Page 46 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

The conservatory rings with it, and then there's just dust drifting in the sea light and her team pounding down the length of the room and my heart going like a dropped hammer.

"Okay!" Juniper arrives first, hands everywhere, patting Amber down like a customs check. "Okay, nope, we hate this room now?—"

"I'm fine." Amber's looking at the plaster.

Then at the distance between us, the two feet I didn't cross, measuring it. I can see her measure it, calculating, and then up at me, dust sifting through the light between us.

Something moves through her face that I can't read and have no right to. She knows what it costs.

She heard the name, too.

First time in five years, out of my mouth, permission or not, and neither of us is going to mention it, since both of us are clearly denying one another from acknowledging this pulsing friction that will surely self-destruct.

Sooner or later…

"The braced section gets netted and sheeted by tomorrow," I say to her, the room, and to my own pulse. "Nobody works under it until the steel's in. That panel was on the June report, page forty. It moved up the schedule just now."

"It certainly did," says Marlowe, dry as kindling, toeing the wreckage.

The inspection wraps on the drive, gravel, and sea wind, her team loading the vans. Amber stands apart with the engineering report under her arm and her clipboard finally lowered, and delivers the verdict in full vendor voice, for the record, for her people, and for Priya's notes.

"The venue is conditionally approved." Tap, tap, tap. "Conditional on every item in this report being completed, inspected, and signed off in six weeks. Steel, drainage, railing, lighting, backup structure, all of it, six weeks from Friday, or we move the wedding and eat the loss. Can you do it?"

Six weeks. It's brutal.

It's two crews and no margin and my own hands on the steel at five every morning, and I run the whole calculation in four seconds the way I've been running this house's numbers half my life, and the answer's real, so I give it to her straight.

"I can. You'll have it."

Yup. I’m still a lying coward cause clearly I’ll do anything to satisfy her, even if she’d never praise or acknowledge me for it.

Amber looks at me for a long moment, longer than vendor voice allows, the wind working a strand loose from her pinned hair, gold in the light off the water, and then she says, quietly, in a completely different register, one built for an audience of exactly me:

"You said that before."

She's in the van before my chest finishes caving.

Doors, gravel, gone down the drive through the blue hydrangeas, her army carrying her back off my cliff, and I standon it alone with a report full of things I know how to fix, understanding the actual terms of the next six weeks better than any contract Lena will ever notarize.

The steel is the easy part.

Every promise I make on this property from now until the equinox gets weighed on a scale she built five years ago out of the one I broke, and the scale doesn't start at zero like a fair shot.

It shouldn't. None of us deserve it to…

I walk back inside past the lantern my grandfather kept burning for boats in the dark, and get my tools.

Let’s get this started…

CHAPTER 9

The Help She Hates

~AMBER~

Hospitals and weddings run on the same fuel, which is other people's composure.

I've supplied it professionally for five years, so when the Honeybell Community Clinic calls at nine on a Tuesday morning, I'm in the truck before the receptionist finishes her sentence, wearing my calmest face like a name tag.