Page 61 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

What am I doing?

There’s just a moment when the thrill high goes to a halt as my thumb hovers over the “CONFIRM” button. I swallow the lump forming in my throat, realizing I’m falling into that cycle again.

The coward pattern I’m desperate to finally break.

I close the app without booking.

Then I get up, cross to the corner of my childhood room, and I open the second suitcase. The one that's been packed since March.

The one I've carried zipped across four cities, telling myself I just hadn't gotten to it.

I take out the forty-one glasses one at a time and set them on the shelf my grandfather built, coupes and rocks and the Nick and Noras, the only things I ever unpack, lining them up in the gray light where they'll stay.

Eight weeks.

However long it takes.

However, it ends.

For once in my life, I'm not booking the flight out before the check comes.

I'm going to stand in the room until the lights come on.

CHAPTER 11

A Different Bouquet

~AUGUST~

The fastest way to kill an arrangement is to decide what it should be before you look at what you actually have.

I've watched a hundred designers do it.

They arrive with the picture already finished in their heads, then they force the stems to match the picture — cutting, wiring, bending a living thing until it obeys a decision made in a car on the way over.

The flowers always know. You can see it in how they sit afterward.

Obedient. Dead a day early.

I've decided, standing in my own field at ten to six with the light going gold over the water, that I will not do that to her.

Not to the flowers.

Or the woman coming up my lane.

The farm is showing off, and I can't stop it. High summer's last peach roses are throwing that impossible warm light back at the sky. The cosmos have gone loose and generous in the breeze, whole rows of them nodding like they know something. Earlydahlias are opening in the far beds, rust and plum and coral and deep gold, autumn clearing its throat under summer's last song.

Bees work the herb border, drunk and unhurried. Behind me, the glass greenhouse has caught the whole sunset and is holding it, a long lantern laid down in the grass, and the orchard past the fence line has started setting fruit where the blossom used to be.

It's the most beautiful the place gets all year, and I arranged none of it for her, which is the entire point.

I check the barn table one more time.

Water in plain pitchers. Two notebooks, blank. The growing schedule she requested, printed clean, week by week from now to the equinox. No bouquet waiting on the table with her name in the card. No music drifting from the greenhouse speakers. No apricot tart from the Marigold Room, which she used to love, which I will not be caught dead producing like a man laying bait.

Nothing here that saysremember.Everything here that sayschoose.

Tessa's clinic. The elevator I wasn't in. The list of small, careful things the other two have apparently been doing. I hear about all of it, the town being what it is, gossip central.