Page 60 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

"Renzo—"

"I'm not proposing. I'm just saying it out loud where you can hear it." He clinks his glass against mine. "You buy this place, you stop being a man who visits Honeybell Harbor. You become a man who's from here again. Think about it. Or don't. But look around first, before you tell me no."

He leaves me at the rail.

So I do the stupid thing:I look around.

Theo, onstage, home. Iris pouring for a table of fishermen who'll tip in stories. The colored glass. The low tide coming through the cracked door. A room that doesn't need me and would keep me anyway, a room that's warm and local and permanent, every single thing I've spent a decade telling dinner parties I was too free to want.

"No," I say, to nobody, out loud, testing it.

It comes out weak.

I notice that.

I finish the whiskey and go back to Marina's and work until the windows go gray.

I finish the proposal at 5:40 in the morning, an hour before the light, thirty-eight pages that turn a security problem into a party and never once let the bride see the trench coat.

Every instinct I own says drive it to her.

Show up on Bellflower Lane with two coffees, the document, and my whole face. Watch her read it, be there for the moment it lands, and await her praise — or scolding.

Fuck. When she’s mad, it turns me on, too.

It's the only move I've ever trusted, the in-person closeness. The four seconds that work on everyone alive.

I don't do it.

I open the Golden Hour Vows portal, and I upload thirty-eight pages into a secure inbox, and I do not attach a note, or a joke, or a single word smuggled into a filename.

I respect the clause and the boundary and the woman who drew it.

Allow the work to stand alone in a place she controls.

I close the laptop, and I sit in the gray dark space with my heart going like a snare.

She answers at 6:52.

I know because I haven't put the phone down.

Two lines. No greeting.

Approved for the project. Reporting structure attached. This is not personal.

I read it three times. The approval. The attachment. And the last sentence, set apart, doing the heavy lifting, the little wall she built in case I tried to climb it.

This is not personal.

"I know," I whisper, to the empty room, the phone, to her who’s far too many miles away to seek her out in this ungoldly hour.

Oh right, that’s not allowed. No contact…right.

Then I do the thing I have never done in eleven cities.

There's a red-eye I always pre-book, a reflex, an escape hatch — a return flight for right after the first event, so that when the wanting gets too big I've got a door with my name on it and a boarding time.

My thumb's already on the airline app out of pure muscle memory, the way it's been for a decade, the way freedom taught me.