Page 63 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

"Follow me," I say. "I'll let the field make the argument."

We walk the beds, and I give her the plan the way you'd hand someone a map of their own house — no flourish, no selling, room by room.

"Sloane wants the season to move through the day. So the flowers move with it." I stop at the peach roses, brush two fingers along a petal without picking it. "Ceremony's at golden hour, so I keep it soft and honest. Peach garden roses. Cream cosmos. Blush dahlias are just opening. White sweet peas for scent, because you'll smell them before you see the aisle. Herbs low in the arrangements — rosemary, flowering thyme — so when a guest leans in to hug the bride, they get the actual farm, not a perfume counter."

"Sweet peas won't hold." She says it fast, pouncing. "Not through a full ceremony in September heat. They'll be tissue paper by the recessional."

"They will if they're cut at four a.m. and conditioned in cold water for six hours, which they will be, because I'll cut them myself the morning of and I don't sleep before a wedding anyway." I meet her eyes, level. "Try again."

Her mouth twitches, annoyed to be caught reaching. "Cocktail hour."

"The light's dropping, so the color deepens with it. Apricot, coral, dusty rose, copper foliage. Warmer. A little more grown-up. This is the hour people stop performing for the ceremony and start actually drinking, so the flowers loosen up too. Less arranged. More like the garden wandered inside."

"Reception."

"Full autumn now. Burgundy dahlias, plum scabiosa, marigolds burning low the way they do in October. Orchard branches down the center of the long tables. Pear, apple, whatever's setting fruit. So there's weight and shadow andcandlelight caught in real branches instead of rented arches." I watch her writing, fast, the pen going. "And the last dance, when it's only the people who stayed. Deeper greenery. Berries. Small lanterns down low. I want the flowers to feel like they've been to the whole wedding and are tired in a good way. Like they danced too."

She stops writing.

Just for a second.

Then she resumes, harder, like she's angry at the pause.

"It's good," she admits, and it clearly costs her. "It's very good, and I've been trying to find the hole in it for ten minutes, but you keep filling them before I finish digging."

"You're allowed to keep digging."

"I intend to." She turns a page. "Tell me what goes wrong. Every florist tells me the dream. I hire the one who tells me the failure."

And there is the woman who rebuilt a company out of a ruin.

Five years ago, she'd have thanked me for the pretty version. Now she wants the fault lines, because she learned the hard way that the fault lines are where the day breaks.

So I give her the failures, plainly.

The dahlias that won't ship and have to be cut day-of or not at all. The scabiosa that browns if a busboy so much as breathes near it warm. The one week in September when a hard rain could flatten the marigold bed and force a substitution, and exactly what I'd substitute, already chosen, a contingency for a wedding I don't yet have.

She writes all of it, and when I finish, she's looking at me with something that isn't warmth but is, at least, attention.

"You planned for a wedding you might not get."

"I plan for weddings I'll never get. It's a compulsion. The planning's free."

That almost gets a real one out of her.

The corner of her mouth. She kills it before it lands, and I let her.

I file the near-miss in the drawer with the rest.

The walk-through winds down as the light goes fully gold, and Marlowe surfaces long enough to declare the tables "structurally honest, which is the nicest thing I've said about anything a Bellamy owns," and then vanishes back into the carriage house with a tape measure and a look that means she'll be a while.

Which leaves us alone in the west field.

Amber goes quiet in a way that changes the air.

She's stopped at the display beds. The ones every client gets walked past on purpose, the beds that used to hold four hundred apricot garden roses at peak, her exact color, the one I trialed two seasons to match the warm side of her scent.

They're empty now. Cut to the ground.