Page 132 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

The Power Seat

~AMBER~

"YOU'RE MOVING?!"

Marlowe and Juniper shriek it in perfect, appalling unison, at a volume that could strip the barnacles clean off a boat hull, both of them frozen in the middle of my living room and staring at me like I've just announced I'm running off to join a cult that worships the county tax office.

I roll my eyes so hard I nearly sprain something behind them.

"I am notmoving."

"You have a box." Juniper points at the box. She points at it the way a prosecutor points at a murder weapon. "You haveseveralboxes, Amber. Those are moving boxes. That is a whole moving-shaped situation unfolding on your rug."

"It's temporary."

I go back to folding a stack of sweaters into the offending box, because if I stop moving my hands, I'll have to sit in the full weight of what I'm actually doing this morning.

"It's to prove to the government I'm not faking a single thing, and it's temporary. I am absolutely not getting rid of my place. I would sooner get rid of the two of you."

They exchange one of their looks — the kind they've been perfecting since the ninth grade, the kind that carries an entire silent conversation I'm not invited to.

Marlowe's got a smear of dried blue paint along one forearm and her dark hair shoved up in a claw clip that is losing its war, still in her work clothes from the salvage yard, smelling the way she always smells: warm cedar, sea salt, a bright curl of orange peel underneath it all, like a workshop with the doors thrown open to the sun.

Juniper's perched on the arm of my couch in a sundress the exact green of a Granny Smith apple, her honeysuckle-and-green-tea scent going soft at the edges with worry even as she grins, because Juniper feels absolutely everything at maximum volume and always has.

They blew up my phone all morning.

Thirty-one texts between the two of them by the time I finally surfaced out of the town hall and called them back — a rising tide ofare you okayanddid it go throughanddo we need to bring the van and a crowbar.

They waited, though.

That's the thing about these two.

They know me well enough to understand that if the town hall deadline came and went with nothing but radio silence on my end, something had gone sideways — and they gave me room to surface on my own before they came descending.

I love them for it.

I'd also lob a sock at either of their heads without a flicker of remorse, which is, I think, the truest measure of a friendship that's lasted this long.

"Okay. Back all the way up. Start from the top." Marlowe drops onto the couch beside Juniper and folds her arms, settling in like a woman preparing to hear a deposition. "Because the last we heard from you, it was dawn and you were being hauled in front of the federal government. Now there are boxes. Talk."

So I talk.

I tell them about the arrangement — the part where Sawyer and I sat down and did the cold math and worked out that the cleanest possible way to prove to a suspicious compliance office that five people are a real, functioning pack is to, inconveniently, actually live like one. I tell them about August agreeing it would make the whole thing far easier to sell. About Beckett — of all the men on this earth,Beckett— being the one who turned out to have a connection to a house a little way outside Honeybell Harbor. A place that sits like a fair midpoint between everybody's work and everybody's lives. Neutral ground. Nobody's turf, and so, somehow, everybody's.

"And Cade?" Juniper asks, because she has never once in her life missed a name.

I pause with a sweater folded halfway.

"That," I say slowly, "is the strange part."

"Strange how?"

"Cade didn't say a word." I frown down at the wool in my hands. "You have to understand how bizarre that is. The second Sawyer walked into the picture, Cade hadopinions.Loud ones. He bristled at every single thing that man did — the drinks, the rescue, the whole of it. But when it came to all five of us actually moving in under one roof together?" I shake my head. "Nothing. He just watched. Went quiet in a way I couldn't read at all."

"Huh," says Marlowe, and I watch her file it away in the exact spot I've filed it myself.

"And then there was the ordeal of just getting home," I go on, layering rolled socks into the corners of the box. "Sawyer'struck is still dead as a doornail in that parking lot. His—" I hesitate over the word, because there's no clean one for it "—his old packmate. Marshall. The one who drove in to sign off on the whole mess. He just left. Took off the second the ink was dry. Didn't fix the truck like he swore he would, didn't linger for so much as a coffee."