36. The Fine Print #3
I trail off, because I don't have the end of the sentence.
I don't want to be cruel. That's the knot of it.
I know exactly how it feels to have information kept from you, to be steered and managed and left to find out the hard way what everyone else already knew, and the thought of doing that to another living person — even Cade, even now — turns my stomach.
But underneath that is a second thing, sharper and more selfish and just as true: How many more times am I supposed to hand my heart over to be juggled?
How long do I keep running my own emotions out into the ring like a circus act for a man who won't lift a finger to catch them?
I'm so tired of being the one who does the reaching.
Beckett squeezes my hand. Then he uses it to turn me, gently, until I have no choice but to look up into his face, and what I find there isn't anger and isn't pity.
It's certainty. Bedrock certainty, the kind he's been building stone by stone since the day he swore by a stalled truck that he was done running.
"Amber." He says my name like it's the whole argument.
"When life moves on, we all have to sit with the choices we made.
Same as we sit with our regrets. There's no separating the two.
" His thumb strokes once across my knuckles.
"Cade's a grown man. It is long past time he learned that being one means either fighting for what you want, or carrying the weight of the regret that shows up when you don't. That's not cruelty, sugar.
That's just the bill coming due." His voice gentles, but it doesn't waver.
"You didn't hide this from him. You didn't build this.
He built it, brick by brick, every single time he chose the easy door.
If he wants a seat at this table, he knows where it is.
He always has. This one is his to fix, not yours to fix for him. "
I breathe out. Slow. He's right, and the rightness of it settles something that's been jangling in me since the campfire. It doesn't make me feel triumphant. It just makes me feel clear.
"His decision now," I say quietly, testing the shape of it.
"His decision now," Beckett agrees.
For a moment we just stand there in the empty corridor, his hand swallowing mine, the frosted door throwing pale light across the linoleum.
I let his words do their slow work. It's a strange gift, being told you're allowed to set something down — that a thing you've been white-knuckling was never yours to hold in the first place.
Nobody's ever handed me that particular permission before.
Trust Beckett to be the one who does, in a government hallway that smells like floor wax and old coffee, without making a single speech about it beyond the one he already made.
I nod, and I let it be true. For five years I have been the woman who carried everyone — who smoothed the road, hunted the fine print, showed up early and stayed late and made a hundred impossible things run on time so that nobody else had to feel the friction.
I don't have to carry Cade. That was never in my contract, the real one or the paper one.
If he wants back into this, he has to walk himself through his own door and sign his own name and do the unglamorous, tedious, adult work of undoing the mess he made.
No one can do it for him. No one should.
As we push out through the front doors into the bright honeyed afternoon, Beckett's hand warm and sure around mine, I understand with sudden, ringing clarity that this is it.
This is the final arc. Everything from here forward is a test, and the terms of the test have changed.
It won't be decided by who says the prettiest thing, or who makes the most beautiful promise on a doorstep, or who swears they've changed.
I've had a lifetime of pretty words. I've got the scars to prove exactly what they're worth.
From here on out, the only currency that counts is action — who shows up, who stays, who does the hard and boring and unbeautiful work of actually choosing me, day after day, in ink and not just in air.
It's a test with four seats already filled and one conspicuously empty.
Beckett earned his the morning he put himself between me and the worst of it and refused to move.
Sawyer earned his with steady hands and a stubborn old truck he keeps coaxing back to life for our sake.
August earned his by finally, after five silent years, saying the hard thing out loud instead of smoothing it flat.
Cade has a chair too — the same chair he's always had, sitting out in the cold with his name on it, a clause in the way, and nobody left willing to carry him to it.
He knows exactly where it is. Whether he walks himself over and does the tedious, unglamorous, grown-up work of clearing his own path is the last question that matters, and it isn't mine to answer for him.
Words got us to the altar and left us there.
Actions are what will decide who's standing in the room when the doors finally open for good.
Now the clock begins to tick before the celebrity wedding everyone's anticipating will either invite blessings or catastrophe.