Page 89 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

I know that now, standing in the gravel with my flats going cold through the soles. I should have climbed into the van an hour ago and let the math wait.

Instead, I stayed.

I wanted the meeting.

Wanted the sealed room, the whiteboard, and the clean forensic pleasure of watching a problem become a plan. I wanted the numbers to add up. To sit four grown men down and confirm that the arithmetic of my own survival would actually hold.

Instead of arithmetic, I got the truth.

The math was never going to math. The math left me at an altar five years ago with no intention of correcting itself when the formula is proven wrong.

My phone buzzes against my hip. I don't stop walking to check it, because I've already started walking, my body making the call my brain is still catching up to. Down the hill. Past the darkened print shop. Toward the harbor road that curves the long way around to Seabriar and my little peach cottage with the rose garden I keep threatening to tame.

It's a twenty-minute drive.

On foot, in the dark, in these shoes, it's closer to three hours.

Fine. Three hours.

I have a great deal to walk off.

The phone buzzes again, insistent, so I pull it out under the last working streetlight and thumb it awake. The group chat is a wall of my three favorite people trying to reach me at once.

Juniper:WHERE ARE YOU? The boys came out looking like someone shot their dog. What happened?Priya:Amber. Confirm location. This is not a drill.Marlowe:She's walking. I can feel it. She does this. Amber, get in a vehicle.Juniper:IS SHE WALKING TO SEABRIAR. IN THE DARK. ABERCROMBIE WHITLOCK?—

I turn the phone face-down against my palm and keep moving.

I'll answer when I'm a person again. Right now I'm a woman on a dark road with five years of something finally coming up her throat, and that woman should not be allowed near a keyboard.

The harbor road unspools ahead of me, pale and dry, the packed-dirt shoulder crunching under my flats.

The water sits off to my right, flat and black, the last of the sunset gone to a thin coral seam at the horizon. The air smells like low tide and cut hay and, faintly, the salt-sugar ghost of somebody's late bonfire. It's beautiful.

This town is always, relentlessly beautiful, even while it watches you come apart on one of its roads.

I let myself have the truth now.

The whole ugly shape of it.

There's no one out here to perform composure for.

They left me because my father threatened them.

I've said versions of that sentence in my head for five years.

I said them the way you press a bruise you've decided is permanent — from a distance, abstractly, a wound I'd catalogued and shelved.

But I couldn’t confirm it.

Didn’t have enough evidence to put the nail on the head and be mad at the ones who created me for steer my life into some sort of entertainment show but then blaming it on me like it was my evil plot to ensue.

Tonight I heard it out loud, in a sealed room, from the men themselves.

Alistair got them in a corner. He named what he'd take. The estate. The contracts. The permits. Theo's whole future. They weighed it, my three Alphas, the men who wrote vows they nevergot to read and in every version of the math they ran, I came out the acceptable loss.

The acceptable loss.

I turn the phrase over like a stone in my pocket.