Page 87 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

I'd nearly forgotten she was here, and I never forget where people are; it's the one thing I'm never wrong about. Amber has stood so still against the far wall that even I lost the thread of her.

She's staring at the three of them like the floor has tilted under something she believed was solid stone.

"My father threatened your businesses," she says. "Theo's scholarship. That's why you left me at the altar."

Every head in the room turns to her.

There it is —the thing this sealed room was truly built to hold.

Not strategy.

The truth, finally out where nobody can swallow it back down, landing squarely on the one person it was kept from.

Her scent breaks the neutralizer before she can stop it.

Sun-warm apricot, the way it always starts, but bruised now, sharp and green at the edges, garden roses snapped clean off at the stem.

I have smelled a great deal of pain across my career.

I have never once wanted to put a building to the torch over it before now.

The three of them wear the identical face.

Regret, with no craft left anywhere in it.

"Yes," August says.

He doesn't look away from her while he says it, which is the first genuinely brave thing I've watched any of them do all day.

"Yes. We were cowards. We left because your father threatened half the people we love and us. We were so far down inside our own fear that not one of us was clear-headed enough to stop and wonder if the bastard was only testing us. We didn't fight him. We didn't fight for you. We drove."

Amber nods.

Slow. Once.

Beckett takes a step toward her. Cade says her name like it costs him a tooth to shape it.

She lifts both hands, palms out, and shakes her head.

The small motion stops them where they stand.

"You know what?" Her voice runs steadier than her scent. "I'm done."

She turns.

And walks right out.

The soundproofing eats the click of the door.

For a moment, none of them move, and I watch three men who rebuild broken things for a living stand there with no idea in the world how to mend the only thing that ever mattered.

"That's not—" Cade's gone gray. "She doesn't do that. She doesn't leave. She fixes. She stays, and she fixes, that's who she is, she?—"

"She's not who she was five years ago." August is already moving for the door. "We keep forgetting that. She stopped being the girl who stays to fix us the morning we drove off. We have todosomething. We can't stand here?—"

Beckett has gone the specific white of a man watching a structure he built come off its footings.

"She said she's done." He stares at the shut door as though it might reopen on the strength of his wanting it to. "She has never said that. Angry, cold, unreachable…all of it, for five years. Never done."