CHAPTER 3 #3
"Signage. Seating chart. Flower ribbon tags. Making your chapel look gracious, intentional, and unbothered."
"That sounds like Paloma."
"She is paying an advance."
Della's eyes changed. "Do you need money?"
The question should have been simple. Yes. No. Later. From anyone else, maybe. Wren had survived the feed store because Paloma made payment a business arrangement and Junie made gloves an inventory problem. A sister's kitchen was harder. Love made pride look worse.
"I need work," Wren said. "I have work now."
Della held her gaze long enough to show she heard the words around the words. Then she nodded. "Okay."
"Okay?"
"Okay. I will not pry while I am holding a pencil and responsible for deciding which relatives can sit near fans. But after the wedding, I am prying with snacks."
"That seems fair."
"And before the wedding, you stand with me."
Wren looked at her sister, at the lists with Della's handwriting in some places and Odette's cleaner corrections in others.
She thought of the chapel, cool limestone and old wood, Della walking toward Ruston with everyone watching.
She thought of herself in front of the town, visible in a way she had not earned and could not avoid.
Then she thought of leaving again with Della remembering that she had said no.
"I'll stand with you," Wren said.
Della's relief was immediate and messy. "Thank you."
"But if Odette asks whether I can wear blush, I will fake a livestock emergency."
"Paloma will write you a note."
They both laughed, and for a few minutes the kitchen became work instead of history.
Della showed her the ceremony list. Wren marked sign locations, measured sight lines from memory, and suggested moving one welcome board outside the chapel door instead of clogging the vestibule.
Della told her Ruston wanted the pasture entrance marked clearly so guests would not drive toward the working pens.
Wren added a directional sign for parking, another for the reception path, and a note to ask Colt which cattle gates had to stay closed.
Writing his name made her pause.
Della saw it. "You can ask Ruston instead."
"No. " Wren set the pencil down with more care than needed. "If I need to know which gate matters, I should ask the person who knows."
"That counts as smoothing things."
"That counts as not sending wedding guests into a herd."
"Romance is practical in Dusthallow."
Wren tried not to smile and failed.
By noon, Della had three fewer lists, Wren had a sketch plan folded in her bag, and the staple box was still waiting in her car like a scolding.
She promised to bring sign sketches by late afternoon, then drove back toward Junie's because Paloma had left a message saying the ribbon was in and the nearly final guest list had become less nearly and more frantic.
The feed store was busier at noon. A ranch hand Wren did not know loaded mineral blocks near the side door. Two neighbors argued softly over the bulletin board. The coffee counter had acquired crumbs, fresh gossip, and Cressie, who looked entirely too pleased to still be there.
Paloma was at the far end of the counter with ribbon samples fanned in front of her. Junie handed Wren the guest list without comment, as if paid work passed through her store as naturally as feed orders.
"Della asked me to stand with her," Wren said to Paloma, because the news still felt too large to keep in her mouth alone.
Paloma smiled. "Good."
Cressie turned from the coffee urn. "Up at the chapel?"
"That's usually where people stand during weddings," Wren said.
"Well. " Cressie's gaze drifted over Wren's face, taking inventory of what the town would make of it. "That will give folks something to look at."
Junie set a roll of narrow ribbon on the counter with unnecessary firmness. "Folks can look at the bride."
"They can, and they will. Della will be lovely. " Cressie's voice softened, but only at the edges. "I only mean it is something, having Wren back beside her. After all this time."
Wren laid the sketch plan on the counter and smoothed one curled corner. "If anyone has questions, they can ask me."
"Can they?"
"They usually do whether invited or not."
Paloma bent over the sketches. "This parking sign needs to be bigger."
"I can make it bigger."
"And this one by the pasture gate needs to say the gate stays closed."
"Colt should confirm the wording."
Cressie did not miss that. "So you and Colt are talking now?"
Wren's thumb found the paper edge before she stopped it. "We are both involved in making sure Della's wedding works."
"That is a tidy answer."
"I am available for tidy answers until three."
Cressie smiled, but the smile had less play in it now. "You know, some of us never did understand it. You and Colt thick as thieves one summer, then you gone before the dust settled. Folks figured you got too good for Dusthallow."
The words moved through the store without needing volume. A neighbor at the bulletin board went still. The ranch hand kept loading blocks but more slowly. Paloma's hand paused over the ribbon. Junie's face became the kind of calm that meant someone had one more chance to behave.
Wren could have answered with the story everyone expected. Austin. Opportunity. Youth. Ambition. She could have pointed to the world outside this town and made leaving sound clean.
But Colt's question waited in her again. Three weeks. All Dusthallow got.
"Folks were wrong about plenty," she said.
Cressie studied her. "Were they wrong about Colt?"
Wren looked at the guest list, at Della's name written at the top in Paloma's neat hand, at the practical work that had landed in front of her when she needed it most. She would not feed the town a love story over a counter that smelled like calf feed and curiosity.
She would not turn Colt's hurt into a public riddle to prove she had been hurt too.
"Colt deserves to answer for Colt," she said. "I deserve to answer for me. Della deserves a wedding that isn't treated like intermission."
For a heartbeat, the feed store held its tongue.
Then Junie said, "Amen," and tore a receipt from the register with such clean finality that even Cressie looked down into her coffee.
Wren marked the larger parking sign, her pulse high but her hand steady enough.
Paloma slid the ribbon samples closer. Work.
She could do work. Work did not forgive her, but it did not ask her to perform her wounds for entertainment either.
It gave her paper, measurements, deadlines, a way to stand in a town that had already decided she would leave.
Cressie set her mug in the sink. "Maybe so," she said. "But Odette always said you were meant for bigger things than a cowboy."