Page 105 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

"It's just manners," she says, which is not an answer, and she knows it isn't. She busies herself with a dish towel that was already folded. "My father used to say—" She stops. Starts over, lighter, like she can outrun the sentence if she takes it at a sprint. "My father has opinions. Had. Has. He runs a whole hospitality empire, everything's about presentation, and he always said an Omega who can't manage her own aroma is an Omega who can't manage anything. That mine was—" a small, well-practiced laugh "—loud. Annoying, was his actual word. That it needed taming before it embarrassed somebody at a nice event."

She reports it like a weather forecast. Like it cost her nothing. But the apricot's gone sad and thin at the edges, the snapped-stem green rising, and I know down to the decimal exactly what it cost.

There it is. Ninety seconds, my foot. Some people you don't read until hour six, standing in their kitchen, watching them fold a towel that was already folded twice.

"Your father," I say, keeping my voice very level, "is wrong."

She blinks. "You don't have to?—"

"I'm not being nice. I'm being accurate. There's a difference, and I traffic mostly in the second one." I count it off on my fingers, because she strikes me as a woman who trusts a list further than she'll ever trust a compliment. "One. Your aroma is warm. It reads as safe — people go loose in a room you've been standing in, whether they clock why or not. That's not nothing. That's the entire business you run. Two. It's complex, which means it's interesting, which means nobody gets tired of it. Three." I let this one land soft. "It's honest. I've known you three days, and I can read your whole day off the air in a room. Right now the air's telling me a man, I would dearly love ten quiet minutes alone with, once said something to a small girl that she is still, decades later, folding towels about."

Quiet. Just the kettle-tick of the old house settling on its bones.

"Those are the pros," she says finally, and her voice isn't quite level. "What are the cons."

"None."

"That's not how lists work."

"It's how this one works."

She narrows her eyes at me. Recovery incoming — I can see her reaching for solid ground, for the version of herself that runs seating charts and stares down federal agents, and I let her have it, because everyone's owed a way back up. "You're very smooth," she says. "You know that? This whole thing. The shelf. The speech. The accent doing the thing the accent's doing. This is a move. You're working an angle. You're trying to get in my pants."

I laugh before I can stop it. A real one, surprised right out of me.

"I promise you I am not," I say.

"Wow. Okay. Rude, but?—"

"Not like that." I scrub a hand along my jaw.How much to hand her. Give her the true thing. She's had a whole lifetime of the managed ones."I'm on — call it a journey. Have been for a good while. Abstinence, the entire grim discipline of it. On purpose. I got very good at wanting nothing from anybody, because wanting things from people is precisely how I ended up—"Careful."—learning some hard lessons I'm still paying off. So no. Your pants are safe. There is no angle. There's no play." I look at her, then decide to be honest one degree past what's smart. "Though I'll tell you, Blooming Apricot — you are making the discipline significantly harder tonight than it was last Tuesday."

She goes pink again. A different pink this time. A pleased one she's clearly furious about.

"That's—" she says. "You can't just — you can't say a thing like that and then just—" She points at me, opens her mouth, shuts it, reboots entirely. "Are you hungry?"

Her stomach answers before I can. It growls — not a polite little gurgle but a long, indignant, deeply betrayed sound, enormous in the small kitchen. We both look down at it. When we look back up, she has achieved a shade of red I genuinely did not know the human face could produce.

"Don't," she warns.

"I didn't say a word."

"You were going to."

"When did you last eat?" is what I say instead, and I watch her actually try to answer the question. Watch her scroll back through the day — the office, the notice, the standoff on the road, the long drive home. Watch her come up empty-handed.

"There was a—" She frowns at the middle distance. "I had a coffee. This morning. There was going to be a scone, and then the federal government tried to dissolve my entire life before nine a.m., so the scone and I never really?—"

"So nothing. Since yesterday."

"I've been busy," she says, with enormous dignity, "getting temporarily pack-bonded to a stranger to save my business."

"Right." I'm already turning for the refrigerator. "What've you got in here."

"Nothing, that's the whole — don't open that, it's?—"

I open it. It's bad. It's a bachelor's fridge wearing a nice apron: half a lemon gone to leather, a heel of parmesan, three eggs, a bunch of something that used to be basil in a past life, and enough condiments to survive a siege. The freezer, when I check, offers ice, a lonely bag of peas, and — salvation — a box of dried pasta somebody shoved in there for reasons I will not interrogate tonight.

"See," she says, right at my shoulder, close enough that the apricot goes straight to my head. "Bare. It's fine. I'll have cereal. I have cereal. Standing up, over the sink, like a Victorian ghost. It's my whole evening process, it's very efficient."