Page 186 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

I'm the one who keeps turning up in doorways.

Theo's words won't quit. They circle the empty room and come back around, louder each pass, refusing to lie down.

I'd rather fight for the future I want than cower…it's too late for that…isn't it?

CHAPTER 36

The Fine Print

~AMBER~

"Thank you so much for coming in so swiftly, Miss Whitlock."

"Happy to." I settle into the chair across the desk and fold my hands in my lap, the picture of a woman who has her whole life in order. "When somebody calls and says there's an error in a federal pack registration, I don't dawdle. Dawdling is how small problems become expensive ones."

The registrar smiles at me over a pair of reading glasses hung on a chain of little wooden beads.

Her name plate reads WREN CALLAHAN, and she's the gentlest thing this building has to offer — an Omega comfortably into her fifties with a soft gray cardigan and a spider plant thriving improbably on the corner of her desk, its runners trailing down toward the recycling bin.

She smells like chamomile and warm printer paper with a thin ribbon of lavender underneath, the exact scent of a person who defuses more panicked couples in a day than a bomb squad. It's a mercy. The last time I sat in a chair like this, it was acrossfrom that starched compliance councilman with the pinched mouth who acted like our whole arrangement was a personal affront to his filing system. Wren Callahan is his opposite in every possible way.

"Can I get either of you anything before we dig in? Water, tea? I keep a kettle back there for exactly this kind of appointment."

She's already half-rising, and when I wave her off with thanks she settles back with an easy nod, unhurried, like we have all the time in the world instead of a countdown I can feel ticking behind my sternum.

It's a small kindness.

In my line of work I've learned that the people who offer you tea before the bad news are usually the ones who make the bad news survivable.

Beside me, Beckett takes up the second chair like it was built for a smaller species. He's got his brown felt hat balanced on one knee, the brim turned up in his big hands, and he looks about as at home in this fussy little office of laminated forms and inspirational cat posters as a bull in a stationery shop. Cedar and smoked vanilla roll off him, steady and low, the black-tea note grounding me the way it always does. I'm grateful he's the one who came. August and Sawyer are across town wrestling with Sawyer's truck, which has decided, in the great tradition of temperamental vintage engines, to start coughing the exact week we need every wheel we own turning.

That's the whole reason I'm being so diligent about paperwork in the first place.

The wedding is coming. Project Golden Bell is no longer a far-off shape on the calendar — it's a countdown, and countdowns don't forgive a single loose end. If we're going to move fast, if we're going to get things rolling the way a celebrity timeline demands, then every one of us needs a reliable wayto get where we're needed. Sawyer's truck sputtering means I've already run the math on whether we'll need to rent him something temporary, or bite the bullet and put him in a new vehicle, or simply juggle. At the shared house it isn't dire — we tend to leave at the same time or close enough, and among four grown adults with four sets of keys, we can bounce and carpool and make it work. Still, I like knowing. I like the fine print squared away before it has a chance to bite. Redundancy is just love with a spreadsheet.

So when Wren's call came through about a flagged error, Beckett set his coffee down, plucked his keys off the hook, and said he'd drive. No fuss. That's Beckett — he doesn't announce that he's showing up. He just shows up.

I smooth my skirt and try to look present, because the truth is a part of me has been running quiet all morning, and I know exactly which part.

Cade.

I've been turning it over like a stone in my pocket, this thing where he stayed the night at another woman's place and came home and told us over coffee like a weather report. It isn't eating me, precisely. Maybe I've gone a little numb to protect myself, the way you stop feeling your feet in cold water. I haven't fully let myself sit in the fact of it yet — Iris, her couch, the whole careless shape of it. Sure, Iris isn't an Omega, as far as I know. Nothing happened. He'll swear up and down that nothing happened. That was never the point. Like the guys said, it's the principle.

Principle is the one language I've never had trouble reading.

Here's the ugly little truth I keep bumping into: I can forgive the altar. I have to. Being left at the altar is a thing that happened five years ago, a scar I've had to learn to live around, and if I'm going to build anything new I can't keep pressing on it. Fine. Water, meet bridge. But looking me in the eye now, after a signed contract, after everything, and deciding it's perfectlyacceptable to sleep at another woman's place? That's not the past. That's a choice made in the present, with full information, and it's a non-negotiable for me. I refuse to nod along and pretend it's fine. I've spent enough of my life being handed things that aren't fine and being asked to smile.

The maddening thing is how quiet it's all gone in me. Two mornings ago I stood on a staircase and shook while my whole body screamed. Now, sitting in a kind woman's office with sun coming through the blinds in warm gold bars, I mostly feel a strange, flat calm, like the surface of a pond after the stone has already gone under. I don't fully trust it. Numbness has always been my body's way of buying time to survive something, of doling the pain out in installments I can actually afford. The bill for Cade will come. I just haven't decided yet what currency I'm paying it in.

Beckett must feel me drifting, because he nudges his knee against mine beneath the desk. "You've gone quiet on me," he murmurs, low enough that Wren stays absorbed in her screen. "That's usually the part where I start checking exits."

"I'm strategizing."

"You're brooding with extra steps." The corner of his mouth tugs up. "Whatever it is, it keeps till we're back in the truck. I'll even let you narrate the whole spreadsheet at me."

"You say that like it's a chore."

"Sugar, last time you got three tabs deep into tablecloth vendors before I could merge onto the highway." He says it fond, not sharp. It tugs a reluctant smile out of me despite everything, which is precisely why he said it.