Page 6 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

It's sitting on the banquet captain's station next to the time sheets, thick as a phone book, three interlocked initials on the cover that I drew myself.

My wedding binder.

One year of my life with a spine on it. Every vendor contact, every timeline broken to the minute, floor plans I redrew nine times, the rain plan, the power plan, the drunk-uncle plan, the seating chart with its careful diplomacies, and the margins full of my handwriting.

Cade's mom front row. She'll say she doesn't care, but she cares.

Ramp for Nana Shaw. August cries at cellos, tissues at the processional. My mother said hiring a planner would be more appropriate, and I built every page of this anyway, at midnight, before dawn, in love with the work in a way I didn't have a word for yet.

The wedding is dead.

At least the binder is still mine.

"Abercrombie." She followed me. Naturally, she followed me, though she stopped at the mouth of the corridor, one hand on the frame, unwilling to actually enter the part of her husband's hotel where things get washed. "Stop. Think. If a photographer catches you leaving like this, that photo exists forever. Do not make this worse."

Worse.

As if tonight is an exam, and I'm the one failing it.

As if there's a version of being abandoned by three men in front of three hundred people that I could be doing more gracefully, and honestly, knowing my mother, she has that version drafted, annotated, and grieving its own lost potential already.

I pick up the binder and hold it against the crystal bodice, right over the spot that hurts.

"My name," I tell her, "is Amber."

Then I walk to the loading dock, put my shoulder into the heavy door, and leave.

Outside, it's raining. The forecast said clear.

I checked it every hour for a week, and I stood under the loading dock awning in my bare feet and my collapsing up-do, holding a binder like a life raft, wearing a gown that will never be photographed.

I take inventory because inventory is a thing my hands know how to do when everything else has stopped working.

No shoes. No phone. No money. No pack. No plan.

Three floors up, three hundred people are being told a kind lie about a medical emergency. Out there in the wet dark, three men who wrote me wedding cards I will now never open are driving away from the life we built, having settled, on my behalf, the question of what I deserve.

A delivery van idles at the end of the dock, hazards blinking amber through the rain, and the driver leans out her window.

Beta, mid-fifties, gray braid, the unshockable face of a woman who has seen every strange thing a hotel loading dock has to offer and rated most of it a five.

She looks at the dress. The binder. The bare feet on wet concrete. She does not tell me to go back inside.

She does not ask what I did.

"You need help, honey?"

Asks.

First person all day to ask me anything, and it's a stranger in a delivery van, and I'd laugh if I had one in me. Somewhere behind me, muffled by concrete and kitchens and gold-leaf halls, the string quartet finally, mercifully, stops playing, and the lastthing that was still calling me back into that building goes quiet with it.

"Yes," I say, and step out into the rain. "I do."

CHAPTER 1

The Bride Who Never Panics

~AMBER~