Page 67 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

Her eyes hold mine. The bee shifts.

I watch her weigh it — the rule she wrote, the neck she's protecting, the man asking permission to do the thing he'd once have done without a thought.

"Yes," she says. "Quickly."

I lift the bee on the edge of two fingers the way my grandmother taught me. A gentleness that predates all my sins. In doing it, the backs of my knuckles barely graze the fabric at her collarbone, not skin, only the warm cotton over it. It’s the closest I've been to her in five years, and it goes through me like a struck bell.

Her scent brightens.

Even through the neutralizer, even pressed down and careful, the apricot lifts half a shade, a single involuntary note of it reaching up to answer my iris and sage before either of us can stop the chemistry, the two aromas finding each other in the gold air the way scent specialists used to remark on at parties, back when we were a thing people remarked on.

I set the bee on a rosemary flower.

Then I step back.

Two full steps, hands visible, putting the distance back exactly where she strung it, because the moment is a door and I am not going to be the man who walks through a door she didn't open.

"Thank you," she says, and her voice isn't quite level, which she hates. I can tell she hates it.

"It liked you." I keep mine gentle, easy, giving her the exit. "Can't fault its taste."

She almost smiles.

Third time today.

She doesn't let it land. Neither do I chase for a reaction.

Not-chasing is the entire apology I'm allowed to make.

By the time Marlowe emerges from the carriage house with her measurements, the light's going long, and we walk back down toward the trucks together. It's there, one hand already on the door, that Amber gives me the verdict.

"Bellamy Blooms is approved," she says, clipboard against her chest, the professional back over her like a tide filling in.

Marlowe's already loaded three measurements and a verdict about the tables into her phone and is pretending, badly, not to watch us.

"Full floral. The bold version, exactly as I described it. Priya sends the contract tomorrow." She opens the door, then stops, one hand on the frame, and delivers the last thing not in vendor voice at all, quiet, for an audience of one. "One condition, off the record. Not in the contract. Just from me to you."

"Name it."

"Don't ever recreate my old bouquet. Not for me. Not for Sloane. Not for some anniversary client in ten years who wants apricot and jasmine and doesn't know what she's ordering."Her eyes are steady. "Don't build that arrangement again for anyone."

"I wouldn't."

It comes out of me instantly and absolutely. She hears the weight in it and tilts her head the way she does when she's decided to push one inch further.

"Why?"

The truest sentence I have. Give it to her clean.

"Because it belonged to a promise I didn't keep." I hold her eyes. "It's not a design anymore. It's a broken vow with petals on it. I could grow every stem again tomorrow, and it would still be the thing I made the morning I got in the car. Some arrangements you don't get to make twice. That one's yours, and it's over. I'd sooner close the greenhouse than build it for a stranger."

She looks at me for a long, long moment.

Then she gets in the truck without answering, which I've learned is its own answer in itself.

Marlowe gives me one last unreadable appraisal over the roof before she climbs in, and they go down the lane through the cosmos and the gold, and I stand in the yard and let this feeling of emptiness weigh down on me.

There's a farm to close down, so I get to work.