Page 14 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

"I trust my crew."

"You inspect your crew." She points the butter knife. "There's a difference, and every one of them can feel it, and so can I, and I raised you better, except apparently I didn't, so eat your eggs." A beat while I eat my eggs, because you don't argue with the woman who taught you to swing a hammer, and then she comes around for the second pass, casual as weather. "Spoken to your sister?"

"About what?"

"Don't. You know about what? Hollis has the boat out doing the Seabriar bluffs all month, she could run your survey in an afternoon, and Oren says that point's getting hungry." She watches me over her toast. "Cheaper than the mainland firm. Better than the county. Family rate."

"Hollis isn't taking my calls."

"Hollis would take a work call. Work is the one door your sister's left open, which is more than you deserve, and you won't even walk through it because standing in a room with her means standing in a room with what you did." She says it without heat.That's the thing about my grandmother, she doesn't need heat, she has accuracy. "Five years, Beckett. She was going to stand up front at that wedding. She loved that girl. You didn't just leave your Omega at the altar, boy, you cost your sister a sister, and you've let her be angry at a closed door ever since because a closed door can't ask you follow-up questions."

The tea's gone cold. I drink it anyway.

My thumb has found the tattoo on the inside of my wrist without asking permission, the way it does, and Mara's eyes go to it, because nothing on this property escapes her, least of all me.

It's a small thing.

A house, unfinished, the roofline open at one corner. August drew it. All three of us carry a version of it, though I doubt the other two would admit theirs still means what it meant. Mine I keep where I can see it when I work, so that every joint I cut, I cut looking at the one thing I never finished.

"Rubbing it won't close the roof," Mara says, quiet now.

"Wasn't rubbing it."

"Beckett Aldous Shaw." She folds her hands on the table. Eighty-one years, and her hands are still steadier than mine. "Punishing yourself has been your full-time occupation for five years, and I'll ask you the question I ask every year about now, and you'll dodge it like every year. Has one hour of it helped her? All this penance. The closed room upstairs, the sister you won't call, the girl you cross the street to keep from crowding. Has any of it reached Amber Whitlock and made her life one ounce lighter?"

"Leaving her alone is the only thing she ever asked of us."

My grandmother looks at me a long moment, and I watch her decide to say it, the thing she's been carrying up my driveway with the bacon for five years, and I understand, in the secondbefore it lands, that breakfast was the ambush and the eggs were the anesthetic.

"She asked you to leave her alone," Mara says, "after you taught her that asking you to stay meant nothing."

The kitchen holds still.

The refrigerator hums. Out past the window, the sea keeps chewing at the point, patient, all the time in the world, and I sit at my own table with a cold mug and nowhere to put that sentence down.

She's right.

That's the whole trouble with the Shaw women, they're carpenters even when they've never held a saw. They find the load-bearing thing and they put their weight on it, and you learn exactly what your structure's worth.

"Eat," she says, gentler, pushing the toast at me. "You're no good to anybody hollow."

She washes the skillet before she goes, because in her kitchen there are standards, and she kisses the top of my head at the door like I'm nine, and then it's just me and the house and the day's real work, which is how I like it, or how I've told myself I like it for so long the two have gone hard to tell apart.

The email comes in at 9:40.

I'm at the office desk, the one I built into the old butler's pantry because the estate office proper has better light and Lena deserved it, when the confidential inquiry flag comes up.

We get them a few times a year. Somebody's publicist, somebody's manager, a wedding that needs the whole property, and an NDA before they'll tell you the couple's names.

This one's from Paloma Crane's office, which even I've heard of, and it's brief, the way expensive things are brief.

Autumn equinox. Two hundred guests. Full estate buyout, ten weeks out, confidentiality binding from first contact. Preliminary walkthrough requested within the fortnight.

Ten weeks.

I look at the conservatory line in my repair ledger and start drafting the polite decline in my head, because the glazing bars won't be done, the cliff work should come first, and a celebrity buyout is a hurricane you invite indoors.

Then I scroll to the coordination block, the paragraph where they list the professionals already attached, and the house goes quiet around me the way it does before weather.