23. Chapter 23 String Lights and Safe Hands
Suzanne
It moves fast once it moves.
Beau's PI hands the evidence package to the DA on a Tuesday morning. By Tuesday afternoon, Vance Adams is in a room with two detectives and a choice: take the fall alone, or give up the man who hired him.
He gives up Daniel Harrison before dinner.
Phone records. Wire transfers. A text thread the campaign lawyer definitely told him to delete, and he definitely didn't. Footage from the Watering Hole and from the street outside Butter & Bean the night of the fire. The locked stairwell door has his prints on the deadbolt.
The fixer, it turns out, keeps receipts.
Fifteen years of cleaning up other people's messes and somewhere along the way he'd started documenting everything, maybe as insurance, maybe just because men like Vance Adams don't fully trust the men who hire them.
Whatever the reason, he hands over a box of it.
Daniel Harrison withdraws from the Senate race on Wednesday. His statement cites "personal and family matters." It is, without question, the most dishonest two sentences he has ever written, which is saying something.
Harrison's team has a press conference scheduled for Wednesday morning. Cole tells me about it later, voice flat with satisfaction. A statement is ready, something about an unstable woman running an extortion scheme against a sitting candidate, my name already typed into the script.
They never get to read it.
The evidence hits the DA's office six hours before the cameras are set to roll. Somewhere between the wire transfers and the deadbolt, somebody on Harrison's team pulls the plug. No press conference. No statement with my name in it. Just silence, and then the resignation.
The restraining order comes through on Thursday.
I'm standing in what's left of Butter & Bean when Cole calls to tell me. The front of the shop is gutted, with blackened walls, warped floors, and the display case gone entirely.
The menu board is gone, too. The one I was rehanging the morning this all started, Grandma's handwriting, the cracked corner I never got around to fixing. I look for it anyway, like it might have survived out of stubbornness alone.
It didn't.
But the back kitchen is mostly intact. The espresso machine survived. My grandmother's apron is still on the hook, smoke-gray now but whole.
"It's done," Cole says.
I press my free hand to the wall. The brick is cool under my palm, solid, still here.
"Okay," I say.
"Okay?"
"I just needed a second."
I hear him breathe. "Take all the seconds you need."
I look around the kitchen. Butter & Bean. My grandmother's dream and then mine. It's going to take months to rebuild. The insurance claim is already open, Beau has already offered to cover what the insurance won't, and I've already told him I'll pay it back. He's already told me I won't.
It's a conversation we'll have again.
The hole where the front window used to be doesn't stop General Tso. He struts through it, picks his way over the debris like he's filing a damage report, and settles onto a singed stool like he's reclaiming territory.
Willa is two steps behind him, holding a box of donuts and looking like she hasn't slept since Tuesday. She takes one look at my face and sets the box down. "What happened?"
"Nothing bad," I say. "For once."
She doesn't push. She just perches on the stool beside the rooster and waits, the donuts forgotten between them.
But the walls are still standing. The bones are good. And for the first time since I drove into Whiskey Bend with a secret and a prayer, I'm not bracing for the next thing to go wrong.
I take my second.
Then I say, "Yes."
A pause. "Yes, what?"
"Yes, Cole Harper." My voice comes out steady. Certain. "I'll marry you."
The silence on the other end lasts exactly long enough for me to wonder if I've misread everything, and then he says, rough and low and real: "Don't move."
He's there in eleven minutes.
He comes through the gap where the window used to be, soot still on his jaw from this morning's shift. He doesn't stop until his hands are on my face.
"Say it again," he says.
"Yes."
He kisses me right there in the wreckage, in front of Willa and General Tso and anyone on Main Street who wants to see Whiskey Bend's fire captain falling apart in a burned-out coffee shop. His palm finds my belly, the way it always does now. Steady. Sure.
"Ranch has string lights," he says against my mouth. "Beau's been dying for an excuse to use them."
I laugh, and for once it doesn't shake at all. "Then I guess we're getting married under string lights."