Page 71 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

"Private." Sloane says it fast, like she's been holding it. "Not hidden. Private. I don't want to feel like I'm performing my own wedding."

"Secure," Nolan adds. "But nobody in an earpiece breathing on my grandmother. If it feels like security, it's failed."

"Then it won't feel like security." I'm already sketching. "It'll feel like a party too good to leave."

I draw the ceremony on the cliff lawn, the reception flowing back into this hall, a hanging installation of greenery and lanterns over the head table to pull the eye up and the room in. I turn the pad so the screen can see it.

"The trouble is the weight," I start. "That much greenery over guests needs?—"

"The east and center beams." Beckett doesn't look up from the plan. "Original oak, twelve-inch. They'll take it. The south wall won't — that's lath over a later renovation. Hang off the beams, not the wall."

I hadn't finished the sentence. He answered the part I hadn't reached yet.

"Fine." I move on before my face can do anything. "Florals need to read from forty feet without?—"

"Scale's too tight." August is already adjusting his own sketch. "From the back rows those blooms vanish. You want fewer stems, bigger gesture. Branch structures here and here, sothe sightline carries." He slides it toward me. It's exactly right. It's the fix I was three seconds from asking for.

"The cocktail hour bottlenecks," I say, testing now, waiting to see who?—

"At the north door." Cade taps the diagram without looking up. "Two hundred people, one bar, one door. Move the first station out to the terrace and you split the flow before it jams. They get a drink and a view in the same six steps. Half your crowd problem never forms."

I stare at the three of them.

They're not showing off. That's the thing that curls under my ribs. There's no performance in it. Beckett finds the bones. August makes it beautiful. Cade feels how a stranger will move through the room before the stranger arrives. I take all three and braid them into one clean hour of somebody's life. We are doing the thing we used to do at a kitchen table at midnight, and none of us decided to start.

The room has gone quiet in a particular way.

Priya has stopped typing. Niall's head is going back and forth between the four of us like he's watching a rally he doesn't understand but can't leave. Juniper has a smile hidden badly behind a hand pie. Marlowe uncrosses her arms.

"That was deeply unsettling to watch," Marlowe says, flat. "Four people using one professional brain. I'd like it noted that I hated it."

Nobody laughs, because everybody feels it.

The meeting keeps rolling and it gets easy, and the easy is the danger. The men bicker about table spacing. Cade wants eighteen inches more between rounds; Beckett says the room can't spare it. I cut in with something dry about how eighteen inches is also what they left between themselves and accountability for five years, and Cade snorts — an actual, undignified snort — before he can stop himself. August, withoutheat, informs Cade that ranunculus and anemone are not "basically the same flower, Cade, they're not even the same season." Cade says they're both round. August closes his eyes like a man praying for strength.

"Round is a quality of fruit, not a flower," he says, eyes still shut. "By that logic I could bill the bride for a bouquet of cherry tomatoes."

"People would talk about that wedding for a decade."

"People would litigate."

Niall raises his hand like we're in a classroom. "Is it — are they always like this?"

"Worse," Marlowe says, not looking up from the molding. "This is them on their best behavior."

Beckett slides the scale model of the head table three inches to the left. I open my mouth to ask him to move the head table three inches to the left.

I close it again.

There it was. The old machinery. Still running perfectly inside a building they'd burned down.

For a few minutes it isn't grief or rage. It's just easy, the way it used to be. That ease is the cruelest thing they've done to me since the note. It reminds me that loving them was the simplest thing I ever did. Surviving what they did with that love was the hard part. Not the loving. The loving was easy. I could do the loving in my sleep. I did, for years.

I put the pen down.

"We'll split from here," I say, too briskly. "Beckett, structure and rigging. August, florals and staging. Cade, beverage and flow. Priya keeps the master. You come to me, not to each other."

I'm reassigning them into separate corners because I've just learned in real time how dangerous the same table is. It's too late for my scent. The apricot has already warmed through the neutralizer — I feel it go, that low golden slip of it into theroom, the tell I can't checklist my way out of. Three Alpha scents answer before three men can stop them. Cedar deepens. Iris blooms. Caramel heats toward smoke. It lasts a second. Then all three of them wrestle it back down, and we all pretend, with enormous dignity, that the room didn't just say a very embarrassing thing out loud.