41. And Then There Was None #2
My jaw comes unhinged. I can't feel my face.
Far off, at the very back of my skull, I understand that I have just, on live regional television, in front of a hundred neighbors and a rolling camera, handed the entire world proof that I am the rat.
I outed myself. I built the noose. Then I stepped into it. Then I kicked the chair.
The anonymous account was never anonymous.
That's the piece my stunned brain keeps snagging on.
Whoever pulled this whole thing apart — and I already know it was Sawyer, it had to be Sawyer, that slow-smiling snake with his badge-wearing friends and his quiet federal favors — didn't merely see the leak coming.
He reached into the machine, peeled my name off the mask, and pinned it to my own chest for the entire county to photograph.
He didn't stop me. He let me do it. He wanted me to do it.
A man doesn't get caught in a trap like this one.
A man gets invited into it, and thanks the host on his way down.
"Can you comment?" The reporter presses in, relentless, delighted. "Were you paid? Blackmailed? Coerced into betraying a longtime client? Give our viewers something, Cade."
There's no way out. That's the thing that lands, cold and total, as the camera drinks me in.
This isn't a rumor I can smooth over with a phone call and a favor.
This is live. This is broadcast. This is my name and my face and my crime, out in the open air of my own hometown, permanent as a brand.
I open my mouth. Nothing comes. I've spent my whole career finding the right word for the worst moment, and now, in the worst moment of my life, I've got nothing but a dry tongue and a ringing skull.
Then the crowd roars.
"NOLAN! NOLAN! NOLAN!"
The chant goes up all at once, a stadium sound, and hands lift and point past me toward the platform.
I turn on instinct, fear clawing straight up my spine, because if Nolan Reeve walks out onto that stage right now, into this catastrophe I built, I don't know what I'll do — throw myself in front of him, maybe, some final useless gesture —
A man steps up onto the platform in a pure white suit with an apricot floral piece pinned at his lapel.
For half a heartbeat the fear whites out everything.
Then something snags. The stance is wrong.
Nolan carries himself tight and coiled, a performer braced for a crowd.
This man moves loose. Easy. Charleston-slow, taking the whole stage like he built it, and the scent that rolls off him toward me isn't Nolan's at all — it's magnolia and black pepper and warm aged bourbon.
Sawyer lifts a hand and waves at the mob like a homecoming king.
"Now why," he drawls, grinning wide, his voice carrying easy over the confusion, "are y'all out here hollering a stranger's name at me?
" He looks around at the flood of people, the fallen barricades, the cameras, and he lets out a low whistle that somehow lands as pure delight.
"Well, I'll be. Didn't think one little model prop shoot would pull half the county out of their houses. "
The chant dies in a hundred throats at once. Confusion ripples backward through the crowd like wind over a wheat field.
Then the bride turns her head.
She turns, unhurried. The light shifts off her face. It's Amber. It was always Amber. Her hazel eyes travel across the mob, cool and unbothered. Then they land on me at the bottom of her staircase, and they lock.
I feel guilt hit me first, a physical blow, gut-deep. But underneath the guilt, rising up behind it, is a second thing I can't name at first, a feeling so strange and slippery it takes me a full second to catch its shape.
Played. I feel played. I don't understand it yet. I just feel, all at once, like a fish who's only now noticing the hook was in his mouth the whole time.
Because it's all too clean. The crowd, the cameras, the timing, the bride who turned out to be the wrong bride — not one piece of it is an accident.
It has the fingerprints of a plan all over it, a good one, a patient one, the kind a man builds quietly over weeks while letting his mark go on believing he's the clever one in the room.
I've been so busy congratulating myself on never getting caught that it never once crossed my mind I might be the one being played.
I taught myself that trick. I used to be the man holding the strings.
Now I'm just the puppet finding out, live, on camera, that his own two hands were never really his.
Amber doesn't smile at me. She doesn't do anything at me.
Her face stays perfectly, professionally blank, a calm I know isn't real because I have seen the storms behind it.
She lets her gaze drift off me and out over the crowd like I'm a stagehand who wandered into frame, and she raises her voice, light and puzzled and pitched to carry.
"Um..." She glances at Sawyer, brow prettily furrowed. "Did we miss something?"
The reporter jumps on it. "Ma'am! Isn't this where Sloane Carroway and Nolan Reeve are getting married this afternoon?"
Amber and Sawyer exchange a look. It's a small thing, a flick of the eyes, but I've watched enough weddings to know a rehearsed beat when I see one, and my stomach drops another floor. Sawyer chuckles, low and warm, and spreads his hands to the whole crowd like he's apologizing for a rain delay.
"Sorry, ladies and gentlemen." He shakes his head, rueful, charming, absolutely in command.
"I'm afraid somebody fed you all some bad information.
There's no celebrity wedding here. We're just shooting a little spread for a bridal-outreach magazine — pretty dress, pretty flowers, a few staged photos to sell the venue package.
" He gestures at the arch, the runner, the whole beautiful fake of it.
"You came all this way for a catalog shoot. I'm real sorry."
A man I hadn't clocked before leans into view from behind a tripod down front — a photographer, professional, camera slung across his chest — and lifts a hand in a friendly little wave.
"Yeah, hi, I honestly don't know what's happening either," he calls out, cheerful. "But could you all clear out so we can finish the shoot? We're losing our light. I'd really rather not have to get the police involved over a permit thing."
The word police moves through the crowd like a cold draft. Then the disappointment sets in, thick and audible — a collective groan of two hundred people who abandoned their funnel cake and their Ferris wheel for a magazine ad.
"Wait," somebody mutters near me. "So the guy lied?"
"He lied," a woman echoes, disgusted. Heads start turning toward me. The security teams — both of them now, reunited, unhurried — begin herding the deflating mob back toward the exits with the bored authority of men who were never actually in danger.
"Well, there you have it, folks." The reporter's already pivoting, already spinning it, her cameraman swinging the lens off the platform and back onto me.
"No celebrity wedding — just a whole lot of chaos stirred up by one local event planner, apparently for the publicity.
It's really something, what people will do to get eyes on their business.
" Her lip curls. The camera zooms in tight, and I feel the red light of it burning a hole in the side of my face.
"Personally? I wouldn't want to hire someone like this. "
"Wait." My voice finally unsticks, cracked and too late. "Wait, no — I can explain, that's not—"
But they're already moving off, packing the camera, the reporter tossing her hair, the crowd bleeding out through the tent flaps in a grumbling river.
Nobody's listening. Nobody's going to listen ever again.
The whole apparatus of my public execution simply folds up its tripod and leaves, and inside two minutes the roaring tent has emptied out to a hollow, petal-strewn quiet.
Even the photographer slips out a side exit with a little two-finger salute at Sawyer, and then it's just the three of us.
Me at the bottom of the stairs. Amber up on her platform in a wedding dress that was never for a wedding.
Sawyer beside her, still in his white suit, still wearing that easy, terrible smile.
I turn to them. I don't even know where to start. "I— you have to let me—"
Sawyer comes down the stairs.
He takes them slow, one at a time, until he's standing square in front of me on the level, close enough that his magnolia crowds out the last of the trampled roses, and I flinch.
I brace. Every muscle in me locks up waiting for the fist, because I earned it, because I'd swing on me too, because a punch would honestly be a mercy compared to whatever this is.
The punch doesn't come.
He just looks at me, unbothered, almost gentle, and he says, quietly, "Check your phone."
That's all. He turns his back on me like I'm not worth the guard. He looks up at Amber, and his whole face changes — softens, opens, goes warm in a way it will never once go for me again.
"I'm gonna head to the second tent and get set for the video," he tells her. "Give me two minutes to get the camera rolling, then start your walk. The music'll cue the second you step through the arch." He winks. "Chin up, shoulders back. Let 'em fall in love with you."
"Okay." Amber's whole face lights, sudden and real and radiant, the professional blankness melting off her the second it's only him she's looking at. "God, they're going to lose it over this one. Best wedding mock we've ever staged."
"Prettiest bride in the business." Sawyer catches her jaw in one hand and kisses her, slow and certain.
She leans into it, and I have to look down at my own shoes.
When he pulls back he cuts one flat, dark look at me over his shoulder — the only unfriendly thing he's done this whole time, and it says everything — and then he strolls off down the aisle and out, whistling, leaving me alone with her.