Page 66 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

When I turn back, Amber is staring at me.

Not softly. Not with forgiveness.

But with a kind of arrested attention, like she's revising a document she'd already filed.

"You've never done that," she says quietly. "In all the years I knew you. You never once contradicted her. Not about the wedding budget, or guest list…not about anything. You'd just—" she gestures, "—rearrange the room until the conflict didn't fit in it anymore."

"I know."This is the confession, and I won't dress it up."That was the whole shape of me. I could feel exactly what was wrong, and I'd redecorate around it instead of naming it. I did it to my mother for thirty years." I hold her eyes. "I did it to you once, at the worst possible moment, when naming the thing out loud would have changed everything. So I've been practicing. Out loud. On purpose. It turns out it doesn't get easier. You just get more willing to pay for it."

She doesn't answer.

But she doesn't look away either.

I've come to learn to keep count of the things she doesn't do.

We move on toward the greenhouse for the last of the walk-through, and the sketches undo it a little.

She sees them through the propped door of my design room — the watercolor studies pinned along the wall, the ink drawings of a structure that doesn't exist yet— and she stops, because Amber Whitlock has never once in her life walked past a beautiful plan without inspecting it.

"What is this?" She's already leaning in. "This isn't an event design. This is a building."

Don't hide it. Hiding is the old sin.

"It's a conservatory." I come up beside her, careful of the distance. "Glass. There, past the west field, where the light's best in winter. I've been drawing it for two years." I point to the studies. "Workshops on that side. A space for small ceremonies in the cold months, so local couples who can't afford a destination wedding still get a beautiful place to stand. And there—" the far drawing, the one I've reworked most "—ateaching floor. Floristry. For Omegas and Betas the big studios won't hire, the ones who get told they're too soft, too junior, or too wrong-designation to run a knife. I want to train them here. I want Bellamy Blooms to make florists, not just flowers."

She's very quiet.

I glance over, and her face has done something I don't have the right to and can't look away from anyway.

"What?" I ask.

"Nothing. It's—" She presses her lips together, and I realize she picked that up from me, years ago, and never gave it back. "I've been designing a retreat. For two years. Gardens, cottages, and a workshop for local vendors. An apprenticeship program for young Omegas who want a career outside a pack." Her voice has gone strange. "For Omegas who want to build something without belonging to anyone. I have the drawings in a drawer at the office. I've never shown them to a soul."

The greenhouse drips behind us, patient.

“We built similar dreams.”

In separate towns, in separate years, not speaking or allowed to watch each other thrive and grow.

Now we both landed on the same shape — success that makes doorways for other people, a place where the excluded get taught the thing they were told they couldn't do.

"We did, didn't we?" she says, and there's a laugh in it that isn't happy, that's closer to grief. "Grew the exact same thing, in the dark, in separate towns, never once speaking. That's the part nobody warns you about. It would be so much easier if we'd become strangers."

"Yes." I don't reach for a single softening word. "It would be much easier if we'd grown apart. We grew parallel instead. I bet that’s worse…"

She looks at the drawings a moment longer. Then makes herself step back from them.

The bee saves us both from the silence, and then nearly doesn't.

It comes off the herb border, lazy, gold, and lands on the collar of her dress, right at the curve where her neck meets her shoulder, near the gland where her scent lives, and my body moves before my mind clears it.

Five years of instinct, one long-limbed reach, my hand already going for her —

I stop.

Hand in the air between us, fingers open, everything in me straining against the leash of a clause I signed and meant.

"There's a bee," I say, low and even, the voice for frightened animals. "On your collar. Left side. I'd like to move it before it decides your neck is a flower. May I? One touch. I'll be quick, and then I'll step back."