Page 7 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

PRESENT DAY…

The trick to a perfect wedding is simple.

Never let anyone see the machinery.

I've built five years and a business on that one rule, which is why nobody at Moonwake Beach knows we're currently losing to the weather.

The wind showed up twenty minutes ahead of schedule, a fat gust off the water that shoved through the ceremony site like a guest who skipped the receiving line, and forty feet of ivory chiffon, hand-draped between cedar posts at six this morning while the gulls heckled me, just tore loose at the north corner with a sound like a held breath finally let go.

Naturally, today was going too well, and I'd said so out loud like an amateur.

"Amber!" Niall comes pounding across the sand, headset crooked, twenty-three years old, sweating through his second wedding season with me. "We have a…okay, we have several?—"

"Rank them."

Something is always going to shambles at a wedding.

"Fabric's ripping, cake van's got a flat on Orchard Road, the Hallorans are fighting about the seating chart again, the tide chart lied to us, aaand" — he takes on air like a swimmer — "Georgie dropped the ring box in the dunes."

Down the beach, six-year-old Georgie Pell stands beside a mound of sea grass with the particular stillness of a child who knows he has done something historic.

I file him under third.

"Rank them again. By what kills us first."

"...Tide?"

"Tide." I'm already moving, clipboard on my hip, heels dangling off two fingers, because sand won its war against my shoes hours ago and I've made my peace with the surrender. "Water reaches the front row in forty minutes, not ninety. We shift the whole ceremony eight feet up-beach, row by row, while everyone's at the welcome table. Radio the caterers to open the lemonade early. Thirsty people look at drinks, not chairs."

"How do you know things like that?"

"Five years of watching what people look at." Mostly what they don't. Nobody at a wedding is watching the planner, which is the entire point of me.

I press my earpiece.

"Juniper. Talk to me about the cake."

"Okay, so, funny story." My best friend's voice comes through bright and fast, a wind chime in a hurricane. Juniper processes stress out loud, at volume, usually while doing four other things. "Van's flat, Dev's on the tire, but the buttercream did not enjoy sitting in a hot van on the shoulder of Orchard Road, so the top tier now has what I'd call a lean. A tilt. A jaunty attitude."

"How jaunty?"

"Pisa."

I close my eyes for one second, which is the ration I allow myself per disaster.

"Can Butterbell rebuild?"

"Already on it. Odette's stripping the bad tier, I'm loading a simpler display as we speak. Less architecture, more flowers, very coastal-romantic. Honestly, cuter than the original, don't tell the bride I said that. Be there by five."

"You're a miracle in an apron."

"Put it on my tombstone. Driving now, bye."

The wind slaps the torn chiffon against its post again, harder, an omen with excellent projection, so I go find the one person on this beach who gets calmer as everything else falls apart.

Marlowe is already under the arch with her arms crossed, studying the straining fabric the way a surgeon studies an X-ray she doesn't like.

She restores salvage for a living, old doors, church pews, barn beams with lightning scars, which means she distrusts anything decorative on principle and has never once been wrong about it in my presence. Gray linen, dark hair pinned up with what I'm fairly sure is an actual carpentry pencil, expression set to quietly appalled.