CHAPTER 5
Nora
The wedding coordinator had a clipboard, a walkie-talkie clipped to her belt, and the energy of a woman who had never once in her life said let's just see how it goes.
"Ceremony faces east," she said, pointing across the meadow behind the Ridgewood estate like she was directing air traffic. "Which means by four o'clock the light will hit the arch from the left, so your photographer needs to be here" — she moved three steps — "not here."
Theo, who was trailing the group with his camera bag over one shoulder, gave me a look that said I have been doing this longer than she has been alive and then smiled at her like she'd handed him a gift.
"Noted," he said. "Great eye."
Beside me, Beckett's mouth twitched.
It was nine fifteen on Day 3 of wedding week, and I was standing in a field with both mothers, the bride, the groom, the coordinator, the caterer's assistant, Theo, Beckett, and — because the universe had a sense of humor that could only be described as vindictive — Aunt June, who had driven out to "check on the tent situation" and was now providing unsolicited commentary on the slope of the lawn.
"It's uneven," she said, squinting at the ceremony site. "Someone's going to twist an ankle."
"It's a meadow, June," my mother said.
"Meadows have grass. This has divots."
The coordinator's smile held, but I watched her pen press hard enough into her clipboard to leave a mark. Donna Lane, standing on the other side of Eli, caught my eye and gave a small, sympathetic shake of her head that somehow communicated families and isn't this wonderful at the same time.
I had woken up that morning in Beckett's spare room for the third time, and the problem was no longer the strangeness.
The problem was how fast the strangeness was wearing off.
I knew the weight of his spare pillow now.
I knew the sound of his coffee grinder through the wall at six twenty, and the ten-minute gap before the kettle clicked off, and the way the hallway smelled like fresh grounds by the time I opened my door.
I knew that he left a clean towel on the bathroom counter without being asked and that he didn't knock to tell me about it, which meant I just found it there, folded in thirds, like the house was taking care of me by itself.
This morning he'd been at the kitchen counter when I came out, pour-over still dripping, and he'd pushed a second mug toward my side without looking up from his phone.
"Your sister texted," he said. "Walkthrough's at nine, not nine thirty. She says wear shoes you can walk in."
"She texted you?"
"Group chat." He took a sip from his mug. "I'm in the group chat now."
I stared at him. "The wedding group chat."
"Willa added me last night." His tone was completely even. "There are a lot of exclamation points."
He was in the group chat. Beckett Lane, who was not my boyfriend, was in Willa's wedding group chat, receiving real-time logistical updates alongside bridesmaids and parents and the woman who was making the cake.
Every notification on his phone was another thread tying the lie tighter, and he'd said it the same way he'd say the mail came.
Now we were standing in a field, and Willa was walking the coordinator through the processional order, and my mother was watching Beckett with the particular warm focus she reserved for men she had already mentally assigned to the family.
"Beckett, honey, you'll be walking with Nora after the ceremony, yes?" Mom said it to him, but her eyes cut to me. "For the recessional?"
"That's the plan," Beckett said.
"Good." She smiled. A real one — pleased, settled, the smile of a woman who had spent two days watching her older daughter look happy and had decided to stop questioning it. "You two look right together. I keep saying that."
She did keep saying that. She had said it at brunch.
She had said it in a text last night that I'd read in Beckett's spare room with my phone screen dimmed so the glow wouldn't show under the door.
He's so good with you, sweetheart. Dad would have liked him.
I'd locked the phone and pressed it facedown on the mattress and stared at the ceiling for a long time.
"Thank you, Mrs. Hart," Beckett said. Nothing extra. Just steady and warm and exactly right, which was the whole problem.
The coordinator moved the group toward the tent site, and the cluster shuffled across the uneven ground — Aunt June had a point about the divots — and Beckett fell into step beside me. Close. Not touching, but close enough that anyone glancing back would see a couple.
"Your mom —" he started, low.
"I know."
"She's happy."
"I know that too."
He was quiet for a second. Then: "You good?"
I looked straight ahead. The caterer's assistant was explaining something about the buffet flow, and Willa was nodding, and Donna Lane was listening with her hands clasped like she was receiving a briefing. Everyone was busy. Nobody was watching us right now.
"She said my dad would have liked you," I said. Quieter than I meant to.
Beckett didn't say anything for a few steps. Then his hand touched the small of my back — brief, light, gone before I could decide whether to lean into it or pull away. Not a performance. There was nobody close enough to see.
My throat tightened, and I made myself swallow past it.
The walkthrough took another forty-five minutes.
We covered the tent layout, the cocktail-hour footprint, the backup rain plan, and the parking situation, which Aunt June had strong opinions about.
Beckett answered two questions about the wooden arch Eli had mentioned wanting — whether it could be freestanding, whether he could build one by Friday — and both times his voice shifted into something drier and more precise, his hands moving slightly as he described joint types I didn't have names for.
The coordinator looked at him like he'd offered to solve a problem she didn't know she had.
"You'd do that?" Willa said, turning to him. "Seriously?"
"It's not complicated. I've got walnut stock I'm not using this week." He shrugged. "Takes a few hours."
Willa looked at me. Her face did something I recognized — the bright, watery expression of a bride who is one kind gesture away from crying in a field. "Nora," she said. "He's building me an arch."
"I heard."
"An arch."
"I'm standing right here, Willa."
She hugged Beckett. He took it with the slightly stiff patience of a man who had not expected to be hugged in front of both families, and over his shoulder, Donna Lane pressed a hand to her chest, and my mother's face went so soft it hurt to look at.
Eli clapped Beckett on the back. "You don't have to do that, man."
"I know."
"But you're going to."
"Yeah."
Eli looked at me. The same way he'd looked at Beckett during the coffee block yesterday — weighing something, measuring whether what he was seeing was real. I held his gaze and smiled, and it took more out of me than it should have.
***
Lunch at the Hart house was worse.
Not bad. Worse. Because bad would have been uncomfortable, and uncomfortable I could have managed. This was warm.
Mom's kitchen was exactly the same — yellow walls, the cookbook shelf that hadn't been reorganized since I was fourteen, the window over the sink that looked out at the backyard where Willa and I had spent every summer.
She'd made chicken salad and put out bread and a bowl of fruit that she kept nudging toward Beckett like he was a guest she needed to feed to prove something.
"Eat," she said, pushing the grapes closer to his plate. "You're building an arch. You need fuel."
"Mom, he's had two sandwiches."
"He's a big man, Nora. Big men eat."
Beckett picked up a grape. "Thank you, Mrs. Hart."
Willa and Eli had taken the seats across from us, and Aunt June had claimed the head of the table like she always did, and the conversation moved fast — seating charts, the florist's last-minute substitution, whether the cousins' kids needed a separate table or would survive the main one.
Normal family chaos. The kind that sounded like noise until you'd been away from it long enough to hear what it actually was, which was people who loved each other arguing about things that didn't matter because the things that did matter were too big to say out loud.
I was doing fine until Willa mentioned the cottage.
"Aunt June, did the electrician call back?"
"This morning," June said. "He can't get out until Thursday. Earliest."
Thursday. Day 4. Two more nights in Beckett's spare room, minimum.
"The floors still need another full day with the fans after he clears the panel," June added, frowning. "I'm sorry, sweetheart. I know it's not ideal."
"It's fine," I said.
"Well, you're in good hands." Mom smiled at Beckett. "Aren't you?"
When he reached for his water, his sleeve brushed my arm. Brief. Casual enough to mean nothing to anyone watching. It still sent a small, stupid awareness through me.
"She's easy to have around," Beckett said.
It was the right thing to say. Simple, casual, the kind of thing a new boyfriend would say about a woman who was sleeping in his guest room. It landed clean with the table. Willa smiled. Mom looked like she wanted to frame the sentence and hang it on the wall.
But his voice had been a shade lower than the rest of the conversation, and he hadn't looked at me when he said it, and there was something in the delivery that didn't feel performed.
I picked up my water glass because I needed something to do with my hands.
"So," Eli said, leaning back, "rehearsal's Friday at four. Beck, you and I need to —"
"Already on it," Beckett said. "Arch build Thursday. Rehearsal setup Friday morning."
"You're terrifyingly organized for someone who doesn't use a calendar."
"I use a calendar."
"You use a piece of scrap wood with dates scratched into it."
"It's a calendar."
I almost laughed, and the almost was the dangerous part — not that it was funny, but that I was sitting at my mother's kitchen table finding Beckett Lane's woodworking scheduling habits endearing, and the gap between the performance and the thing underneath it was getting so thin I couldn't always tell which side I was on.
Theo arrived late, camera in tow, and dropped into the empty chair beside Aunt June. He'd been shooting something downtown and had the slightly wired look of a man running on caffeine and enthusiasm.
"Missed the walkthrough photos," he said.
"But I got some great stuff on Main Street.
Mae was at the café — she says hi, by the way.
" This to me. Then, to Beckett, with a grin that was a little too bright: "She also says to tell you that Mrs. Delaney asked her this morning whether Nora was a good influence. "
Beckett's expression didn't change. "What did Mae say?"
"She said, and I'm quoting: 'She's incredible and he's obsessed with her, please tell Mrs. Delaney to mind her business.'"
Silence. Then Eli snorted. Willa pressed her lips together hard. My mother looked delighted.
Beckett took a sip of water. "I'll talk to Mae."
"Don't you dare," Donna said from across the table, and I hadn't even realized she'd arrived until she was pulling out a chair and setting down a foil-wrapped plate. "Mae's doing beautifully. Mrs. Delaney needed to hear it."
She said it with complete conviction — the conviction of a mother who believed every word her daughter had said because why wouldn't she, when the evidence was sitting right here at this table, her son beside this girl, looking exactly like a man who was exactly where he wanted to be.
I felt Beckett go still beside me. Not tense. Still. The particular stillness he got when something landed too close to a truth neither of us had agreed to tell.
"Anyway," Theo said, lifting his camera, "can I get a few shots? The light in here is gorgeous."
Before I could object, he was framing the table.
I instinctively leaned a half-degree closer to Beckett — not planned, just the muscle memory of performance — and his arm shifted behind my chair.
Not around me. Just on the back of the chair.
But my shoulder blade touched his forearm, and the contact sent a line of heat up the side of my neck that I had to pretend was about the sun coming through the window.
Theo took three shots. The third one, he paused and checked the screen and smiled at it like it had told him something good.
I didn't ask to see it. I already knew what it looked like. I knew because I could feel it — the way we fit inside the frame of this kitchen, this family, this impossible story we'd built in three days that everyone in this room wanted to be true.
The wanting was the worst part. Not theirs. Mine.
"More grapes?" Mom asked.
"I'm good, Mom."
I wasn't. But I'd gotten very practiced at saying so.