Page 32 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

Over the next hour, I watch Paloma aim question after question at Sloan; dates, numbers, preferences, and every single time, Nolan waits.

He never once answers for her. When she reaches for a word, he lets her reach. When she looks at him, he's already looking back, and only then does he speak, adding, never replacing, and nobody in this room knows they're doing anything remarkable, which is what makes it remarkable.

I built a career reading couples in rooms.

This is a man who treats his person's voice like load-bearing architecture.

My chest does something complicated and unprofessional, and I put it with my body's other opinions, in the drawer, for later.

The drawer is getting full, but then again, the drawer has been getting full for five years.

Who doesn’t crave such in this time and age where dating is in the pit of hell and finding a man who truly loves you in the way he makes eye contact is like finding a needle in a sea of haystacks.

One in a million honestly.

Now find a pack of three Alphas?

Might as well give up and try again in the next life.

I’m probably in that very category…

"Tell her the real version," Nolan says quietly when Paloma reaches the agenda line reading venue rationale. "Not the deck. The grandmother version."

So Sloane pulls her knees up in the chair like nobody media-trained her out of it years ago, and tells me.

Her grandmother, Ruth, waited tables at this inn, this exact building, for eleven summers, and rented the blue cottage on Wickens Lane, and every June until Sloane was fourteen, before the shows, before any of it, she'd be sent east to spend the season being nobody in particular.

"I learned to swim off the town dock. I know the fudge shop's ripple recipe changed in 2009, and I hold a grudge. Gran taught me the Wishing Pier rules. You walk out alone, one wish, you tell it to the water and never to a person, or it belongs to the person instead of you."

A small laugh.

"I've kept wishes secret from three continents of tabloids. Gran would be proud."

Then the laugh goes, and what's under it is nine years old.

"The Lantern House wasn't a venue then. It was just the beautiful house on the cliff, and one dusk we watched a wedding from the public path, all those lights coming on under the big lantern, and I decided, the way you decide things at that age, completely, with your whole spine. Gran died two winters ago. Most of my life happens in public and belongs to strangers."

She looks at me straight, and the exhaustion in her face organizes itself into something older and steadier.

"I'd like one day that belongs to me. One place, one day. That's the entire brief, Ms. Whitlock. Everything else is negotiable, catering, guest count, all of it. That part isn't."

"And if it can't be done privately," Nolan says, still quiet, "we don't do it. We'll get married in my mother's yard in jackets, and the studio can report on a fence." He says it without drama, asettled fact, and Sloane's hand finds his without either of them looking.

There it is, the thing that gets past all my armor when nothing else this morning has.

Not the fame, not the budget.

This.

Two people who would drop the entire spectacle on the floor and walk away holding hands, spectacle be damned.

Here I sit in my peach linen with my neutralized throat and take the hit quietly, because I was engaged to three men once, and the spectacle survived us and went ahead, served the shrimp, and nobody walked away holding my hand.

I was simply left behind like unwanted trash while the world mocked like my life was the latest entertainment article that deserved exclusive front row seats…

Envy is the wrong word.

It's more like reading a sentence in a language I studied for years and never once heard spoken aloud.