42. In The Cards #2
Every chair in that tent holds a person who caught me on a night I was falling. I didn't invite a single one of them — I didn't know to — and yet here they all sit, dressed in their good clothes, clutching tissues, beaming at a bride who thought she was showing up to fake it for a camera.
Somebody built me a wedding out of the exact people who loved me back to life, and I never once felt them planning it. The care of that, the sheer secret labor of it, cracks something open in my chest that I don't think will ever fully close again.
This is real. This is a wedding.
This is my wedding.
I catch a movement to my left, close.
I turn, and my whole body goes tight.
My father.
Alistair Whitlock is standing at the end of the first pew in a charcoal suit that costs more than the tent, silver hair swept back, and he is looking at me with an expression I have not seen on his face since I was small enough to believe he hung the moon.
I try to school my features. I try to be the composed woman I've spent decades learning to be in front of this man.
My scent betrays me instantly — the apricot going thin and uncertain, spiking sharp at the edges, broadcasting every nerve in my body to anyone with a nose.
He steps toward me. Slowly. Like a man approaching a horse that has every reason to bolt. He does something I have genuinely never once seen Alistair Whitlock do in thirty years of being his daughter.
He offers me his hand, palm up. He lowers his voice to something only I can hear.
"I did you wrong, Amber."
I go very still.
"Not because you deserved it. You never deserved a single ounce of it.
" His jaw tightens, and I watch him force the words out like they're being dragged up from a place deep and rusted shut.
"I told myself that if I was hard enough on you — hard enough on the men who wanted you — I'd guarantee you ended up with a pack worthy of a woman of your nature.
That harshness was love. That control was protection. "
His pale eyes shine, and he blinks it furiously back.
"All it ever did was make me heartless in your eyes, and rightly so.
When your heart was breaking, I should have stood beside you.
Instead I added to the wreckage. I know that now.
" He draws a breath that shakes. "This is not the place for the apology you're owed, and I won't insult you by trying to cram it into a whisper at an altar.
But when you're ready…whenever that is, if it's ever…
I'll be waiting. To talk. To listen. To prove I can learn to communicate like a father instead of a fortress, and to let time do what time does to old wounds. "
His hand stays open between us.
"May I walk my daughter down her aisle?"
I stare at that open hand.
This cost him everything he has.
I know my father.
I know exactly how much pride a gesture like this burns off a man built entirely out of pride, and for him to stand in a tent full of my people with his palm up and his armor off — it staggers me. My pack did this. I understand it all at once, standing there.
They must have gone to him, must have said their piece and lit whatever fire under him got him into that suit and that pew. They gave me back my father for a day without ever telling me they were going to try, and I don't know whether to throttle them or love them past sense.
It should make me furious.
There it is again — a decision made about my life, in a room I wasn't in, without my say. That's the exact thing I swore I'd never tolerate a second time, the line I drew in permanent ink.
But standing here with my father's trembling hand held out like a white flag, I finally understand the difference. There's the kind of secret that's kept from you, to control you.
Then there's the kind that's kept for you, as a gift, by people who studied your heart until they knew what it wanted before you'd ever say it out loud.
My men dealt only in the second kind.
It turns out that one doesn't feel like a cage at all.
It feels like being known.
We butted heads my whole life. We'll butt heads again; I have no illusions.
But there is a child under this heavy beaded dress now, a whole new person who is going to want to know where she came from, and I find that I don't want that child growing up with an empty chair where a grandfather should be.
Not if there's a version of him willing to earn the seat.
I put my hand in his.
His fingers close around mine, careful as if I might shatter. I feel the fine tremor running through them, and my throat closes clean shut. He tucks my hand into the crook of his arm the way he must have practiced a hundred times in a mirror.
The melody of the organ lifts, and we begin to walk.
And now it lands, fully, with every step — this is no marketing commercial.
This is no mock, no decoy, no campaign.
This is my wedding.
A private one. A small one.
The exact wedding I confessed to Sawyer I wanted in the dark and never thought I'd get — only the people who matter, in a room that means something, down to the last petal and the last familiar face.
He heard me. He heard, and he built it, in secret, right under my nose, while I was so busy protecting everyone else's happy ending that I never once caught them stealing me mine.
By the time we reach the platform, the tears have broken loose and are running hot down my flushed cheeks, and I don't wipe them, because for once in my life I'm not managing anything at all.
Sawyer stands at the center. My father stops.
There's a beat where the two of them simply look at each other — the man who tested me half to death and the man who passed the test — and something silent and heavy passes between them before my father lifts my hand and places it, with great deliberateness, into Sawyer's.
"Take care of her," he says, rough.
"With everything I've got, sir," Sawyer answers, and means it.
My father steps back, and back again, until he reaches the front pew. He settles down beside a woman in dove gray who has been sobbing so hard into a lace handkerchief that I hadn't even let myself look at her yet. My mother. Helena.
She lifts her ruined face and gives me a wet, wobbling, radiant smile, gardenia and old powder and bergamot rising off her in a cloud, and something in my chest that has been locked for a very long time gives a little.
I turn back to Sawyer.
He's grinning at me through his own glassy eyes, and I laugh, wet and helpless.
"I figured," he drawls, low, just for me and the two men flanking him, "that the element of surprise was the only way I was ever going to get to give you the closest thing to a perfect wedding you deserve. You'd have planned every second of it into the ground otherwise."
He reaches into his jacket and pulls out a small velvet box.
When he opens it, there isn't one ring inside but two — an engagement ring catching the light in a hot white blaze, and nested against it a wedding band that matches it seam to seam.
"I did think about proposing first, doing it proper, giving you the whole down-on-one-knee routine and a nice long engagement." His grin cracks wider, and his voice thickens.
"But Blooming Apricot, do we really have that kind of time to waste?"
A laugh bursts out of me, thick with tears, because no.
No, we don't.
There's a clock ticking under this dress, and we both know it.
They all know it, as it happens. I never even got my big teary announcement — Sawyer took one look at me over a plate of pancakes weeks ago and simply knew, the way Sawyer knows everything, and by the time I worked up the nerve to tell the other two, Beckett had already started sneaking baby books he thinks I haven't noticed and August had quietly claimed a sunny corner of the new house for a nursery.
"I knew," Sawyer goes on, and his composure finally starts to go, his eyes brimming, "the second I walked into your ridiculous, beautiful little town and laid eyes on you across a soundproof room, that you were the Omega I was going to marry.
I'm a man of my oath, Amber. I don't say a thing I don't mean, and I don't make a promise I won't die keeping.
" He lifts the engagement ring from the box.
"So I vow this ring will announce to the whole watching world exactly what you are — chosen, claimed, adored.
And I vow it'll sit on your hand every day for the rest of your life, reminding you of a thing you spent too long doubting.
You are worthy of commitment. You always were. "
My vision swims.
I can barely see the ring for the tears.
Then Sawyer looks to either side of him.
August and Beckett step in close, reaching out together to lay their hands over his — three sets of fingers steadying the tiny gold thing between them — and Sawyer lifts my trembling left hand.
All four of us slide the engagement ring on first, the wedding band behind it. It's the four of us doing it, all at once.
I lose the last of my composure entirely.
"I HAVE THE BOY RINGS!"
The shriek comes from the back of the tent, and the whole room breaks into startled, delighted laughter.
Little George — four years old, Priya's nephew, drowning in a tiny gray suit with the sleeves rolled twice — comes barreling down the ivory runner at a dead waddle, a satin pillow clutched to his chest with both arms and three men's rings wobbling dangerously on top of it.
He does not slow down. He does not care about pacing. He hits the bottom stair and stops dead, breathing hard, and thrusts the pillow up over his head toward me like an offering to a very small, very serious god.
"You did such a good job, George," I manage, laughing through the tears, and he beams like I've knighted him.
I lift the three rings off the pillow. I look at each of my men, and I understand that this is the part that's mine.
This is my moment.