"Hold the ladder."
"I am holding the ladder."
"You're holding my ankle."
"Your ankle is attached to the ladder," Theo said. "Structurally, it's the same thing."
I was eight feet up on the roof of the Halcyon Hotel, wiring jasmine into the top of the ceremony arch, with the whole city spread out below me in the late Friday sun. The river was a strip of hammered tin. Somebody's laundry flapped on a balcony two streets away. Up here, nineteen floors above the traffic, the wind had a clean smell, and it kept trying to steal my roll of wire.
The arch was the best thing I had ever made. I knew it the way you know a song is good before the chorus. Blush garden roses, apricot, cream, foxgloves for height, and the jasmine trailing down both sides so that by the time the bride walked under it tomorrow the whole roof would smell green and sweet.
Theo's hand was warm around my ankle, just above the strap of my clog. He was not looking at the arch.
"You missed a bit," he said.
"Where?"
"Nowhere. I wanted you to look down."
I looked down. He was grinning, squinting into the sun, his sleeves rolled, a smear of green moss across his forearm. My wire slipped and the cut end went straight into the pad of my thumb.
"Ow. Ow, you idiot."
"Come down."
"I'm fine."
"You're bleeding on the bride's roses. Come down."
I came down. He took my hand and turned it to the light, and before I could stop him he had a roll of green florist's tape out of his back pocket and was winding it round my thumb, neat and tight, the way his father taught both of us to wrap stems.
"There," he said, and didn't let go.
Behind him, his crew was laying the reception tables in long rows, dark red roses packed into moss, candles in old green glass. His half of the roof looked like a velvet room at midnight. Mine looked like a June morning. Somehow they worked side by side. I didn't want to think about why.
One job belonged to neither of us. On Wednesday Celeste had emailed, with six exclamation marks, to ask for white peonies in the bridal suite, the pink-hearted kind, because her grandmother had carried them. Theo had taken that job before I could open my mouth. Three tall buckets of them stood in the shade of the water tower, waiting to go downstairs. I didn't look at them. I had got very good at not looking at things.
"We haven't talked about the letters," I said.
"Rule three."
"Rule three is suspended."
"Since when?"
"Since you held my ankle."
His thumb moved across my knuckles. His voice dropped. "Tonight. After dinner. I swear, Bell."
Then the planner came out of the stairwell clapping her hands for the lighting check, and he let go of me, and I went back up the ladder with a green thumb and my face on fire.
The rehearsal dinner was on the roof at eight, under strings of round bulbs Theo had hung himself that afternoon from the water tower to the parapet. The wedding party was twenty people. The real thing tomorrow would be three hundred, and a string quartet, and a fire marshal, but tonight it was a long table under the arch and a lot of wine and Celeste laughing at everything.
I had meant to slip away after the setup. Celeste wouldn't hear of it.
"You built this," she said, and pushed me into a chair at the end of the table. "Both of you. Sit. Eat. Julian, these are my florists."
Julian Pike was not what I expected from a man whose father owned half the riverfront. He was thin and quiet, with soft brown hair and a nose that had been broken once and set a little crooked. He shook my hand politely. Then he turned to shake Theo's, and stopped with his arm half out, and the color went out of his face like water down a drain.
"Hello, Julian," Theo said.
Julian's hand went to his own nose. He seemed to have no idea he was doing it.
"You," he said. "I didn't know. Celeste never said the name."
"I didn't either," Theo said. "Not till last week."
Celeste looked between them, puzzled, and then shrugged it off and called for more wine.
Theo had been put in charge of the place cards, because his handwriting was nicer than the planner's. While the soup came round he sat beside me with a stack of cream cards and his green fountain pen, writing out table numbers for tomorrow. Table 7. Table 17. Table 27. He crossed his sevens. A small bar through each one, quick and neat, a habit he hadn't had at twenty-four.
Something about those sevens snagged in my mind, like wool on a nail.
I was still trying to work out what when the stairwell door banged open behind us and a man came out onto the roof.
He was in his sixties, silver-haired, tall, with a camel coat thrown over his shoulders like a cape. Two younger men in dark suits came out after him and stood by the door. One had a furled black umbrella on his arm, though it hadn't rained all day, and I had last seen him under Theo's awning. He moved like a man who expected the furniture to get out of his way, and the furniture did. Julian stood up so fast his chair scraped.
"Dad. You said you'd be late."
"I am late," said Graham Pike. "Flight from Zurich. Celeste, you look lovely. What is that smell?"
"Jasmine," said Celeste. "Nora's idea."
"Is it." He came down the length of the table, kissing cheeks, shaking hands, making a slow circuit, until he reached our end. He looked at me with polite disinterest. Then he looked at Theo.
He stopped.
For a long moment Graham Pike didn't say anything at all. He took in the rolled sleeves, the moss on the forearm, the green fountain pen, the place cards fanned out by Theo's plate. His face did nothing. His eyes went flat and pale as coins.
The whole table had gone quiet. The bulbs swayed on their wire. Down on the street, nineteen floors below, a siren rose and faded.
"Marsh," said Graham Pike. "You had my letter. I paid you a great deal of money to stay away from this city."