Piper's stomach started to hurt.
"Sometimes everyone can do everything right and it just doesn't work," Diana mused.
Piper couldn't entirely be certain how she looked in that moment, but she would guess she'd probably turned a shade of green that matched Anna the first day they'd met. "Oh?"
"And then they meet the right person, and you can't really remember a time anymore when they weren't together." Diana smiled, wistfully. "Except we have photos to prove it." She laughed. "The photographic evidence is where it gets you." She winked.
Her gaze drifted to the man orchestrating the magic. Roman was so muscled he was built like a tank, but he moved with the quiet grace of a predator, knelt with his camera—he called her Louise—cradled in his hands.
He was all intense focus and cropped hair, a man on a mission, but a genuine smile softened his features when he looked up from the viewfinder.
"It hasn't been easy for Roman, either," Diana said, like they were talking about the peonies again. "He and Sadie took two tries to get it right."
Two tries.
The words snagged in Piper's brain, tripping over the carefully organized files of evidence she'd been collecting her entire adult life. Her entire philosophy—the one built on the wreckage of her parents' catastrophic marriages—was predicated on a single, brutal theorem: if it failed, she was the failure. She was the curse. The common denominator.
But Jase… Roman… they'd failed and she was nowhere around.
But then they'd just… tried again? With someone new? And it had worked?
Diana must have seen the shock ghost across Piper's face, because she turned from watching her son, her expression gentling. "Love isn't a test you can fail, you know," she said, her voice as warm and comforting as the afternoon sun. Her gaze drifted back to Anna and Drake, who now laughed as Roman directed them into another pose. "We all think it's supposed to be a straight line, a perfect plan from start to finish. But it's not. Sometimes you have to get a little lost to find the right path." She looked at Piper then, her eyes full of a simple, profound truth that landed with the force of a revelation. "My Alex, he broke two engagements before me. Drove his mother nuts. But he told me early on that he's a terrible driver when it comes to love. I told him he just hadn't found the right road yet. The detours are part of the map, Piper."
Piper's internal ledger, with its neat columns of proof that she was wedding kryptonite, suddenly looked like nonsense.
The clipboard in her hands felt ridiculous. All her neat columns and color-coded tabs were proof of a debunked theorem.
Maybe she wasn't cursed. The paths weren't linear, and she'd thought it was her fault. But it was life. Not her. The idea was so foreign, so radically optimistic, that it stole the air from Piper's lungs. All this time she'd seen her history as a verdict, a final judgment.
But what if Diana was right?
What if it was all just… mileage? Practice?
The thought didn't settle comfortably.
"You two look like you're plotting a government takeover. What'd I miss?" Zach asked, striding toward them, his hands tucked in his pockets. He had that easy grin that always seemed to make her squirm.
No warning, no text, no explanation. One moment the world was a soft-focus memory she was observing from the sidelines, and the next, there was Zach, stepping into the middle of the shoot like he belonged there.
The sight of him was a dash of something warm and solid in the middle of her suddenly shifting universe.
Diana's smile was serene, as if she'd been expecting him. "I was just telling Piper how Roman and Sadie reconnected after all that time apart. How the second try was the one that stuck."
"She also told me Jase was married before," Piper's gaze met Zach's, and the words tumbled out before she could stop them, a confirmation of the impossible.
Zach let out a low whistle, his grin turning wry. "Wow, Mom's spilling all the family secrets today, huh?" He glanced between the two of them, his expression relaxing as he seemed to read the room. "Yeah, well. Once my brothers pulled their heads out of their asses, they finally got it right. Just took them a while to get there."
Diana made a simple noise under her breath, a fond, exasperated sound as she turned to fuss with nearby flowers. "It's not like you're winning the race when it comes to finding love, Zachary."
"Now you sound like Babushka," he said, feigning hurt.
"Take that back," Diana admonished, but her words were kind.
"And, for the record." He took Piper's hand in his. "I'd say my timing has been perfect."
Perfect timing.
Not cursed timing. Not failed timing. Perfect.
