Loving (First on Scene #2)

Chapter 1

Audrey

I learned early what happens when you need someone.

You call, and they don't answer. You call again.

You sit in the kitchen at eleven o'clock on a Tuesday with the phone on the counter and your daughter asleep upstairs.

You wait for a man to call you back, and he doesn't call you back.

You go to bed. In the morning, you set the table for two because you haven't learned yet that he's never coming home.

My mother set that table for three years after my father left. I ate across from an empty chair until I was nine years old, and she finally took it away.

I didn't need anyone. I'd made sure of that.

Load-bearing walls, poured foundation, a life built from the ground up to never require a man to hold it in place.

Nursing over business school. L&D over the residency my mother wanted for me.

Hartsdale General over every hospital where the Callahan name could have opened a door, because those doors belonged to my mother's blueprint, not mine.

Every decision, every year, every morning I woke up alone in an apartment I paid for with money I earned was proof that the system worked. That I was not my mother.

My best friend was getting married in the morning.

I was standing in the bungalow on Maple Avenue with a glass of water in my hand, watching the rehearsal dinner wind down around me.

Astrid was across the room, leaning into Easton, laughing at something he said with her whole face, and I felt it—the pull, small and low in my chest, the one I never had to go looking for because it never left.

It sat there all the time, behind the architecture, tapping on the glass.

I set the water down and went back to work.

The room needed me. I'd been running it without stopping since four o'clock.

Astrid's mother had been crying since the first toast and showed no signs of letting up.

Caldwell cornered me twice about a suit jacket problem I'd already fixed. The caterer ran out of the rosemary focaccia and looked at me like I’d personally eaten it.

I handled each one the same way I handled everything: moving, smiling, keeping the machinery invisible so the night could feel effortless for the people inside it.

I was good at this. I was always good at this. Twelve hours at Hartsdale General today, a labor and delivery shift that ran long because a first-time mother needed someone to hold her hand through the seventh hour, and I was the one who stayed.

I drove straight here after. Changed in Astrid's bathroom, lipstick on in her mirror, hair pinned and left.

My scrubs were in a bag by the back door.

My heels were on. If the night required a version of me who hadn't been awake since four in the morning, that version showed up, because she always showed up. That was her whole job.

"Audrey." Astrid's mother caught my elbow near the kitchen, her eyes wet and pink. "The photographer tomorrow, does she know about the light in the garden at four?"

"She knows," I said. "I sent her three reference photos and a compass heading. She'll be there at three to test it."

Astrid's mother blinked, then squeezed my arm. "You're a miracle."

"I'm a maid of honor who doesn't leave things to chance. Go sit down, Mrs. Matthews. There's a whole tray of mini eclairs on the far table that would love to comfort you right now."

She went. I picked up an abandoned plate from the side table, moved a vase two inches to the left because it was blocking the path to the bathroom, and checked the time on my phone.

That was when I looked up and saw Duke Rhodes.

He was leaning against the fireplace mantel with a beer in his hand, telling a story to three people who were already laughing before he got to the good part.

His sleeves were rolled to his elbows. His collar was open one button too far.

His hair was curling at the ends because he hadn't cut it in too long, and the dimple on his left side was out.

I was very tired of watching that dimple.

He caught someone's name wrong on purpose and corrected himself with a grin that made the whole group laugh harder.

Three months of planning this wedding beside this man, and I'd catalogued more of him than I wanted to admit.

He argued about everything. He had opinions about font sizes, playlist pacing, and where to seat the groomsmen.

He told me the rehearsal dinner music was "a little aggressive" and then sent me a counter-playlist that was ninety minutes of dad rock and one Dolly Parton song.

When I moved the groomsmen's table to the east side of the garden for the afternoon light, he moved it back because "the guys want to be near the bar.

" I moved it again. He looked at me with that grin and said, "Noted, Callahan. "

I'd filed things about him I never asked to file. His hands, when he made a point, were used like punctuation. The fact that he could read a room from the doorway and decide what it needed before anyone asked. I didn't want to notice. I noticed anyway.

My phone buzzed on the side table. I picked it up. Mom.

Colleen

Breakfast Sunday? I'll make the frittata.

I read it and didn't reply. I put the phone face down on the table and went to check on the wine.

Some invitations arrive with instructions folded inside.

My mother's frittata was one. Sunday breakfast at Callahan House meant the linen napkins, the good plates, and a conversation she'd already decided we were having before I sat down.

I loved my mother. I also knew her weight, and tonight I was carrying enough of my own.

I found the extra bottles in the kitchen, opened a white, and was carrying it back to the living room when Duke appeared at my shoulder.

"Callahan."

"Rhodes."

He fell into step beside me. He was taller than I wanted him to be, and he smelled clean, like soap and something I wasn’t going to identify, because identifying a man's scent at your best friend's rehearsal dinner was a door I wasn’t walking through.

"Quick question about tomorrow," he said.

"If it's about the seating chart again, I will end you."

"Toasts."

I stopped walking. "What about the toasts?"

"I think the best man should open."

I turned to face him. He had his beer in one hand and his other hand in his pocket. His whole posture said relaxed in a way that meant he knew exactly what he was about to start. Three months had given me fluency in that posture.

"Maid of honor goes first," I said. "That's the order."

"Traditionally, the best man opens."

"Traditionally, the best man's toast is under five minutes. Yours is fifteen. I'm not following fifteen minutes of you."

The dimple appeared. "You've timed my toast?"

"Astrid timed your toast. She texted me about it. With a screenshot."

"It's a good toast."

"It's a TED Talk. I'm going first, and then you can have the room."

"See, that's my concern." He took a sip of his beer, unhurried, like we had all night. "If you go first, you're going to be warm and devastating, and every person in that garden is going to be in tears, and then I have to follow that with a pinball machine story. You're setting me up."

"That's not my problem."

"I'm saying, you soften the room, I land the jokes. It's a better sequence."

"I'm not your warm-up act, Rhodes."

He looked at me for a beat longer than the conversation required. His eyes were green and bright with something between amusement and appreciation, and heat moved through my chest that I attributed to nothing, because there was nothing to attribute it to.

"Fine," he said. "You go first. But when I bring the house down, I don't want to hear about it."

"You won't bring the house down."

"I have a pinball machine story that is going to bring the house down."

"Nobody cares about your pinball machine story."

"Easton cares about my pinball machine story."

Astrid drifted past us, her hand trailing along my shoulder. "Are you two fighting about the toasts again?"

"He wants to go first," I said.

"She's threatened by my material," Duke said.

Astrid looked between us with the patient, fond expression of a woman who had watched this for three months and stopped refereeing somewhere around week four. "You’ll work it out," she said and kept walking.

Duke saluted her with his beer. I watched Astrid cross the room toward Easton, and everything else fell away.

He was standing by the window with a glass in his hand, talking to someone I didn't register, and when Astrid reached him, his shoulders settled.

Astrid leaned into his side, and he shifted his weight to make room for her without looking down.

She said something quietly. He laughed against her hair.

She closed her eyes for half a second, and I watched the two of them disappear into the small, private world they'd been building.

I'd watched Astrid build it from the outside—every panicked phone call, every time she called me from her bathroom to ask what to wear like she'd never owned clothes before, every Wednesday I sat on her kitchen stool eating a sandwich and pretending I couldn't see his truck across the street.

I told her she deserved someone who would fight for her, and I meant every word of it. I meant every word of the toast I was going to give tomorrow about how Astrid Matthews was the bravest person I knew because she let herself be loved when it would have been easier to run.

I meant it for her. I couldn't mean it for myself.

I wanted what they had. I wanted it completely, involuntarily, the way you want something you've trained yourself to stop reaching for—with the full understanding that wanting it was the most dangerous thing I could do.

Because wanting leads to needing, and needing leads to the kitchen at eleven o'clock, the phone on the counter, the empty chair. I knew where that road ended.

So I stopped watching.

I turned toward the back porch because I needed air.

The maid of honor was allowed to step outside for one minute to check the chairs, the wine, or whatever smallest errand would justify leaving the room where her best friend was, proof that need didn't always end the way it ended in my mother's kitchen.

The bungalow's back steps were narrow and uneven. My heels were made for standing, not for navigating century-old staircases. I should have taken them off, but taking them off meant admitting the night was winding down, and the maid of honor doesn't clock out until the last guest leaves.

The first step was fine. On the second, the heel caught between the boards.

I pitched forward. My hand went for the railing and missed.

My center of gravity was gone before I could correct it, and then a hand closed around my elbow—firm, fast, low enough to catch my balance without pulling me off my feet.

I grabbed his forearm on reflex, my fingers wrapping around muscle and warmth, and for one second, my entire weight was held by a man I'd not asked to catch me.

Duke steadied me, letting the momentum settle. He held on for one beat past necessary—his palm against the inside of my elbow, his fingers warm through the fabric of my sleeve—and then let go.

"Graceful, Callahan."

I straightened my dress. My skin was still registering where his hand had been. "I had it."

"You had the ground. I prevented the introduction."

"Don't you have a story to go tell someone?"

He stepped back, hands in his pockets, the grin in place. "Just making sure the maid of honor makes it to tomorrow. Self-interest."

"Goodnight, Rhodes."

"Night, Callahan."

He went inside. I stayed on the porch, hands on the railing, letting the cool air settle over my arms and my neck.

The spot on my elbow was still warm.

His hand had been on my arm for two seconds. Maybe three. I was still counting.

I went back inside. Cleared plates. Topped off Astrid's mother's water. Duke was at the fireplace again, finishing a story I'd missed. He caught my eye across the room and raised his beer a quarter inch—a salute, or a truce, or nothing at all—and I looked away.

One more day. The wedding, the toasts, the send-off, and the best man and the maid of honor would go back to opposite sides of a town small enough to share but big enough to avoid each other in. One more day, and I would never have to deal with Duke Rhodes again.