Page 143 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

"So why aren't you defending him harder? He's your packmate. Alphas close ranks. I've watched it happen my whole life. You lot circle the wagons even when one of your own is dead wrong. But here you are, handing me his ugliest truth, and I'm about as close to your rival as a man gets."

I work in silence a moment, wires cool under my fingers, deciding how much of myself I'm willing to spend on a roadside.

"Because I grew up inside a house that closed ranks," I say. "And I know down to the bone exactly what it costs."

I keep my eyes on the engine. It's easier to say it to an engine.

"From the outside, my parents were flawless. The prettiest house on the lane. The correct pew at church. My mother's garden in every county magazine that ever ran." My voice stays level. "Behind the front door, the marriage had been dying for years, and everyone inside it knew. My mother's answer to every crack in the foundation was to decorate over it. New drapes.Fresh flowers on the table, always fresh flowers. A dinner party to paper over the silence. She could make anything on God's earthlookbeautiful. She simply couldn't make one single thing true."

"And your father?"

"My father retreated into his work and never came back out. Every hard conversation, every raised voice gathering on the horizon…he'd arrange to be at the office instead." I pause, because here's the part I've only ever said once, to Amber, in the dark, a lifetime ago. "And I became the child who kept the rooms peaceful. I got very, very good at it. I could feel a fight coming the way you feel the weather turn in a bad knee, and I'd move to soften it before a single voice had risen. A joke. A well-timed distraction. A bright little question about somebody's day." I loosen a stubborn nut. "I made myself into the flowers on the table. Pretty. Pleasant. Placed there to make the ugliness a touch easier to sit beside."

I close the last connection and sit back on my heels.

"But that isn't a life, Sawyer. That's a stage set. That's a house where nobody ever says the true thing out loud, because the man at the head of the table never once found the courage for a plainI'm sorry.Never learned to open his mouth and let one real feeling walk out of it."

My voice drops.

"And what I've finally worked out, years too late for it to do me any good. If you can't say the hard thing. If you'll always soonermanagea feeling than speak it…you cannot keep a love alive. It's not possible. It rots quietly, behind the pretty drapes, while everyone at the table smiles."

Sawyer says nothing.

He's letting me get there.

"That's my flaw, since you asked for it. My father's exact flaw, only dressed in nicer clothes." I make myself say the whole of it."When it got hard with Amber, I didn't fight for her. Imanagedit. I told myself the kindest thing a man could do was smooth it all over, keep the peace, spare everyone the ugly public scene." A bitter breath escapes me. "I built that woman the most beautiful courthouse anyone ever saw. Then I stood there in it, holding the flowers, and let them read out her sentence without saying one word in her defense."

"So no," I say. "I won't close ranks around Cade, and I won't decorate over what the three of us did to her. I already tried that once, five years ago, and it cost me the only thing I have ever truly wanted. I came back to this town telling myself I could make amends quietly. Do the wedding. Be useful. Be gentle. Hide the worst of the past so it wouldn't cut her a second time." I shake my head. "But that is the identical coward's move, only in a florist's apron. You do not heal a wound by arranging flowers over the top of it. We're adults. The single way through the thing is to sit down in the ugly truth of it together, on purpose, out loud, and rebuild from there." I meet his eyes. "That's all I'm asking for. The chance to do it the honest way this time. I only need the opportunity."

I close the hood with a solid, satisfying thump and wipe my hands down the rag.

"Try her now."

Sawyer holds my gaze a beat longer than strictly necessary — something working behind his eyes I can't quite read — then swings up into the cab.

The engine turns over, coughs once, and catches, settling into a rough but honest idle. It runs.

"Well, I’ll be damned," Sawyer says, leaning out the window with a grin splitting his face. "Flower boy's got hands."

"Flower boy has a reputation you swore on your life to protect," I remind him, retrieving my shirt off the mirror. "Notone word. And if you ever need anything else…the truck, a lift, an ear…you know exactly where the shop is. I mean that, too."

He doesn't answer right away.

He's looking at me again, but it's different this time, his gaze snagged low on my ribs, where the ink is.

I'd half-forgotten I was still standing here shirtless.

"That," Sawyer says, nodding toward it. "What's it mean?"

I glance down at my own side.

It climbs me from hip to ribs — a vine, rendered in fine black linework, blooming as it rises up my body. A peony for the year the shop first turned a profit. A cluster of forget-me-nots for my grandmother. A dozen small milestones, each one inked on a different quiet night, a different year. A whole garden grown up the side of me. At the very top of it, though, near my heart, there's one last bloom that was never finished. Just an outline. The clean, empty shape of a rose, waiting to be filled in.

"The rose is hers," I say quietly. "Amber's. We designed it together, back then, the two of us leaning over a sketchbook at midnight. The plan was to finish it the week after the wedding — ink it in, give it color, make it real. Our first act as a bonded pack." I draw my shirt back on, slow, over the outline of her. "The wedding never came. So it's simply... stayed like this. Five years now. The unfinished shape of her, sitting right over my heart, that I never once got to fill in."

I've had a hundred chances to have it lasered away, or covered, or finished off with some other flower to spare myself the ache of a blank space over my heart. I never did a single one of them.

You keep the outline,I decided a long time ago,because the outline is the truest thing you own.An unfinished promise. A thing a man swore he'd do, and then didn't.