40. Not In The Cards
Not In The Cards
~CADE~
The fair swallows me whole the second I step off the boardwalk.
Honeybell Harbor doesn't do anything halfway, and the Harborlight Fair is no exception — a whole glittering carnival crammed onto the green by the water, string lights looping tent to tent, a Ferris wheel turning slow against a sky going gold at the edges.
The air is thick with it.
Funnel cake and hot sugar and fry oil, cut with the brine coming off the marsh and the green crush of trampled grass.
Kids shriek past me with candy apples. A brass band murders a song two tents over.
It's the kind of afternoon that's supposed to make a person feel alive, and I move through the middle of it feeling like a ghost nobody's noticed is dead yet.
I used to love this fair. That's the cruelest part.
Every autumn since I was a kid, the Harborlight rolled in on the first cold snap, and my whole family came down to the green — Mom judging the pie tent like a hanging judge, Theo begging quarters for the ring toss, me winning him a stuffed shark three years running because I've always had a good arm and a better read on a rigged game.
I know this fair in my bones. I know which funnel-cake stand skimps on the sugar and which carny runs the honest wheel. Tonight I move through all of it like I'm walking behind glass, close enough to smell the caramel, too far gone to taste a thing.
I pull out my phone and thumb out a text to the group thread, the professional one, the one with the guys and Amber's coordination team.
At the tent in five. Vendor load-in on schedule, floral's staged, transport's holding. Everything's in position.
It sends with a cheerful little whoosh, like it's proud of me.
They'll read it and they won't answer. That's the rhythm now. I feed the machine my competent little updates. The machine hums along. Nobody types back so much as a thumbs-up, because a thumbs-up would be a kindness, and they have run clean out of those for me. I don't blame them.
I'd have run out too.
here was a time the four of us couldn't get through a single load-in without somebody cracking a joke and the rest of us laughing too hard to lift the crates. The silence where all of that used to live is the loudest thing in my life now.
Today's the wedding day. Sloane Carroway marries Nolan Reeve in a handful of hours, the biggest event this town has ever hosted, the crown of my whole career — and God forgive me, the thing I keep having to shove back down isn't nerves.
It's relief. Relief that after today, it's over.
All of it. The pretending. The showing up to jobs beside three men who look through me like I'm smoke.
The nightly ache of driving past a house I helped pick out and not turning in.
After today, I don't have to hurt this much every single morning.
What kind of man feels relief at the ending of the best thing that ever happened to him?
I've turned that question over a hundred times, and I keep landing in the same ugly place.
A tired kind. A coward kind. A man so worn thin from bracing for the next blow that he'll take the ending itself just to make the waiting stop.
My father was that kind of man. Mom told me so herself, right to my face, across a plate of eggs.
Like father like son. I laughed it off then. I'm not laughing now.
I don't go home anymore. Not really. Theo hasn't answered a text of mine in weeks — my own little brother, who used to blow up my phone with memes at two in the morning, gone quiet as a shut door.
Mom still sets a plate for me when I turn up, still slides it across the table without a word, because she is constitutionally incapable of letting a Mercer go hungry under her roof.
But we both know the truth of it. I'm not welcome home.
Not really. Not while I keep choosing the way I'm choosing.
She feeds my body and grieves the rest of me right to my face, and there's no plate big enough to fix that.
Theo's the one that guts me worst. He looked up to me once — trailed me around like a burr, begged for my hand-me-down boots, told anybody who'd listen that his big brother could fix anything under the sun.
Now he can't stand to breathe the same air as me, and the maddening part is I understand exactly why.
He said it plain, the day the whole thing came apart at Mom's table.
You let fear run your whole life, and one day you'll wake up and realize it cost you everything you had going for you.
He was barely out of his teens and he read me clean down to the bone.
I've spent every day since trying to prove him wrong by proving him a little more right.
My phone buzzes again. A different thread this time. No name. Just a number I've learned to dread.
You know the location of the wedding. Best time to burst the bubble, yes? Do it right and it spreads before the vows. This will be the last text.
The lump comes up hot and immediate in my throat. I stop dead in the middle of the fairway, and a woman with a stroller mutters something and swerves around me.
The fair keeps roaring, oblivious. A little kid three feet away is losing his entire mind with joy over a balloon animal.
The Ferris wheel groans and lifts another car of laughing strangers up toward a pink sky.
The whole world is having the time of its life, and here I stand in the middle of it, reading a death sentence for somebody's happiness dressed up as a text with no name on it.
I read it twice. Then a third time, as if the words might rearrange themselves into something I could live with. They don't. They never do.
The last text. They keep saying that. They never mean it. But this time — this time it might be true, because after today there's nothing left to leak. The event happens or it doesn't. I go through with this or I don't.
I never even found out who's on the other end of that number.
That's the piece that keeps me up at night.
For months now I've been dancing to a voice I've never once heard, taking my orders from a stranger who somehow knows my client list, my schedule, my mother's maiden name, the exact shape of the thing I'm most afraid of losing.
It started small. A text that knew a little too much.
A suggestion dressed up like a favor with a threat folded inside it.
By the time I understood I was in the water, I was already in past my neck, and the water only ever rises.
Smart money says it's a rival planner, or a soul that Sloane's people burned, or one of the hundred enemies a family like the Reeves collects on the way up.
I stopped guessing weeks ago. Knowing the name wouldn't lower the water I'm standing in.
Here's the part nobody knows. Nobody's caught me.
Three months of little poisoned breadcrumbs — a venue name dropped at the Tide Table, a delivery window murmured where the wrong ear could catch it — and not one of them has ever once looked at me and known.
They sat in a meeting yesterday, all four of them, brows furrowed over a map, talking in low urgent voices about whether they'd need to scramble a backup location if the leak sprang again.
I sat right there with them. I nodded along.
I offered a suggestion about access roads.
I have gotten monstrously good at nodding along.
That's what shames me most, if I'm keeping an honest tally.
Not even the leaking. The lying. Sitting in a room with people I helped break and letting them lean on my competence, watching August chew his pen bloody over a problem I planted, watching Beckett go quiet and grim the way he does when there's nothing in reach worth punching.
I could have ended their worry with four words.
I know who's doing it. I never once said them.
I sat there in my nice pressed shirt being useful, and I let three good men chase a ghost that has my exact face.
I hate this. I hate every part of it. I hate that I'm about to torch the happiest day of a bride's life, a woman who's never done a thing to me but pay her invoices on time.
Nolan's going to look for the leak after this and he's going to find it, eventually, and when he does I'll never work a wedding in this state again.
My whole career, the one thing I built with my own two hands, the one thing that was ever fully mine — gone. Over a phone.
But that's the trap, isn't it. That's the whole trap.
My career is already the thing on the line.
The voice on the other end of that number made sure I understood, months ago, in words I still hear when I try to sleep, that if I don't cooperate they'll bury me anyway — bad word in the right ears, contracts pulled, my name mud from here to Cutter's Bay.
Damned if I do. Buried if I don't. So I do.
I've been doing it for months. I even took the money, once, because refusing it felt more dangerous than taking it, and now I'm a man who was paid to keep a dead secret and I can't scrub that off no matter how hard I scrub.
I've got the message drafted already. It's sitting in a compose window, waiting, patient as a snake in tall grass.
Anonymous account. The exact GPS pin. A single line built to detonate — SLOANE CARROWAY WEDDING, HAPPENING NOW, come see the dress before it's gone — engineered to rip through the town group chats and light up every phone in Honeybell Harbor inside four minutes.
A mob of gawkers descending on a private ceremony like gulls on a dropped sandwich.
Chaos. Ruin. Exactly what I was told to deliver.