37. Blooming Apricot
Blooming Apricot
~AMBER~
"Are you stressed?"
"No, I'm fucking hungry."
The words come out sharper than the question deserves, which — fine, that's answer enough on its own.
I don't stop moving. I've got a seating chart in one hand and a fabric swatch in the other, and I'm crossing my own office for what has to be the fortieth time, laying things down on surfaces and immediately picking them back up like a raccoon with a filing system.
Golden Hour Vows has never looked more like a crime scene.
There are ribbon samples fanned across the loveseat.
There's a tower of RSVP cards colonizing my desk.
A garment bag holding the bridesmaids' swatch dresses hangs off the bookshelf, and the whole room smells like cardstock and cold coffee and the eucalyptus stems Priya left in a mason jar by the window.
My checklist has a checklist. The caterer needs a final headcount by Thursday.
The rental company swears the chiavari chairs ship Monday, which means they'll ship Wednesday, which means I need a backup vendor on standby who doesn't know they're a backup vendor.
Sloane's people want one more mood board.
Nolan's people want fewer emails. I have color-coded every last piece of it, and the color-coding has started developing subplots of its own.
Sawyer is watching me from the armchair in the corner with the lazy, delighted patience of a man at a very good tennis match.
He's got one ankle hooked over the opposite knee, a pen spinning idle through his fingers, magnolia and black pepper and warm bourbon rolling off him easy as a Sunday.
He isn't helping. He isn't not-helping. He's just spectating my slow-motion unraveling like it's the most entertaining thing to happen in Honeybell Harbor all week.
It might be. It's a small town.
"You're doing the raccoon thing," he observes.
"I'm coordinating."
"You've picked up that swatch four times. It's beige. It was beige the last three times. It's going to stay beige."
"It's oatmeal, the light in here is a liar, and I need to know if it fights the coral or complements it.
" I hold the fabric up to the window, glare at it, set it down.
"The wedding is in a week, Sawyer. A week.
Eight weeks ago this was a comfortable, distant, theoretical event.
Now it's a countdown, and I swear to God the last two months evaporated.
I feel like I climbed into one of those Doctor Who phone boxes and got spat back out on the wrong side of the calendar. "
"A TARDIS."
"I don't need the correct terminology, I need forty-eight more hours in every day."
He grins. The scoundrel actually grins, and it does nothing to lower my blood pressure.
Under the theatrics, though, my hands know exactly what they're doing.
That's the thing about a crash-out — mine never look like panic, not the real kind.
The real panic only shows up when something's genuinely broken past fixing, and this isn't that.
This is the loud, flailing, productive kind, the kind where everything feels like it's sliding off the table but nothing's actually hit the floor. Yet. I think. Probably.
The pack has been the one steady thing in all of it, which is its own small miracle.
Since the contract got updated — since the paperwork quietly narrowed us to four — the four of us have found a rhythm I didn't dare hope for.
Beckett anchors. August smooths. Sawyer charms. I plan.
We fit. On a good morning, standing in that rambling kitchen with all their scents braided into the coffee steam, I let myself believe this is a life I get to keep.
If you ignore Cade. Which is getting harder to do.
He hasn't set foot in the house. Not once.
He shows up to every job we share, does his part with the polish of a man who's never dropped a ball professionally in his life.
Then he vanishes back to whatever couch he's living on now, and he does not come home.
There isn't a home, as far as he's concerned.
The three of them are too proud to chase him and too hurt to say his name at dinner, and I can feel it souring in Beckett especially — a low, banked anger under the cedar every time somebody almost mentions the empty fifth chair.
August tried, once. Two weeks back he left a plate in the fridge with Cade's name on a sticky note, written in that careful florist's hand of his, in case Cade turned up hungry after a shift.
The plate sat there four days. August threw it out himself without a word, and none of us said anything, because there wasn't a version of the comment that didn't cut somebody.
That's the shape of things now. A plate nobody ate. A note nobody answered.
I keep telling everyone it doesn't bother me.
I'm an excellent liar. I've fooled juries of vendors and mothers-of-the-bride.
I have not fooled myself for one single second.
It bothers me plenty, and worse than the bother is what it's doing to the house — making it stubbornly refuse to become a home, keeping it a way station, a place we're camped instead of a place we're planting.
I have a folder of listings a mile deep.
Three bedrooms minimum, a real kitchen, a yard big enough for a garden August could disappear into and a fire pit we actually own instead of one that came with a rental.
I catch myself lingering on the houses with a fourth and a fifth bedroom, then clicking away fast, because planning rooms for people who haven't earned them is exactly how a woman ends up humiliated on a church lawn.
I learned that lesson in permanent ink. I plan for the four who show up.
The rest is not my math to do. That refusal is exactly why Beckett cornered me last night, took the pen out of my hand the way they all keep doing, and announced we're going house-hunting tomorrow.
Properly. Before the festival swallows the whole town.
Because there's a festival coming. The Harborlight Fair rolls into Honeybell Harbor next week, tents and string lights and a Ferris wheel down by the water, and the timing is either a gift or a curse depending on the hour you ask me.
We're planning to use it. We just haven't broadcast how, because the one problem I cannot spreadsheet my way out of is the oldest problem this town has.
Gossip.
"You've gone quiet," Sawyer says. "That's scarier than the pacing."
"I'm thinking about the leak."
His pen stops spinning. That got him.
Here's the thing nobody warned me about when I signed a celebrity client: a small town keeps no secrets.
Sloane Carroway is a household name, Nolan Reeve is the kind of groom whose face sells magazines, and every detail of their wedding is worth actual money to the wrong person.
We've had three things slip already. Little things — the venue shortlist, a delivery window, the color story — surfacing in places they had no business surfacing.
Whispered at the Tide Table. Half-known at the Driftglass.
Each leak a pinprick, each one proof that we cannot give Sloane and Nolan the wedding they're paying for, the wedding they deserve, unless we get so creative that the truth never leaves the four of us at all.
So Sawyer and I have been running a trap.
It's an old planner's trick, and a nasty one — you feed slightly different false details to different people, salt the ground with fictions, then wait to see which fiction crawls back to you and from whose mouth.
A canary in the coal mine. We've done it twice now. Both times the canary died.
The first leak was almost funny — a florist two towns over calling to "confirm" an order I'd never placed, working off a color story only six living people had seen.
The second wasn't funny at all. Somebody let Sloane's arrival window slip to Beatrice Honeywell over at the Salt and Honey like it was common weather, and Beatrice, bless her heart, passed it along to me thinking she was being helpful.
Every pinhole like that is a photographer's payday and a bride's nightmare.
I have spent my whole career making certain my brides never once have to flinch.
I am not about to start with the biggest client of my life.
"You're chewing on the part you don't want to say," Sawyer says quietly, all the play gone out of his voice.
I set the seating chart down. Slowly, this time.
"The information that leaked," I say, "went to exactly one person on the team each time. And it wasn't August. And it wasn't Beckett. And it wasn't you." I make myself look at him. "You do the math you get with a list that short."
The name sits there between us, unspoken, because saying it out loud would make it a thing I've decided to believe, and I am not ready to decide that.
It can't be Cade. He's careless, he's a coward, he's currently the most frustrating man in three counties, but a leak?
Selling out a client? That's a different kind of low.
Except every time I run the numbers, the same answer keeps falling out of the machine.
It isn't one of my other men, and it certainly isn't me.
"We stay creative," Sawyer says finally. It's not a denial. It's not an agreement. It's a decision to keep moving, which right now is all either of us can afford. "We keep the real plan to the four of us. Nobody else gets the true version, not even by accident."
"That's the plan." I press the heels of my hands to my eyes. "God, I'm tired. And starving. Did I mention starving?"
"Once or twice."