Page 90 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

It's such a clean, terrible way to put it.

I remember the first night I drove into this town, everything I owned crammed into a hatchback, a binder of someone else's ruined wedding riding shotgun where a person should have been.

I remember parking outside a shuttered stationery shop on Bellflower Lane —the one that would become mine— and doing the only kind of math that had ever loved me back.

What it would cost.

How long it would take.

Who I'd have to become.

I built Golden Hour Vows one impossible column at a time, and not a single column had a man in it, because I'd learned, expensively, that men are the variable you cannot control for.

So I made myself the constant.

I made myself the entire equation.

In the end, it worked.

That's the cruel joke of the thing. It worked, beautifully, right up until the man whose empire I never wanted came back to remind me I'd built my whole independence on ground he still holds the deed to.

Here is the part I make myself look at straight, because I have never once been able to leave a problem unexamined, and I'm not going to start on the worst night of the reopening.

I am not even angry that they chose the Harbor.

That would surprise them, if any of them were brave enough to ask.

I understand connection better than anyone alive.

I have built a whole company on the truth that a small town is a web, and you cannot pull one thread without a hundred others going taut. If my father had made good —closed the farm, pulled the permits, killed a nineteen-year-old's scholarship out of spite— it would not have been three men who suffered. It would have been Milo, Marina, Theo, and half the vendors on Bellflower Lane.

I have spent five years protecting exactly those people.

I would not have wanted them burned for me either.

So no.

The choice to save the Harbor is not the thing that guts me.

The thing that guts me is what the choice proved.

It proved they were not willing to be selfish for me.

Not once.

Not for a single hour.

Every man I've ever watched truly fight for a woman has, at some point, been magnificently, stupidly selfish about it — willing to set something on fire, willing to be the villain, willing to carry a risk no sane person would carry, because the alternative was losing her.

My three did the reasonable thing.

They ran the numbers. The numbers said let her go.

They were sensible enough, careful enough,goodenough, to obey.

They loved me.

They simply loved me reasonably.