Page 70 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

Then I take out the tape, and I mark them. Not all of them. Not four hundred. Just enough — a dozen stems, maybe two — to sit in the cocktail-hour arrangements among the coral and the plum and the rust she chose.

Not a shrine. Not a message. Not a bouquet rebuilt for a ghost.

One color among many. One warm note in an arrangement she designed herself, braver than the girl who ordered them, standing beside all the bold new things she wasn't afraid of anymore.

You don't get to keep her in the past,I tell the roses and myself.And you don't get to cut her out of the present to prove you've let her go. You let her be one true color in a better arrangement, and you do the work, and you stay in the field this time.

I tape the last stem.

Above the west field, where the conservatory will stand if I'm brave enough to build it, the stars are out over the water. I stay down among the roses until the cold gets into my knees, planning a wedding I might get to make, for a woman who told me the truth in my own field and drove away before I could thank her for it.

The apricot will be there.

Not as a wound this time.

As a choice, hers, and I mean to be worthy of having grown it.

CHAPTER 12

Terms And Conditions

~AMBER~

The most dangerous thing in any room is competence.

Beauty, people forgive. Money, they resent politely. But let someone be genuinely good at a hard thing in front of you, and some traitor part of the animal brain leans toward them before the coffee's poured.

I know this because I sell it.

I know it better because I'm about to spend two hours watching the three men who broke me be very, very good at their jobs.

The Lantern House gave us the small east room for the summit. It has a long oak table, tall windows full of afternoon sea, and the specific smell of a house Beckett has been restoring by hand — cedar shavings, beeswax, cold stone.

I have not been inside this building since it was going to be the place I got married. I decided this morning that I would walk in like it's a venue. It is a venue. I keep telling myself that as I take the chair at the head of the table and set my clipboard down like a gavel.

My team fills in around me. Priya with her laptop and three contract tabs. Niall with the good markers. Marlowe, arms crossed, already appraising the crown molding for structural honesty. Juniper, who has brought a bakery box nobody asked for, and everybody will finish.

Then the three of them.

Beckett takes the far end. He does it on purpose — I watch him choose the seat where his shoulders and his long legs won't sit between me and the door. His scent barely reaches me. Cedar, black tea, wet stone, all of it held on a leash so short I can see the effort in his jaw. August sits to my left with a shallow crate of samples. No apricot roses. Only the bold things I chose at his farm: loud coral, rust, dark plum, two garden roses blown open uneven on purpose. His pear-and-iris stays low, tucked under the green smell of cut stems. Cade takes the seat across from August with a folder of beverage projections and guest-flow diagrams. No wink. No opening bit. His salt-and-caramel warmth only sharpens when I look straight at him, which I try not to do.

They are being careful with me. It's worse than if they were careless.

"Before we start." I keep my voice in contract register. "The short version, so nobody has to wonder. This is a job. No touching without a spoken yes. No scent used as an argument. No decisions about this wedding made anywhere I'm not standing. Professional access is not romantic forgiveness. Competence buys you my respect. It does not buy you an inch of me. Are we agreed?"

"Agreed," Beckett says.

"Agreed," August says.

"Agreed," says Cade, and doesn't smile, which is somehow the loudest of the three.

They're not going to fight me on anything. I armored up for a war nobody's going to hold.

"Good. Then let's build a wedding."

Sloane and Nolan come up on the wall screen with Paloma boxed in the corner. Sloane looks tired in the way of a woman who's been managed her whole life. Nolan sits close enough to reach her, not close enough to crowd. I like them for it.

"Tell me what you want the day to feel like," I say. "Not the schedule. The feeling."