Page 110 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

"Nothing," I echo.

"Not a flicker. Not a spark. The first couple times, I told myself it was timing. Wrong week, wrong woman, bad angle of the light." He laces his fingers together over his stomach. "Then it happened again. And again. The exact same way, every time, until it stopped being coincidence and started being a pattern with a hole cut out of the middle of it, and the hole was shaped like me."

Oh, I know that particular arithmetic.The one where you're the single variable that won't fit the equation, so the problem must obviously, quietly, be you. I've done that long division on myself a thousand nights.

"You spend enough years being the one man in the room who doesn't feel the thing every other man feels," he says, "and you start to wonder whether they forgot to install the part in you at the factory."

"So what did you do about it," I ask, softer now.

"I found the exit ramp." A rueful tilt of his head. "I'd been circling the idea of building weddings for a living — it was the only work that ever litmeup the way an Omega lit up the rest of them. There was a course. Event design, old-world style, taught on the Amalfi Coast. Six weeks on paper." The grin turns crooked. "You ladies would call what it became a Euro summer. Lemons the size of my fist. A little blue town stacked straight up a cliff into the sky. I learned to plan a wedding in three languages, drank wine that ruined me for anything since, and I did not come home in six weeks." He pauses. "I came home in a year."

"Ayear." I'm scandalized on general principle. "You Eat-Pray-Love'd your way straight out of a pack crisis."

"I Eat-Pray-Love'd my way into the best year of my life, thank you kindly." He says it without a scrap of shame, and I have to bite down on a smile. "Best thing I ever did for myself, running off to that cliff."

"And your pack just — let you? Vanish across an ocean for a year?"

"They weren't thrilled." He shrugs one shoulder. "Then partway through my lemons, the call came. Silas, on a bad line, near midnight my time. Said they'd found her. Maybe. The realest maybe they'd ever had. And they wanted to know if I was going to pack up my whole new life and fly home for an Omega I had never once laid eyes on."

"Were you?"

"No." Simple, clean, no apology in it. "We talked about doing the modern thing — video calls, photographs, courting a woman through a phone screen. But you cannot scent a person through glass, Amber. There's no spark on a screen. No chemistry, nothing real to plant your feet on. So I told them to go on ahead without me. Court her properly, do it right, take their time. And when I finally came home, we'd all sit down together and seal it as a pack." He tips his head. "Generous of me, I thought at the time. Real team player."

I hold up a finger, because a horrible suspicion is forming. "Hang on. Back the truck up. Did youknow?When they told you they'd found her — did you have the first inkling it was your own sister? Did she not once mention she happened to be courting an entire pack of Charleston craftsmen?"

He looks at me. He lets it hang exactly long enough that I know the answer is about to break my brain a second time tonight.

"Blooming Apricot," he says, gentle as anything. "I didn't know Ihada sister."

The wine nearly goes down the wrong pipe. "You —what?"

"Didn't know she existed on this earth." He lifts that one shoulder again, the picture of a man who made his peace with a wild, thorny thing a long time ago. "My people are complicated. My father was a complicated man in particular, with a whole complicated life filed in a drawer none of us got to open until later. Family drama." He spreads his hands. "It's wild out there, sweetheart."

"That is notdrama," I sputter. "That is aseason finale.That is the episode they hold back for May?—"

"You're not wrong."

He waits me out, because he's already learned — in one single day, the infuriating man — that I have to get the noise out of my system before I'm any use at hearing the next part. I subside, barely, gesturing at him with my glass to continue.

"By the time the year ran out, I had a real choice on my hands," he says. "My last semester came bundled with a co-op placement back home in Charleston. A good one — the kind that puts a client roster in your hand on the first morning. Brides already booked. Weddings on the calendar. A time-limited door, the sort that does not politely hold itself open while you dither on a cliff in Italy eating stone fruit."He talks about opportunity the way I do. Doors. Windows. Timing. We're both people who count the exits in every room we enter."So I came home. And the pack threw a proper dinner to introduce me, at long last, to her. The Omega. The one they'd spent my whole year away courting."

He goes quiet a moment. The lamplight catches the threads of gold in his stubble, the tired lines fanning from his eyes.

"And I walked in," he says, "and I looked right at her, and I felt nothing. Again. Except worse this time — because this was meant to betheone. The one they were sure of, dead sure, ready to bond. And still, not one flicker. No pull, no 'oh,' no hum under the breastbone. Just a nice-looking young woman smiling at mepolite across a dinner table." His mouth twists. "I remember thinking, well. That settles it, then. It's official. Something's broke clean through in me, and now they're all about to find out live, over the good china."

"But," I breathe.

"But Silas kept looking between the two of us. All night long. Couldn't leave it be. Finally says it right out loud, in front of God and everybody — 'you two have got the same eyes.'" A dry, disbelieving huff of breath. "And we did. Same eyes. Same left hand on the fork. Same exact way of tipping our heads a half-inch when we're chewing on a thought. So we took a test, because you do not build a lifelong pack bond on amaybe.And—" he spreads his hands wide, a rueful showman taking his bow "—voilà. My pack had spent a year and a half of their lives falling for my baby sister."

I set my wine down on the nightstand before I drop it into the sheets. "No.Nofu—no way."

"Way."

"Sawyer. You could be a wholelimited serieson Netflix. Six episodes. A moody one-sheet poster with everybody looking off in different directions. Somebody's weeping aunt at the paternity reveal?—"

"I'd audition for the lead." He tips me a wink that ought to be against the law this close to two in the morning. "Play my own self. How hard could it possibly be."

I laugh — I can't not — but it fades fast, because I can feel the two of us wading out past the funny part now, into water that's suddenly got no bottom. "So what did youdo?" I ask, quiet. "After the test. After you knew. What did you actually do."