schedule works."

"That schedule is a man walking into the sea and calling it a swim plan when he literally can’t swim for the life of him."

She pulls up the client chair, sits, folds her hands, and gives me the flat, deep-water look.

"We heard about Tessa. Congratulations and condolences, in the right proportions. Now talk. Out loud, to people, instead of to arrows."

I guess this is what it’s like to have real friends…

So I talk, because the pie is warm, the door is locked, and these two have earned the unencrypted version.

Ten weeks. Four holes. Meridian gone, Fern & Anchor gone, linens on a boat behind a storm, and the map with all roads leading up one particular cliff is surely catching on fire.

I hear my own voice climb as I lay it out, less composed per sentence, until the true thing surfaces with its whole ugly shape.

"If I bring them in, all three, venue, flowers, hospitality, do you understand what that hands them? Ten weeks of legitimacy. Ten weeks of being needed by me, in my world, invoiced and scheduled, and every single day of it says the quiet sentence.” I pause to take a breath and let it out. “She couldn't do this without us. Five years of building a life where that sentence can't be said, and I'd be signing it back into existence in triplicate. Help is power, Marlowe. Whoever gets to be needed holds the room."

Marlowe considers this the way she considers a joint under load.

"No," she says finally. "Unclear terms hold the room. Help with strings holds the room. Help with a contract, scope, rate, term, exit clause, is just labor, and labor doesn't get a vote. You hire plumbers you don't love. You've hired caterers you actively hate; I've watched you smile at Gerald." A pause. "The power you're afraid of doesn't come through the invoice, Amber. It comes through the fog. So we remove the fog."

"She's saying it fancy, I'll say it plain." Juniper's cross-legged on the client sofa now with the galette. "You can reject themen and use the vendors. Same bodies, different doors. Beckett Shaw, the man who wrecked you, doesn't get within a mile of you. B. Shaw, the contractor, fixes a roof for money and gets a one-star review if the railing wobbles. You're allowed to run both files at once, honey, women compartmentalize harder than that before breakfast."

"And when the files leak?" It comes out before I can dress it. "When it's week six, and it's raining, and one of them does something, and the old—" I stop. Attempt to Reroute. Fail to reroute. Ugh…why is this so hard to express?"What happens if the old feelings come back?"

The office goes quiet.

Juniper sets down the galette, which for Juniper is genuflection, and looks at me with those warm brown eyes that have watched me rebuild from the studs up, and says, gently, like handing me something small and true:

"Then you feel them. Feelings aren't contracts, Amber. You can feel a whole hurricane and not sign anything."

Bellflower Lane goes on being golden outside the window, and I sit with a half-eaten hand pie and let the actual confession out, the one under all the schedule math.

"I'm not afraid they'll be cruel." My voice comes out low and even, which is somehow worse than shaking. "Cruel I could use. If they'd come back smug, careless. If Beckett steamrolled or Cade charmed at me, or hell, August did that wounded-gentle thing as a lever, I'd have ten fresh weeks of evidence that can validate this foundation of inner rage. The anger stays load-bearing, and my whole house stands on that anger. Do you understand? It's in the foundation. What I'm afraid of is what's actually happening. He disclosed every flaw in his own venue. He asked permission to say my name. August offered me his competitors. Cade signed away his own contract before anyone asked. They've been—" the word costs me, I pay it, "—wonderful.Careful and honest and wonderful, for almost a week, and if they've genuinely changed, if that's real…then I have to stand in it knowing part of me is still—" I stop at the cliff edge of the sentence.

My friends wait. Neither of them pushes me over, and I step back from it myself, which is its own answer.

"The anger I know how to hold. To carter and low it to steam for who knows how much longer…but…the wanting, I don't. The daring emotion of yearning for the same men who broke me…I don’t want…to deal with any of that…"

Juniper's eyes have gone bright. Marlowe leans forward, elbows on knees, and delivers the load-bearing sentence of the evening in her appraiser's voice, plain as a stamp.

"Wanting something doesn't obligate you to surrender to it. You can stand in a room with a beautiful thing, note that it's beautiful, and not buy it. I do it at every estate sale in my life."

She allows her words to shimmer for a full minute before wrapping it up like an offered gift.

"Observe them, Amber. Ten weeks, professionally supervised, at contract rates. Gather your own evidence about who they've become, with your hand on the exit the whole time. Whatever you learn, you'll have learned it on your terms. In your town, with us four feet away, instead of wondering for another five years and calling the wondering peace despite the burning rage brewing within you."