23. Witnessed
Witnessed
~AMBER~
"And we're supposed to believe you're approving this?"
The councilman says it like an accusation, which — to be fair to him — it is.
I don't look up from the mountain of paperwork I'm currently signing my whole life away on.
If I look up, I'll have to look at his face, and his face has been doing something sour and self-satisfied for the better part of forty minutes now, a face that clearly enjoys the taste of the word unfortunately in its mouth.
We made it here with four minutes to spare before the eight-seventeen cutoff.
Four minutes.
Marshall drove us into town like a man who has never met a speed limit he respected, one wrist draped over the wheel, while I clutched the door handle and Sawyer read the federal instructions aloud off his phone.
We've been in this room the better part of an hour since, and in that hour I have signed my name so many times it's stopped looking like a word and started resembling a small, tired drawing of a bird. This is the last of it.
The final stack.
The only thing left standing between me and the business I built with my own two hands is this pinched man and his rubber stamp — and he knows it, and he is savoring every second.
I'm bent over a long municipal desk in a back room of the town hall that smells like old paper, scorched coffee, and the particular staleness of a place where joy comes strictly to fill out forms.
My pen has started to feel like a permanent extension of my cramping hand.
To my right, lined up along the wall like boys sent to wait outside a principal's office, stand Beckett, August, and Cade — spines straight, jaws set, doing a heroic and visibly excruciating job of holding still and holding their tongues.
To my left, draped against the side of the desk with the boneless ease of a man who has never once been intimidated by a government building, lounges Marshall.
Marshall is smoking a cigarette.
Indoors. In a no-smoking building.
Beneath a laminated sign that reads, in cheerful municipal capitals, NO SMOKING, tacked to the wall not four feet from his head.
He signed the last page of his portion of the paperwork ten minutes ago, and now he's taking a slow, luxurious pull off the cigarette like we're all lounging in a jazz club instead of sweating through a federal compliance hearing.
He considers the fuming councilman through a thin gray veil of smoke, unbothered down to his bones.
He exhales.
A lazy plume drifts across the desk toward the official, who looks like he might combust on principle and save the cigarette the trouble.
"And why wouldn't I approve it?" Marshall asks, mild as warm milk.
"The man isn't my packmate anymore. That doesn't mean I'm meant to sit around wishing misery on him for the crime of finding happiness in a different pack.
" He taps ash into the empty air. "That's not how it works.
Not for people who actually loved each other. "
The councilman — a thin, pinched man with reading glasses shoved up onto his forehead and the general aura of somebody who files his own joy under pending review — sets his jaw. "This office cannot possibly be expected to certify genuine compatibility among the five of them."
"Can't it?" Marshall isn't even looking at him now. He's studying the burning tip of his cigarette like it holds the more interesting conversation. "Go on, then. Tell me why you think that."
The man's mouth twists like he's been waiting all morning for the invitation.
"Gladly." He turns — not toward Marshall this time, but toward the three men against the wall, pitching his voice louder so it carries through the whole cramped room.
"These three are known the length and breadth of this town.
Everyone knows the story. They left this Omega—" a curt nod in my direction, like I'm Exhibit A and not a woman holding a pen "—standing at the altar.
Abandoned her. Five years ago, in front of the entirety of Honeybell Harbor.
No explanation offered. None whatsoever.
And now?" He spreads his hands wide, performing for the cheap seats.
"Now they come waltzing in here, expecting me to stamp a form swearing they've suddenly, conveniently rediscovered their love?
Please. Who, precisely, do they imagine they're convincing? "
The words land in the little room like a tray of dropped glass.
I keep my eyes on the paperwork.
I keep my pen moving, slow and even, my signature looping across another dotted line as though the man hasn't just hauled the single worst day of my life out into the fluorescent light and laid it on the desk for everyone to examine.
Keep signing. Do not give him the flinch he's fishing for. You survived the actual altar, Amber. You can survive a small man narrating it back to you.
Marshall taps his ash and exhales, entirely unmoved.
"See, that's an awful lot of noise about a story you only know the loud half of," he says.
"You've got the leaving. Congratulations.
The whole town's got the leaving. What not one of you gossips ever thought to ask is what was holding a knife to their throats while they did it.
" He tilts his head. "But that's not your job, is it?
Your job is a stamp. So how about you do the small, boring thing this office pays you for, and leave the judging to the people who were actually standing in that room. "
The councilman's face goes an interesting shade of plum.
"That is not—"
"Compatibility. That's the box you're snagged on.
" Marshall talks right over him, unhurried.
"You want to know whether five people can hold a pack together.
" He gestures, lazy, at me, at the men, at Sawyer, at the whole crowded little room.
"So quit lecturing and watch. Going to be the easiest certification you sign all year. "
I let my gaze slide, just once, to the right.
The three of them are a study in barely-contained agony.
Beckett has his arms crossed so tightly the seams of his jacket are filing a formal complaint, his cedar-and-rain-stone scent gone sharp and thunderous with the effort of staying silent.
August has gone pale, his eyes fixed on some neutral patch of the far wall, his gentle iris-and-sage scent curdling at the edges — he looks like every syllable is a nail somebody's tapping in slow.
Cade's the worst of the three at hiding it. His jaw works, his hands flex and fist at his sides, and that spiced-rum-and-blood-orange scent of his practically crackles with the need to defend himself, to explain, to say the thing he's never once been allowed to say.
Not one of them makes a sound.
They can't.
And every one of them knows they can't.
The power in this room lives entirely inside the councilman's pinched little court, and if a single one of them snaps back, he could sink our whole certification out of nothing but spite.
So they stand in it. They take it.
They let a stranger narrate their worst mistake to a room, heads high and mouths shut, because that is the toll on the bridge to the second chance they came here to beg for.
Once — just once — Cade's weight shifts, his mouth opening on the front edge of a word, five years of held-back explanation finally clawing for the door. Beckett's hand closes around his forearm before the sound can get out. Not rough. Just steady, an anchor dropped clean.
Not here, the grip says. Don't hand the man a reason.
Cade's jaw snaps shut. He breathes out through his nose, long and unsteady, and folds himself back into stillness.
I feel those swallowed words in my own chest like a stone, and I hate — I genuinely, helplessly hate — that some starved little corner of me wanted to hear them.
There's a second thing simmering under all that fury, too — one I clocked the very second the four of us walked through the door.
They've seen my neck.
The hair I left down doesn't cover the side of my throat.
It doesn't cover the mark riding just above my collarbone, or the plain, undeniable fact that I walked into this building smelling like Sawyer Devereaux from my hairline to my heels.
Beckett's eyes keep snagging on the marks and wrenching away. Cade looked exactly once, and hasn't let himself look again, his throat working around whatever he swallowed. August noticed and went still and quiet behind his own face.
They know.
They know precisely what I did last night, and precisely with whom. It is quietly taking all three of them apart at the seams.
I keep waiting to feel cruel about that.
Vindicated, even.
Mostly what I feel, sitting under the weight of every eye in this room, is witnessed — seen, for the first time in five long years, as a woman somebody wanted enough to leave a mark.
It's a small, dizzy, faintly shameful kind of power, and I don't fully trust it yet.
Five years I've spent making myself smaller in this town — neutralizing my scent down to nothing, pinning my hair up tight, keeping my chin level and my wants filed away where nobody could pick them up and use them on me.
Now here I sit in the ugliest room in the county, marked up and steeped in a man's whole night, pinned under a government official's glare, feeling more like myself than I have since the last time somebody buttoned me into a white dress.
I don't know what to do with the feeling.
So I do the one thing I've always known how to do under pressure. I keep signing.
A light touch lands at my waist.
I glance over my shoulder to find Sawyer inches away, hovering close, a paper cup of the terrible municipal coffee in one hand and — I realize — the other resting gently at the small of my back.
"I got you a chair," he says, low, just for me.
I blink up at him.
"You what?"
He nods toward it.
A plain office chair, wheeled over from some empty desk across the room and positioned right behind me.