CHAPTER 4
Beckett
The bridal-party errand run was not my idea.
Eli called at noon while I was in the workshop measuring stock for a bookcase commission.
Nora was upstairs in the spare room, doing something on her laptop that she'd described as "damage control" before closing the door — phone calls to her mother, responses to texts, the kind of social management that seemed to run her the way an engine runs on fuel.
"I need you at Granville's by two," Eli said. "Groomsmen gifts. Willa's got the bridesmaids at the florist the same time, so we're all downtown. She wants everyone together for coffee after."
"I'm working."
"You're the best man during the week your best friend gets married. You can bill me for the hours."
He hung up. That was Eli — three sentences and the assumption that everyone would show up, which they always did, because he was the kind of person who made showing up feel like it had been your idea.
I put the phone down and looked at the piece of walnut on the bench.
I'd been about to mark a dado cut. The pencil was still behind my ear.
The shop smelled like sawdust and the linseed oil I'd wiped on the test piece that morning, and for a minute I just stood there in the quiet and let myself have the thing I wasn't going to have for the rest of the day: a room where nobody was watching.
Then I went inside to tell Nora we had somewhere to be.
She was sitting cross-legged on the spare bed with her phone in one hand and her laptop open beside her, wearing a white tank top and shorts, her hair twisted up off her neck with one of those clips.
She looked up when I knocked on the open door, and I clocked the shift — the way her expression went from whatever she'd been doing alone to the version of herself she used when someone else was in the frame.
Faster. Brighter. Guard moving into position.
"Eli needs me downtown at two. Groomsmen stuff. Willa's got the bridesmaids at the florist." I leaned against the doorframe. "The coffee after is the part we can't skip."
She processed it quickly. I watched her think — not the conclusions, just the speed of arrival. Her eyes narrowed, then cleared.
"Because the whole bridal party together means the whole bridal party watching."
"Yeah."
"Okay." She uncrossed her legs and stood in one motion. "Give me twenty minutes."
I went back to the workshop. Didn't need to be there.
The dado could wait. But I needed ten minutes of doing something with my hands that had nothing to do with Nora Hart standing up from a bed in my house with her hair up and her shoulders bare and the clip pulling a loose strand across the back of her neck that I was not going to think about.
I picked up a sanding block. Ran it along the edge of the walnut. Concentrated on the grain.
It didn't help much.
Here's the thing about proximity that the arrangement didn't account for: it wasn't the big moments that were going to be the problem.
The kiss, the brunch, the public performance — those had a script, even if the script was thin.
You played the part, you hit the beats, you came home and went to separate rooms and the door closed and the performance was over.
But the rest of it — the sound of her moving through the hallway at night, the way her toiletry bag had colonized exactly one-third of the bathroom counter in neat rows, the specific rhythm she had of padding barefoot from room to room like she was trying to take up as little space as possible in someone else's house — that didn't have a script.
That was just being near someone. And it was doing things to my concentration that I couldn't sand out of a board.
At 1:50 I parked on Main Street and Nora stepped out of the truck like she'd been doing it for months — easy, natural, already scanning the sidewalk with that particular alertness she had, reading the street the way I'd read a joint before loading it.
Assessing. Anticipating. She'd changed into a blue sundress and sandals, her hair down now, and she looked good enough to make concentration harder than it needed to be.
Granville's was the kind of store that sold leather goods and pocketknives and the specific type of men's accessories that groomsmen pretended to be excited about.
Eli was already inside with two of the other groomsmen — Jake Holt and Danny Vega, guys I'd known since high school, guys who would absolutely notice if something seemed off and absolutely make it worse if they thought it was funny.
"There he is," Eli said. "And there she is. Nora Hart. I heard you two nearly set the Wisteria on fire last night."
"We were just standing at the bar," I said.
"That's not what I heard."
Danny grinned. "My mom called at seven this morning to tell me Beckett Lane has a girlfriend. Seven a.m., man. On a Tuesday."
"Does she eat?" Jake asked. "Your mom, I mean. Or does she just run on gossip and decaf?"
"Both. Simultaneously."
Nora handled it well. Better than well. She laughed in the right places, deflected the questions that pushed too close, and treated the attention with exactly the kind of warm, slightly embarrassed composure that sold the story without overselling it.
When Danny asked how they'd gotten together, she said, "Slowly, and then all at once," and the guys bought it because she delivered it like she meant it and not like she'd rehearsed it.
I watched her work the room from inside the display aisle.
She was good at it — the social calibration, the way she tuned her warmth to match the audience.
Different from how she'd been at brunch.
With Donna and Mae, she'd been careful, precise.
With the guys, she loosened up, matched their energy, gave Jake enough shit about his haircut that he looked delighted.
I liked watching her do it. That was the problem.
Not just that she was good at it but that I liked it — liked the speed, liked the way her hands moved when she talked, liked how she turned her chin slightly when she was about to say something sharp, like her body was already enjoying it before her mouth caught up.
I picked up a leather flask from the display shelf, turned it over in my hands, and put it back. Not because I was considering it. Because I needed something to do with my fingers that wasn't watching her.
Eli appeared beside me. "You good?"
"I'm good."
"You look good. She looks good." He picked up the flask I'd put down, examined it, put it down again. "You know what you're doing?"
The question sat differently than it would have from anyone else. Eli wasn't probing. He was checking a load-bearing wall for cracks because that was what he did — direct, careful, and not willing to let a friend pretend everything was fine if it wasn't.
"Yeah," I said. "I know what I'm doing."
That was mostly true.
We met the bridesmaids at the café at three.
Willa had brought the full contingent — her college roommate Priya, her work friend Caroline, and Nora, who'd walked over from the florist where she'd apparently spent forty minutes helping Willa negotiate between two nearly identical shades of ivory ribbon.
The café had pushed two tables together on the sidewalk, and within thirty seconds of everyone sitting down, the seating arrangement put Nora directly beside me in full view of Main Street.
This was the part that the minimal-physical-stuff rule hadn't been designed for.
Not the big public kiss, not the brunch performance, but this — sitting together at a café table while eight people generated wedding-week energy around us and the sun hit her forearm where it rested an inch from mine and nobody was asking us to perform and yet the performance couldn't stop.
Willa was across the table, radiating bridal happiness and the kind of unconscious social pressure that made everyone around her act like they were already in the wedding photos.
She kept glancing at me and Nora with an expression that was half delight and half something softer — relief, maybe.
Like her sister being happy took a weight off the week that she hadn't wanted to carry.
That landed on me in a way I hadn't expected. Because Willa's relief was real, and it was built on a thing that wasn't, and the distance between those two facts was going to get harder to manage the more people invested in it.
"You guys are cute together," Priya said, leaning across the table. "Like, annoyingly cute. How did this happen?"
"Neighbors," Nora said. "You know how it goes."
"No, I don't. That's why I'm asking."
Nora's leg pressed against mine under the table. Quick. Deliberate. A signal.
"She came over to borrow a wrench," I said.
Nora glanced at me. "Did I?"
"You needed to tighten something."
"I hate this story already."
"And yet you came over."
Her mouth twitched. It wasn't a rehearsed bit. It was the two of us finding the rhythm of a story that didn't exist and somehow making it feel true because the timing worked and she was fast and I was dry and together it sounded like something.
The table laughed. Nora smiled. Her leg stayed against mine.
Caroline asked about the cottage, and I let Nora take it — the burst pipe, the water, the timing of it all. She was honest about the logistics without being dramatic, and she wove the staying-with-Beckett part into it naturally enough that it sounded like a lucky convenience rather than a crisis.
"So you're literally living together," Caroline said.
"For the week." Nora's voice stayed light. "He has a spare room and I have a useless cottage. It works."
"It works," Priya repeated, grinning. "Sure."
Under the table, Nora's fingers found my knee. Not holding. Just landing there. Light and quick like she was steadying herself, or testing something, or doing the thing we'd agreed to do in public — minimal physical stuff, just enough to be convincing.
Except her fingers were warm through my jeans and she hadn't looked at me when she did it, which meant she was performing for the table, which meant it shouldn't have landed the way it did, which was in my chest, at the base of my sternum, like a match striking and holding.
I didn't move. Didn't react. Took a sip of my coffee and let her hand stay where it was because that was what the arrangement required.
But my attention locked onto the weight of her fingers the way it locked onto a measurement I couldn't round — exact, specific, not going away.
The coffee ran long. People kept showing up — two more of Eli's cousins, someone's roommate who was in town early.
The table expanded. The noise grew. Tyler walked past on the opposite sidewalk at some point, hands in his pockets, and I felt Nora register it without looking.
A small tension in her shoulders, there and gone. Her fingers lifted off my knee.
I didn't track him. Didn't need to. He wasn't the thing that was dangerous.
By four-thirty the group was breaking apart, people heading off to change before the evening.
Willa pulled Nora into a hug on the sidewalk that went on long enough to be a real conversation — low voices, Willa's hand on Nora's arm, both of them doing the sister thing where words weren't strictly necessary.
I stood by the truck and waited. Eli was beside me.
"Tomorrow's the venue walkthrough," he said. "Nine a.m. Both families, the coordinator, the caterer. Then lunch at the Hart place."
"I'll be there."
"With your girlfriend."
"With Nora."
He looked at me, steady. "She's good, Beck. Don't screw it up."
Eli walked off before I could answer, which was probably intentional, because Eli understood that some things were better left without a response.
Nora came back across the sidewalk. The late-afternoon sun was behind her and her hair had gone a little wild from the heat, curling at the ends, and she had that expression she got when she was coming down from a performance — slightly loosened, slightly transparent, like the real version was closer to the surface before she noticed and pulled it back.
"Survived," she said.
"Survived."
We got in the truck. She buckled her seatbelt and leaned her head against the window and didn't say anything for the three-minute drive back, and I let the silence sit because it was the first honest thing we'd shared since this morning — the absence of an audience, the quiet after the work.
At the house she went upstairs to change. I went to the workshop because I still had the dado to cut and because the shop was the only place my head went quiet.
I marked the line. Set the depth on the saw. Ran the first pass clean and straight.
My phone buzzed. Mae.
She's great. Mom's already planning Christmas. Just so you know.
I put the phone face-down on the bench.
The second pass was cleaner than the first. I blew the dust off the channel, ran my thumb along the cut to check the depth, and stood there in the smell of walnut and linseed oil while the last of the daylight came through the shop windows.
Inside the house, I heard the shower turn on.
The old pipes knocked twice — the same knock they always made, the same sound I'd heard a thousand times.
But it landed differently now because someone was in there, someone specific, and the whole house felt like it had shifted an eighth of an inch off its foundation.
Not enough to see. Enough to feel in every room.
Tomorrow was the venue walkthrough. Both families.
The coordinator. Lunch at the Harts'. A full day of being watched by people who cared about both of us and believed a thing that wasn't true, while the cottage sat empty and damp next door and the week got shorter and the rules we'd agreed to got thinner every time she touched me and didn't mean it.
Or meant it exactly as much as she was supposed to, which was minimally, which was enough, which was the whole problem.
I turned off the shop light. Went inside. The shower was still running.
I walked past the bathroom door without stopping and went to the kitchen and started dinner because a person needed to eat and my hands needed a task and the sound of water through that door was not something I was going to stand in the hallway and think about.
Not tonight. Not yet.
The week was only on day two.