Page 4 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

My father fills the frame in his charcoal tux, and I watch him take in the room, the letter, his only daughter shaking in forty pounds of crinoline, and the first words out of Alistair Whitlock's mouth, the very first, are:

"Who else has seen it?"

"Just the girl," my mother says.

"Which girl?"

"The attendant. Nina, something."

"Name to Davis. NDA before she leaves the property tonight." He shuts the door behind him, and only then does his gaze get around to me, running the numbers the way he runs them on a distressed asset. "How bad is she?"

"She is standing right here."

"Then she can hear me say this is containable." He straightens a cufflink. "We announce a medical emergency. One of the grooms collapsed. The carpenter. He's the least connected. Ceremony postponed, guests enjoy the dinner with our compliments, and by Monday we control the story."

"The story."

"Yes, Abercrombie, the story. Three hundred witnesses downstairs, half of them press or married to it. The Hastings came. The designation board chair came. Two senators. Every minute we spend in this room, somebody down there is inventing a version of tonight, and I promise you theirs is worse."

"Worse than the truth?" My voice cracks straight down the middle, and I let it. "Beckett, August, and Cade left me at the altar, Dad. That's not a story. That's my life, and you've been in this room ninety seconds, and you haven't asked me one question. Are you all right? Not what do you need?"

"What you need," my father says, patient, a man explaining an invoice line to a difficult client, "is for this family's name to survive the weekend. Everything you have, the dress, this hotel, the life you're grieving so loudly, exists because the Whitlock name means something. We can repair this."

"Repair what? My life, or the reputation?"

He looks at me for a long moment.

He doesn't answer.

Twenty-four years, compressed into one silence.

They wanted a son.

They got me, and named me after the grandfather the son was supposed to honor, and spent two decades sanding at the result.

Almost what everyone ordered. Never quite right.

I used to think that if I stood still enough, planned hard enough, smiled correctly enough, the almost would close.

Tonight, the almost is a ballroom with three hundred chairs in it and no grooms.

"Helena," he says, already turning, "she stays up here until the ballroom clears. I don't want her seen."

He opens the door to go, and the hallway pours in.

That's the flaw in my father's hotels; he's never once noticed, for all of them, and he owns eleven. Sound moves through service stairwells like water finding a drain, and for the four seconds the door stands open, I get the mezzanine below at full clarity, guests clotted up in little groups with their champagne, deciding things.

Changed their minds, obviously.

Alphas get cold feet about bonding…it's biological.

She must have done something. Packs don't just walk. There's always a reason.

What did anyone expect, three boys from some fishing village playing dress-up in this family?

Poor Abercrombie. First the name, now this.

And then, lower, with a laugh folded into it, a voice I half know from Christmas parties:or maybe the grooms got a good look at what they were marrying into, and ran.