40. Not In The Cards #3
"It's all right." She's already looking back down into her clouded glass, already half gone from me. "Go on, now. Walk on into the destiny you've picked. Best you go and witness that wedding dress." A pause. Her rings click against the crystal. "One last time."
The words snag on something and tear. "What do you mean, one last—"
But she's humming now, some old tune with no beginning or end, her attention folded entirely back into the ball.
I've been dismissed. The great and terrible seer of the Harborlight Fair has taken my measure, said her piece, and moved on.
She's paying me no more mind than she'd pay a moth against the tent flap.
One last time. The phrase trails after me like a cold draft.
She couldn't have meant it the way it landed.
She meant go look at the pretty dress before the night is over, the way you'd tell anybody at a fair to catch the fireworks before they're gone.
That's all. That has to be all. But my skin has gone to gooseflesh under my good jacket.
The fair's gold light has taken on the queasy shimmer of a thing about to tip over, and I can't shake the sense that the old woman saw the whole shape of tonight long before I ever did.
I stand there stupid for a second longer. Then I make myself turn. I make myself walk.
My phone's back in my hand before I've cleared her tent, the screen a bright cold rectangle in the gathering dusk, and I stare down at it knowing — feeling it in my chest like a stone — that I've run out of road.
The wedding's in a few hours. The message is drafted.
The number's waiting for its confirmation.
Whatever I'm going to be, after today, I'm about to become it.
There's a choice sitting right here in my palm and no more room left to not make it.
I think about Amber.
I think about that morning, the one I keep circling back to at three a.m. — the kitchen, the pancakes I wasn't there for, and her.
On the stairs. I know she heard me. I know it the way you know a bruise before it colors.
She was up there and I was down here getting loud and stupid and cruel about Iris and a couch, saying she was going to be the cause of every ounce of misery this second chance dragged in, saying it like it was her fault, like any of it was ever her fault.
She heard all of it. I felt her hear it.
That's the thing I can't set down. Not the contract, not the threats, not even the burning wreck of my career.
Her. On those stairs, going still the way she does when a thing lands too hard to even flinch from.
I have spent five and a half years being a man who hurts Amber Whitlock and calls it self-preservation.
First at an altar. Then on a staircase. Now, in a few hours, if I go through with this — a third time.
Not aimed at her directly, this round, but at the one fragile thing she has poured her whole battered heart into building back up out of the wreckage I helped make.
Three strikes. A man doesn't get a fourth. A man shouldn't.
After tonight, it won't matter. That's the thing I keep telling myself.
After this wedding, we scatter. The pack gets its house on the outskirts and I get my truck and my empty apartment and the long, clean, merciful distance between us.
Maybe distance is the thing that finally fixes it.
Or maybe there's no fixing. A man just learns to move on, and that's its own kind of mercy too.
Ondine's voice keeps circling back through me.
Will you truly let fear go on dictating your whole future?
Under it runs an older, colder one — Theo's.
You let fear run your whole life. Under even that, the oldest voice of all, my father's, the one I've spent thirty years running from and turning into by the inch.
Three ghosts, all singing the same note in three different keys.
I've gotten very good at not listening. I've built a whole life out of not listening.
The trouble with a fair full of fortune-tellers and family is that the not-listening eventually runs out of road, same as everything else does.
I take a breath that shakes on the way in. My thumb hovers over the screen, over the little arrow that ends things, and my own reflection stares back at me faint and gray in the glass between the words.
Two roads. That's what the fair-witch would likely call it, if she deigned to glance up again.
Two roads and a coward standing at the fork, same as always.
One of them I know cold. It's the one I've walked my whole life, the one my father blazed clear ahead of me, the safe wide road that keeps you moving and keeps you good and alone.
The other scares me so badly I can hardly make my eyes rest on it.
That's the joke of being your father's son.
You get so practiced at the running that standing still starts to feel like the only truly dangerous thing left.
"I have to own up to my shit," I whisper, to nobody, to the roar of a fair that isn't listening. My voice cracks down the middle. "So let's own up to my decisions."
I press the send button.