Page 64 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

Bare stems and mulch where a sunrise used to stand.

"You had apricot roses here." She doesn't look at me. She's looking at the bare bed, and her voice has changed register, off the clipboard now, into something with a floor under it. "Two weeks ago. The whole town got them. Ruth Kettle had a bucket on the general store counter. The clinic had them in the waiting room. Somebody left a jar of them on a grave up at St. Brendan's." Now she turns. "You stripped your best display bed and gave four thousand dollars of roses away in three days. Why?"

Here it is.

The one question I hoped she wouldn't ask and knew she would, because she reads a field the way I read a dahlia, forty-eight hours early. I could deflect. I have the words. I feel Cade's whole toolkit sitting right there, the charming near-answer, andI understand for the first time in my life exactly why he reaches for it far too often.

Because the truth is standing in front of me with those stunning brown eyes with hints of green, and I would give a great deal not to say it.

I press my lips together.

"Because you were going to walk up that lane on Thursday. And you'd pass four hundred apricot roses in your exact color between the gate and my barn. There is no version of that walk where you don't stop, even for a second, and wonder whether I grew them for you." I keep my hands still at my sides. "Whether the whole field was a message. Whether I've spent five years farming a shrine. I couldn't stand the idea of you doing that math in my field, so I cut the evidence and gave it away before you got here."

The wind moves the cosmos.

She doesn't say anything for a moment, and surely my admission was the wrong idea.

Anyone else would take offense to it. Removing something that held so much meaning because the person who inspired their beauty was coming into your space. Your world, and witness the evidence firsthand.

However, she isn’t like everyone else.

She always takes things different. Looks at scenarios in different perspectives that most would never fathom. That’s why she’s such a successful wedding planner, taking things from all aligns and achieving perfection at its finest.

When she does, it lands like a correction from a teacher I respect.

"That's still letting the past run the work, August."

I go very still.

"You made a floral decision…a real one, a display bed, your best color, gone. Based entirely on what happened five years ago.You didn't cut those roses for the wedding. You cut them for the ghost." Her chin is up. "You keep telling me you won't let the past control your flowers. Then you gutted a bed to hide from it. That's not freedom from the past. That's the past holding the shears."

She's right.

The understanding arrives all at once, clean and total, the way it does when someone says a true thing you've been arranging your whole life not to notice. I removed the roses to prove I wasn't haunted, and the removal was the haunting. It was also in hopes of protecting her, but all it did was really emphasize that I haven’t moved on from that fateful date where we ran away like the cowards we were.

But has she moved on? Has she been able to forget the agony we delivered to her with our choices?

I performed being over her by making a decision I'd never make for any other client on earth.

"You're right," I say, and I feel the words cost me. "I did the thing I swore I wouldn't. I let it decide."

She blinks, like she braced for an argument and got a confession instead.

She just handed me back a piece of my own honesty — I ask the question that's been building in me since her truck came up the lane.

It is not only about flowers.

"So tell me." I turn to face her fully. "Forget what you carried five years ago. Forget the girl who ordered that bouquet. What would you choose now?"

She goes quiet again, but it's a different level of silence.

This one has her looking out over the beds like she's actually letting the question shimmer. I watch her decide to answer it honestly, watch her set the clipboard down on the fence rail so her hands are free.

Deep down, I understand I'm about to meet a stranger I've loved for five years.

"Coral," she says. "But bolder than I'd have dared at twenty-four. Not blush. Not the safe or the typical warmth everyone photographs. Real coral, loud, almost orange, the color that makes a mother-of-the-bride nervous."

"I have it. Second field. Keep going."