42. In The Cards
In The Cards
~AMBER~
The walk to the second tent is the longest aisle I've ever laid down, and I designed it that way myself, so I have nobody to blame but the woman in the mirror.
It runs a hundred feet at least, a river of ivory runner unspooled across the grass, hemmed on both sides by an arch that August and I argued over for three delirious weeks. Wondrous is the only word for it.
He's built the whole thing out of the fight we had — the good fight, the one where I told him I couldn't stand the flowers from my first bouquet, the ones I'd carried five and a half years ago and dropped on a cold stone step, and he told me, in that gentle immovable way of his, that a flower doesn't carry a memory unless you let it.
So we compromised.
He kept the ranunculus, the ones I loved back then and love still.
He kept the deep reds and the burnt autumn orange I've always reached for.
He swapped in new things too, coral dahlias and apricot roses and rosemary for remembrance, so the whole arch smells like the old grief and the new joy braided into one impossible rope.
I carry a smaller version of it in my hands right now, a bouquet that is both the flowers I was abandoned holding and the flowers I chose on purpose, and it is the single most beautiful thing anyone has ever made me.
He wouldn't take a dime for it, either.
When I tried to fold the arch into the event budget, August looked at me like I'd offered to pay him for breathing.
Some things a man builds because he loves you, he said, then went right back to wiring roses onto a frame at midnight without another word.
I think about that more and more lately — the way all three of them have quietly stopped letting me pay my own way through my own life. Not to control me.
Out of something I am still, at this late hour, learning how to let myself have.
The dress is another animal.
It's heavy — real weight, boned and beaded, the veil a whole separate ceremony of tulle floating off the back of my head. It clings to me with the seriousness of a thing built to last a lifetime, and by rights all that weight should be dragging at me.
My heart won't cooperate. My heart is light as a shed feather.
That's the strangest part.
An hour ago I stood in a wrecked tent and watched a man I once loved lose everything he had, and I felt no triumph in it, no grief either, just a clean and startling quiet.
We confirmed it.
Cade was the leak.
It played out live, on regional television, in front of a hundred neighbors and a rolling camera, and by now I'd bet the whole story is racing through Honeybell Harbor faster than a grease fire — Beatrice at the Salt and Honey, the men at the Driftglass, every phone in every kitchen lit up with it.
I keep waiting to feel the old fury swell up. It doesn't come. He made his choice. He sat across a table from a man who trusted him with everything and he sold that trust for a stranger's money and his own comfort, and now his career is the price of it.
That's not a thing I did to him.
That's a thing he did to himself, with his own two hands, over months, while three better men chose me on purpose every single day.
The anger I've carried about the past — the great cold stone of it that has taken up room in my chest for five and a half years — I feel it dissolving as I walk, grain by grain, like sugar in warm water.
It isn't worth the space anymore.
That's what finally lands.
There's a child coming now, a whole new person who is going to need every inch of room in my heart for love and not one inch of it for rage, and I refuse to raise a baby in a house I've let the past haunt.
Boy or girl, this child is going to grow up watching a mother who chose forward.
I want that so badly it aches.
So I let Cade go, right there on the ivory runner, the way you set down a suitcase you've hauled so long you forgot it was heavy. I told him he could come by the cottage and try to talk it through, and I meant it in the way you mean a door left unlocked. But that's wishful thinking, and I know it.
I've made my decision, and it doesn't have Cade in it. It has August and Beckett and Sawyer, three men who spent ten weeks earning back something they threw away, who bled for it and knelt for it and stood their ground for it. They earned their second chance.
He earned his exit.
There's a mercy in it I didn't expect.
For five and a half years I imagined the day I'd finally stop hurting over Cade Mercer would arrive like a thunderclap — some grand, cathartic reckoning. It came instead like this: a quiet Tuesday feeling on a wedding afternoon, an old ache simply packing its bags and letting itself out.
I hope, in some far-off future, he finds his way to whatever waits on the other side of all that fear. I truly do.
I just won't be there to watch it, and I have made my peace with the not-watching.
I don't even know how we're going to pull off an actual wedding of our own, once the dust settles. The logistics of it make my planner's brain itch — four people, one Omega, a town full of gossips.
I guess that's a problem for a woman who's about to have all the time in the world.
The house is nearly ready. I'm handing the business to Sawyer and the girls. By tonight, I'll finally get to be the bride instead of the one steaming the bride's train.
I reach the arch, and the music swells.
It's a good cue.
I built it myself, timed to the step, and the song that lifts out of the tent as I cross under the flowers reaches straight into my chest and squeezes tears up into my eyes before I can stop them.
Because I know this song.
It's the one that played this morning, at dawn, when Sloane Carroway married Nolan Reeve.
God, this morning.
We pulled it off at first light, in a tiny stone chapel four counties out, twelve guests and a sunrise pouring gold through old glass, everything hushed and holy and perfectly, blessedly quiet.
Nobody in the world thought we'd hold a celebrity wedding in the sleepy hour right before a county fair swallowed the whole town — which is precisely why it was the one hour nobody was watching.
By the time Cade lit his little fuse this afternoon, Sloane and Nolan were already married, already gone, already miles up over the clouds in a private jet, bound for an island whose name lives in exactly four heads.
The whole leaked "wedding" the mob came screaming for was a stage set, a beautiful decoy, a wedding-shaped hole for a rat to fall into.
I felt for Nolan this morning, I did.
There's a particular grief in learning your betrayer is the man you trusted the most, and I watched it move across his face when Sawyer told him.
But then he turned back to Sloane. He kissed his brand-new wife under that gold light, with nobody in the world able to touch them, and the relief that broke open in his eyes was a thing I'll carry a long time.
We did that.
We gave them the one morning that was truly theirs.
Even that can't hold a candle to what's moving in my own chest right now.
Relief that I get to stop. Relief that I get to rest.
To grow this baby.
To let three good men spoil me rotten while I finally build a future instead of managing everyone else's for a change.
The house is ready. Everything's set.
By the end of today, Honeybell Harbor won't be seeing much of us for a good long while.
It isn't a goodbye, though. It's a see-you-later, whispered to a town that took a heartbroken runaway bride five and a half years ago and let her build a whole life out of other people's happy endings.
I owe this place more than I can say.
I stop before the tall white doors of the second tent, and two ushers in dark suits step forward and bow, one to each door, their hands settling on the brass to open them.
I lift my chin. There are cameras in there, I remind myself. This is a shoot. A campaign. A mock. Chin up, shoulders back, let them fall in love with the fantasy.
The doors swing open. The music crests. A live organ — a real one, wheezing and glorious, the kind you'd never hire for a magazine ad — pours its whole heart into the peak of the song.
Then I see who's waiting for me at the end of the aisle.
Sawyer. August. Beckett.
My feet forget how to work.
They're standing at the top of a low, flower-drowned platform, all three of them, turned toward me with their faces open and shining.
Sawyer in the pure white suit I thought was a costume.
Beckett enormous and solemn beside him, his hands folded, his jaw already working like a man losing a battle with his own eyes.
August in the middle-left, a sprig of ranunculus in his lapel, smiling at me the way he smiles at a first bloom in spring.
Their scents reach me all at once, braided down the length of the aisle — Sawyer's magnolia and black pepper, Beckett's cedar and smoked vanilla, August's iris and green sage — the exact combination I wake up wrapped inside every single morning, the smell my whole body has learned to read as safe.
It hits me harder than the sight of them does.
You can dress up a decoy. You cannot fake the way three Alphas smell when they're looking down an aisle at the one person they'd set the world alight to protect.
This isn't a shoot.
I stand frozen under the arch, my bouquet trembling in my grip. I let my eyes travel the tent, and every place they land undoes me a little more.
I know these people.
Every single one. It's not a crowd of hired extras.
It's my team in the front pews — Priya with mascara already ruined, Niall grinning like a fool, Tessa off her leave and sobbing openly.
It's the handful of souls who held me together across the worst years of my life, gathered on white chairs in a tent full of my own flowers.
Marlowe is there, arms crossed, scowling to keep from crying and failing badly at it.
Then Juniper in the second row with both hands pressed to her mouth, tears streaming down a face lit up with so much pride I have to look away before it takes my knees.