15. The Long Road Home
The Long Road Home
~AMBER~
The first thing you learn in this business is to confirm your own ride home before you confirm anyone else's.
I have arranged transportation for four hundred guests in a single evening. Shuttles, town cars, a horse-drawn carriage once, a boat that leaked.
I have never, in five years, remembered to arrange my own.
There is always someone to ride back with. Marlowe with the salvage van. Juniper with the bakery boxes. Priya with the good rental. I climb in wherever there's a seat, because the seat is never the thing I'm thinking about.
Tonight there is no seat waiting for me to fill for a ride.
I walk out of the meeting hall into the blue end of the evening. The lot behind the library is empty. I understand in one clean beat exactly what happened.
The team took the truck. They dropped everyone at their designated doors the way we always do.
They left the way we always leave, and they assumed — reasonably, because it has been true every single day for five years — that I was already handled.
That someone had me. That I'd fold into whatever vehicle had room and ride home thinking about tomorrow.
I should have gone with them.
I know that now, standing in the gravel with my flats going cold through the soles. I should have climbed into the van an hour ago and let the math wait.
Instead, I stayed.
I wanted the meeting.
Wanted the sealed room, the whiteboard, and the clean forensic pleasure of watching a problem become a plan. I wanted the numbers to add up. To sit four grown men down and confirm that the arithmetic of my own survival would actually hold.
Instead of arithmetic, I got the truth.
The math was never going to math. The math left me at an altar five years ago with no intention of correcting itself when the formula is proven wrong.
My phone buzzes against my hip. I don't stop walking to check it, because I've already started walking, my body making the call my brain is still catching up to.
Down the hill. Past the darkened print shop.
Toward the harbor road that curves the long way around to Seabriar and my little peach cottage with the rose garden I keep threatening to tame.
It's a twenty-minute drive.
On foot, in the dark, in these shoes, it's closer to three hours.
Fine. Three hours.
I have a great deal to walk off.
The phone buzzes again, insistent, so I pull it out under the last working streetlight and thumb it awake. The group chat is a wall of my three favorite people trying to reach me at once.
Juniper: WHERE ARE YOU? The boys came out looking like someone shot their dog. What happened? Priya: Amber. Confirm location. This is not a drill. Marlowe: She's walking. I can feel it. She does this. Amber, get in a vehicle. Juniper: IS SHE WALKING TO SEAbrIAR. IN THE DARK. ABERCROMBIE WHITLOCK—
I turn the phone face-down against my palm and keep moving.
I'll answer when I'm a person again. Right now I'm a woman on a dark road with five years of something finally coming up her throat, and that woman should not be allowed near a keyboard.
The harbor road unspools ahead of me, pale and dry, the packed-dirt shoulder crunching under my flats.
The water sits off to my right, flat and black, the last of the sunset gone to a thin coral seam at the horizon. The air smells like low tide and cut hay and, faintly, the salt-sugar ghost of somebody's late bonfire. It's beautiful.
This town is always, relentlessly beautiful, even while it watches you come apart on one of its roads.
I let myself have the truth now.
The whole ugly shape of it.
There's no one out here to perform composure for.
They left me because my father threatened them.
I've said versions of that sentence in my head for five years.
I said them the way you press a bruise you've decided is permanent — from a distance, abstractly, a wound I'd catalogued and shelved.
But I couldn’t confirm it.
Didn’t have enough evidence to put the nail on the head and be mad at the ones who created me for steer my life into some sort of entertainment show but then blaming it on me like it was my evil plot to ensue.
Tonight I heard it out loud, in a sealed room, from the men themselves.
Alistair got them in a corner. He named what he'd take. The estate. The contracts. The permits. Theo's whole future. They weighed it, my three Alphas, the men who wrote vows they never got to read and in every version of the math they ran, I came out the acceptable loss.
The acceptable loss.
I turn the phrase over like a stone in my pocket.
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, good enough, to obey.
They loved me.
They simply loved me reasonably.
Reasonable love folds the second it's asked to bleed.
My feet hurt already, and I'm not a quarter of the way.
I keep going.
My father is a villain.
I decided that a long time ago, and I am not interested in revising the ruling tonight.
But I'm honest enough, furious, with the salt stinging the back of my throat, to know he didn't build this new trap to punish me.
He built it to protect me.
Me, and the empire he assumes I'll inherit whether I want the thing or not. He watched three men prove, in front of the whole eastern seaboard, that they'd choose their own ground over his daughter.
He filed it away, the way he files everything.
Now he's testing whether they'll do it a second time.
That's what turns my stomach on this dark road.
Not the cruelty. The accuracy.
He is proving his entire point without saying a word, because the men keep proving it for him.
He threatened them once, and they folded.
He's threatened them again, and I only learned the truth of the first time because the second arrived in a cream envelope with a filing code stamped in the corner.
What, exactly, were they planning to do about it?
Sign the forms. Stand in a row. Be careful, honest, and sorry, and let it happen again in slow motion, because careful is the only setting they own.
I stop in the middle of the empty road and press the heels of my hands to my eyes. I breathe. My own scent comes up around me sharp enough to taste — apricot gone bruised, roses snapped off at the stem, the spiced-citrus burn I could never train out of my own anger.
There's no neutralizer left in me strong enough to hold it, and I don't want to hold it. Let the whole dark road smell it.
There's no one out here to hide from.
I would rather crawl home on my hands than let one of them drive me.
I lower my hands.
I keep walking.
I make it maybe a mile before I hear the engine.
It comes up fast behind me, too fast, tires biting the dry road, then a hard screech as it brakes.
My whole stupid traitor heart does the thing I'd have sworn under oath it wouldn't. It leaps. For one bright, humiliating second, I let myself hope it's them. That one of them couldn't stand it.
That somebody finally chose the unreasonable thing and came tearing down a dark road to fight for the woman who walked out on him.
I turn my head.
It isn't them.
The truck idling half a length behind me is not Beckett's, and the eyes locked onto mine through the windshield aren't cedar-and-storm hazel. They're darker. Warmer. Right now they're wide with something that looks a great deal like fear.
Sawyer.
He's a wreck, and that's the first thing I register, because it's so unlike him it stops the breath in me.
The immaculate Charleston composure is gone. His cream shirt clings to his chest, sleeves shoved to the elbow, dark curls damp and wild, and he's breathing like a man who just ran a very long way in the wrong shoes.
I do the geography, and my chest does something complicated.