Chapter 2
Duke
Easton Ford was getting married in an hour, and I couldn't get the tie right.
The knot kept coming out crooked. The silk was a dusty blue-gray Audrey had picked, something with a name I'd never bothered to learn, and I'd been standing at the dresser mirror in the bungalow's spare bedroom for five minutes, working it loose and starting over.
I could start an IV on a kid in a moving rig without flinching. I couldn't tie a tie.
Through the window, I could hear the day coming together.
The caterer had the kitchen. The band was on the back porch running a sound check that was mostly a guy saying one two into a microphone at intervals.
Mendoza had hauled the chairs over in the bay truck at six and set them up in rows, eight across, twelve deep, with the aisle of grass running down the middle to the arch he'd built over the winter. The roses on the arch had come in pink.
I pulled the tie apart and started over.
I'd been trying to get Easton Ford to go on a date for the better part of a year before Astrid came home.
It hadn't been subtle. Allie, my cousin, first with dinner at the diner, low-stakes, no pressure.
He'd gone because I'd asked him to, and come back the same.
Cassie after that. Jen. Maddy the librarian.
The CRNA from Linden, whose name I couldn't remember now.
I'd run through every woman I knew and a few I'd dated myself, and he'd said no to all of them in the way Easton said no, which was to say yes and then sit across from a perfectly good woman for two hours and come home unchanged.
I'd kept trying because I didn't know what else to do.
His grandmother had died, Penny was getting old, and the house on Maple was too quiet.
He'd closed a door I couldn't get through.
Not because he'd locked it. Because he didn't know it was closed.
He went to shift. He came home. He ate Halsey's eggs, checked the engine compartment, did the job, and went back to the empty house.
When I asked him if he was alright, he said yeah in the flat voice that meant he believed it.
Then Astrid moved in across the street, and everything changed.
I didn't do it. I didn't arrange it. I'd spent a year trying to shove the right woman in front of him, and the right woman had shown up on her own with a U-Haul and a dog and a set of coffee mugs she'd picked out herself.
I'd watched it happen from the outside the way you watch a season turn—slowly, and then all at once.
The eggs went untouched at the firehouse counter the morning he told me there was somebody.
His voice had been different. Not the flat voice.
The other one, the one I hadn't heard since before his grandmother died.
That was the moment I'd stopped worrying about him.
Now I was standing in his spare bedroom on the morning of his wedding, trying to get a tie right, and the thing I felt was relief.
A year of watching him be a closed door.
The door was finally open, and the woman who'd opened it was somewhere on the other side of this bungalow putting on a dress, and in an hour, I was going to stand beside him at the arch and mean every word of the toast I'd spent three months writing.
I was happy for him. The uncomplicated kind, the kind that didn't need anything underneath it. My best friend had found the person, and the person had found him. The yard was going to be full of everyone they'd ever known, and it was a good day.
I got the knot close enough to pass and looked at myself in the mirror.
I'd always done casual. That wasn't a wound.
It was a preference, the way some people liked cities, and some people liked small towns.
I liked Tuesday nights. I liked a drink at the bar and a weekend if she was good company, and the easy goodbye at the end of it when the goodbye was what both of you wanted.
I'd never lied to anybody about it. I'd never had to.
The women who walked through my life walked out of it on good terms, and most of them still waved when they saw me at the diner, and that had always been enough.
It had always been enough.
But watching Easton with Astrid—watching her look at him across a room, watching him look back, watching a man I'd known most of my adult life become someone I almost didn't recognize—I'd started to wonder: was there a version of that for me? Did I want one?
I didn't have an answer.
I straightened the tie under my collar. It wasn't perfect, but it was close.
The question could wait. Today wasn't mine.
Easton came in at eleven-fifteen.
He was already dressed. Navy suit, white shirt, cuffs unbuttoned.
"Rhodes."
"Ford."
"You can't tie a tie."
"I can tie a tie. This tie is the wrong tie."
"That's the tie Audrey picked."
"I'm aware."
He came over and took the two ends. I let him. He did the four-in-hand without thinking about it, with the quiet competence of a man who had learned a thing once at fifteen and never needed to learn it again. He tightened it at my throat. He straightened it under my collar.
He looked at me in the mirror.
"You good?"
"Yeah."
"You sure?"
"Ford."
"Yeah."
"Don't."
He didn't.
He clapped me on the shoulder on his way out.
I walked through the bungalow's kitchen, past the caterer who had claimed every inch of counter space, and out onto the back patio where the morning was coming in cool, with the river still in the air and the sun just getting warm enough to promise the afternoon.
The chairs were full.
The whole town had come. My dad was in the fourth row with my mom beside him, and Caroline was on their other side with Henry on her lap.
Reese was behind them, in a dress I hadn't seen before, with her phone already out.
My dad caught my eye across the chairs and gave me the thumbs-up.
I gave him the nod back. My mom looked at me for a beat, and her eyes went still and careful the way they did when she was reading me, and then she looked away.
I went up to the arch.
Easton was already there. Moose was at his left hip with the rings on his collar, the navy ribbon, and the small spray of pink rose that Audrey had tied and retied for a week.
Easton's hands were at his sides. His jaw was set.
He had the look of a man who had written a vow and read it four times and was about to find out if he could get it out without losing it.
I stood beside him. I didn't say anything. I didn't need to.
The band shifted.
Audrey came around the side of the bungalow.
She was in the sage dress. She had her hair pinned at the nape, pulled back clean, so her neck was bare, and the line of her jaw caught the light.
Bouquet at her waist, pink and cream tied with ribbon.
She walked at a pace she'd decided on and was not going to be moved off of, chin lifted, the half-smile she offered when she wasn't going to let herself give a full one.
My chest did something I wasn't ready for.
It wasn't the dress, although the dress was doing its job.
It was the whole of her, the complete picture that landed in my body before my brain caught up with it.
Three months I'd been in this woman's orbit.
Three months of seating charts and playlist arguments, and her stealing fries off my plate at the diner like I wasn't going to notice.
Three months, and I'd never let myself look at her head-on.
I was looking now.
She was Sports Illustrated beautiful. That was the phrase my brain supplied, and it was accurate, and it landed with the weight of a thing I'd been actively refusing to see.
The collarbones in the neckline of that dress.
Her shoulders moved when she walked, the gray of her eyes catching the late-morning sun.
She was beautiful. Sharp and funny, the kind of woman who filled silence like it was her personal enemy, and I'd have asked her out three months ago if she weren't the most royal pain in the ass I'd ever met.
She came up beside me at the arch. She turned to face the aisle. She was close enough that I could smell her perfume, something warm underneath the flowers in the bouquet, and I made myself look at the chairs.
She glanced over at me. Quick, like she was checking something.
"Rhodes."
"Callahan."
"Don't you dare make him cry before she gets out here."
"I wasn't going to."
"Mhm."
She looked away. I didn't.
I held the look one beat longer than I should have—the line of her jaw, the bare neck, the small muscle working at the corner of her mouth where the half-smile was holding on. She didn't catch me. Or she did, and she let me have it.
I looked at the chairs.
Easton couldn't get through his vow.
He got two lines in, and his throat closed. Astrid squeezed his hand. She said something to him I couldn't hear, and whatever it was, let the rest of it come loose.
I should have been watching him. I was watching her.
Audrey was three feet to my left at the arch, her bouquet at her waist, her chin lifted, and she was crying.
Not the way Astrid's mother was crying—not the open, helpless kind.
The quiet kind. The kind where the tears come, and you don't wipe them because wiping them would mean admitting they're there.
She was watching her best friend get married, and whatever she was feeling about it was right there on her face, unguarded, and I'd never seen Audrey Callahan unguarded.
She glanced over. Caught me looking.
Her eyes were wet and gray and wide, and for one second, she didn't have a wall up. Then it came back. She looked away. She wiped her cheek with the heel of her hand, fast, like she was brushing off a fly.
I looked at the chairs.
Astrid got three words into her vow. You came back. That was all she managed before she put her hand on the side of Easton's face and said it again, steadier, and the yard went so quiet I could hear the river past the back fence.