Page 138 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

"God, no. Not for years." I turn it over, considering. "Red, actually. And…oddly enough…orange. The two of them together,especially." I glance toward the fogged windows, where the sky has gone the exact shade I mean. "Sunset colors. I never used to be a sunset person. Somehow I am now."

Something flickers across his face.

I watch him file it away, careful, the way he files the difference between two shades of the same rose.

"Noted," he murmurs. "And the flowers? I remember the combinations you loved, back when you talked about your own—" he stops himself, redirects, gentle as anything "—the ones you used to love. But tell me about now. What's the one flower you never get tired of looking at?"

I twirl a sprig of rosemary between my fingers, thinking.

"Ranunculus," I decide. "The way they fold in on themselves, layer after layer after layer, like they're keeping a secret they'll only tell you if you're patient enough to wait for it. I never tire of those."

"Ranunculus," he echoes, and I know without a doubt it's going into the same vault asred and orange.

"Favorite season," he says next, threading a plume of gold grass into the arrangement without looking up. "And don't tell me you don't have one. Everybody in the flower business has one."

"Autumn." It comes out faster than I expect, and surprises me. "It used to be spring. All that hopeful new-green everything." I run my thumb down the spine of a burgundy leaf. "But autumn's honest. It knows things end, and it decides to be beautiful about it anyway. I respect that in a season."

His hands go still for a moment over the flowers.

"Autumn," he echoes, quiet, like the word cost him something to hear. "You really have changed, Amber Rose."

"Five years will do that."

"It suits you," he says simply. "The change. It suits you."

"One more." He tilts his head. "Your favorite sweet. It used to be lemon tarts. And that key lime pie from the Salt and Honey you'd swear up and down you weren't ordering a second slice of."

"You remember the second slice."

"I remember everything, Amber." He says it with no weight at all, which is exactly the thing that gives it weight.

I have to drop my eyes to the flowers for a second.

"Cupcakes," I admit. "These days. Vanilla icing, specifically — the plain kind everybody overlooks in the case." I lift a shoulder. "I got tired of complicated. Turns out the simplest sweet thing is the one I want now."

I don't miss the way his mouth curves at that, like I've just told him something far larger than a dessert order.

We drift back toward the work, because the work is safe, and because there's a genuine wedding to build here.

The centerpiece takes shape between our four hands, apricot deepening into coral deepening into burgundy and gold, the whole arrangement transitioning like a sky at dusk.

As we work, August talks.

He tells me about a project he's been quietly dreaming up. A book, of all things. He wants to work with Elodie —the botanical illustrator, the one who does those impossible watercolors where you can practically smell the paper— on a book documenting every flower in Honeybell Harbor, season by season, through the whole turning year.

"That sounds like an artist's project," I say, and I mean it as the highest compliment I own.

"It is." He trims a fig branch, thoughtful. "I've spent my entire life making beauty that disappears, Amber. That's the job, when you get down to it. You build something breathtaking. It's perfect for exactly one day. Then it wilts. It's gone. Everyone moves right along to the next perfect thing." He sets the branch down. "I think I've grown tired of only making things that die. Iwant to make something that lasts. Something that teaches the people who come after us how to keep it going, once we're not here to arrange it for them anymore."

"A legacy," I say softly. "You want to leave a legacy."

"I want to leaveproof." He says the word carefully, like it's fragile. "Proof that the beautiful thing was here. That it was tended. That somebody loved it enough to write the whole of it down, so it wouldn't be lost the second the season turned cold."

He glances up at me, and the flowers aren't entirely what he's talking about now.

"That means reminiscing, some," he says, lower. "Going back through what was, and finding what's still worth keeping. It means reaching for the opportunities that could turn into a second chance — before those wilt too."

I keep my eyes on the coral dahlia turning in my hands. "And what," I ask, just as quietly, "if the person is afraid? To open their heart to someone who already shattered it once."