CHAPTER 7
Nora
The bonfire at Eli's parents' place was already loud by the time we pulled up in Beckett's truck at quarter to eight.
This was not the casual fifteen-person bonfire the group chat had promised.
Cars lined the gravel shoulder. String lights cut across the backyard.
The fire pit was ringed with people from both families, half the bridal party, and at least a dozen extra bodies Eli's mother had clearly decided counted as wedding-adjacent.
"How many people did Eli invite?" I asked.
Beckett looked through the windshield. "Eli doesn't control guest lists. His mom does."
"So this is on his mother."
"Pretty much."
I checked my reflection in the visor mirror, then snapped it shut. Hair up. Sundress. Lip gloss. Defensive optimism.
"Okay," I said. "Game plan. We stay an hour, maybe ninety minutes. We circulate. When we're together, we keep it light — new, casual, still figuring it out."
"That is the same briefing you gave me before brunch."
"Because it worked at brunch."
His mouth tugged. "Anything else?"
"Don't be too you."
"Too what?"
"Too calm and competent. People read into it."
"You want me to be worse at things."
"For one night. For the mission."
He got out of the truck. "I'll do what I can."
The yard was bigger than I remembered. Lawn chairs, coolers, tiki torches, music low under the talk. I did one fast sweep. Donna talking to Eli's mom. My mother and Aunt June near the house. Willa and Eli by the fire. Priya and Caroline on a blanket. Theo drifting with his camera.
Mae spotted us immediately. Her eyes went from Beckett to me to the space between us and sharpened with interest.
Tyler was here.
He was standing near the tree line with a beer, talking to one of Eli's cousins. He wasn't looking at me. That didn't help.
"Nora!" Willa waved me over. "Come sit."
We'd been there maybe twenty seconds. Beckett's hand touched the small of my back just long enough to cross the patio in front of both mothers and Mae. Then he peeled off toward Eli while I dropped onto the stone bench beside Willa.
"You two didn't exactly sneak in," she said, smiling much too knowingly.
"We live together temporarily because of a plumbing disaster. Separate arrival would've been weird."
"Uh-huh." She handed me a hard seltzer. "You look weirdly calm."
"That's humidity and denial."
Priya leaned over. "You two are cute, by the way."
"Thank you. I'll add it to the file."
Caroline opened her mouth with the exact kind of question I'd been fielding for two days, and I cut her off with my brightest smile. "It's new. That's the whole update."
So far, so manageable.
Then Danny found a deck of cards and Mae found purpose.
"It's not really trivia," she said, appearing beside the fire with the expression of someone who had been waiting all evening for the right level of audience. "You answer questions about each other and we see who knows their person best."
Willa and Eli went first. They were easy and adorable and mildly competitive in the way happy engaged people are when they already know how the round ends.
Everyone laughed. Theo moved closer with his camera.
My mother watched with both hands around a cup and the look of a woman for whom this week was unfolding exactly as she'd hoped.
Then Mae said, "Okay, next couple."
And looked at me.
"We're not really—" I started.
"You're literally the only other couple here," Mae said. "Three questions. Easy ones."
I looked for Beckett. He was standing behind the pit with Eli, beer in hand, gone very still.
Our eyes met across the fire.
"Come on, Lane," Danny called. "Get over here."
Beckett came around and sat beside me, close enough to read as a couple, far enough that I was suddenly aware of every inch. He set his beer at his feet.
"Three questions," he said.
Mae beamed. "First one. Easy. What's their go-to coffee order?"
I exhaled. Safe. "He doesn't do orders. He makes pour-over at home. No sugar, no milk, whole ritual."
A small wave of laughter went around the fire.
Beckett glanced at me. "She steals whatever's in front of her and adds enough milk to make it a different drink."
"That is not inaccurate," I said.
More laughter. Fine. One survived.
"Question two," Mae said. "What's the thing they do when they're nervous that they think nobody notices?"
My stomach dropped.
I knew his answer. I knew it too well. When Beckett was under pressure, his fingers found the nearest surface — table edge, doorframe, his own thumb against the pads of his fingers — as if texture gave him something to hold while the rest of him stayed still.
I couldn't say that. It was too specific. Too observed. Too revealing.
"She smooths things," Beckett said.
I turned.
He was looking at me, not the group. "Her dress. Her hair. The edge of a napkin. Whatever's in reach. She straightens it, and then she's fine. Or she wants you to think she's fine."
The fire popped.
"That's a lucky guess," I said, and my voice came out strange.
"Is it wrong?" Mae asked.
No. It was exactly right.
"Your turn," she said. "What does he do?"
I could have lied. Said he checked his phone. Cracked his knuckles. Shrugged too casually. But he'd just told the truth, and if I came back with something generic, everyone here would feel the mismatch.
So I told the truth too.
"His hands," I said. "He finds something to touch. A surface, an edge, the grain of whatever's closest. It's like he's reading it. He probably doesn't know he does it."
Silence landed hard. Then Priya let out a quiet, "Okay, wow."
Beckett's expression didn't move. His fingers did — they stopped completely.
"That's intimate," Caroline said.
"Great," I said too brightly. "That's two. Excellent. Who's next?"
"One more," Mae said, and now even she sounded a little more careful. "When did you know?"
I already hated it.
"When did you know you liked each other?" she asked. "The real moment. Not the public version."
We didn't have one. Not one we could safely use.
We had new, really new, still figuring it out. We had the Wisteria kiss, which everyone had already reinterpreted into proof of something private. We had strategic vagueness and a town eager to do the rest.
We did not have a clean origin story.
I opened my mouth.
Beckett spoke first.
"She was on the phone."
I turned toward him. He was looking at the fire.
"Two weeks before the wedding," he said. "I was in the workshop with the door open. She was out on June's porch, pacing through some work call. I couldn't hear the words. Just her voice."
He took a sip of beer.
"And then she laughed. Right in the middle of it. A real laugh. The kind that gets out before you can stop it. I put down what I was working on and just listened for a while."
Nobody moved.
This wasn't an improvisation. His voice had gone flatter, more careful. Expensive.
This had happened.
I just hadn't known he was listening.
"Nora?" Mae asked softly. "What about you?"
I needed something true enough to hold. The truest thing I had — the moment he kissed me back at the Wisteria with his hand at my jaw like he'd thought about where to put it — was too true.
So I gave them a different truth.
"The coffee," I said. "The first morning after the cottage flooded. I came downstairs and there was already a second mug out. He hadn't asked how I take it. He'd just paid attention the day before and remembered."
Willa made the tiniest strangled sound.
The circle broke all at once — groans, laughter, Danny accusing Eli of setting an impossible standard, someone near the back saying they were dead. The pressure scattered the way it always does at a bonfire. Music went louder. Jake challenged Danny to cornhole. Conversation split and moved.
But the six inches between Beckett and me felt like a live wire.
Mae caught my eye on her way toward Theo. She was smiling, but she also gestured toward us as she said something to him. Witness to photographer. Transmission path open.
Beckett stood. "I'm getting a beer."
"Great," I said. "Beer is good."
He walked off. I watched him go, the set of his shoulders, the way one hand pressed once against his thigh before disappearing into his pocket.
Willa leaned in. "I know you said it's new," she murmured, "but that didn't look new."
"It is new."
"The way he just talked about you?" She shook her head. "That man has been paying attention longer than a couple of days."
I had no answer for that because she was right, and because both of our answers had been true, and because we'd just told a yard full of people the truth while asking them to read it as part of a lie.
Tyler crossed behind the fire pit on his way to the drink table. He didn't look at me. He didn't need to. For one weird second I couldn't remember whether this whole thing was still a performance or whether the performance had simply run out ahead of us.
I stood, smoothed my dress, caught myself doing it, and stopped.
Beckett was at the edge of the yard ten minutes later when he found me near the string lights, two beers in hand.
I took one. "That was—"
"Yeah."
"You told the truth."
"So did you."
"That's the problem."
"I know that."
The party kept going behind us, building the narrative we'd just handed it.
"By tomorrow morning," I said, "this won't be new and casual anymore. It'll be you listened to her laugh through the wall and knew."
"Probably."
"And then we can't walk it back without hurting people."
His voice was lower now, rougher. "I know."
We stood there with the fire behind us and the dark tree line ahead and everything we'd just done hanging between us like something already too big to manage.
"We should go," I said.
"Okay."
We left quickly. Willa hugged me too long. Mae caught Beckett's arm and said something that made his face go carefully blank. My mother waved from her chair and mouthed so happy for you, sweetheart, and the words landed like a blow.
The drive home was silent. Windows down. Warm air. His hands locked on the wheel. The cottage next door dark and useless when we pulled in.
"Beckett," I said.
"Don't." Quiet and scraped raw. "Not right now."
Inside, the house felt too still. Too close.
"Goodnight," I said.
He looked at me for one long beat, his gaze dropping to my mouth before it came back up. "Goodnight."
I went to the spare room, shut the door, and leaned against it with my hands still shaking.
Not from embarrassment. Not even from fear.
From the look on his face when he'd said she'd laughed, and I put down what I was working on and just listened.
He'd been real.
And in forty-eight hours this was supposed to end, which would've been easier if the story we'd just told looked anything like a story that was supposed to end in two days.