Chapter 10
chapter
ten
Gracie
The crowd erupts, and Henry pulls back just enough to break the kiss, but not enough to break contact.
His forehead rests against mine for a half-second before he grins, drops his hand from my face, and turns us both back toward the crowd like he didn't just short-circuit every synapse in my brain in front of two hundred people.
My lips are tingling. Actually tingling. Like I've been stung by something sweet and venomous, and my body can't decide if it wants to run away or lean back in for more.
I press my fingers to my mouth before I can stop myself, then immediately drop my hand because I'm not a teenager in a movie and I refuse to be the woman standing under string lights touching her lips after a kiss like she's never been kissed before.
Except I'm not sure I have been. Not like that.
Not with the entire sky pressing down and the fiddle playing something slow and achy in the background and one of Henry's hands cupping my cheek and the other warm and possessive at my waist like he's done this a thousand times and plans to do it a thousand more.
It was supposed to be for show. Wasn’t it?
Someone needs to inform my circulatory system, because it didn't get the memo.
Henry steers us back toward our table with the easy confidence of a man who just declared something enormous in front of everyone he's ever known and apparently feels great about it.
Meanwhile, I'm navigating the crowd on legs that have the structural integrity of overproofed dough.
People are clapping us on the shoulders.
Someone squeezes my arm. A woman I vaguely recognize from the post office tells me she just knew it and she told Brenda, and Brenda owes her twenty dollars.
There's a twenty-dollar bet? About me? About us?
I mean its not like I haven’t heard it before. People have said for years that Henry and I would be so great together. It’s part of what made teenage me declare my undying love to him.
Caroline catches my eye from across the table as we sit back down.
She gives me a look that practically screams I told you so.
Damien hands Henry a beer and shakes his hand like Henry just scored a winning touchdown.
Cora Black leans toward me with the warm smile of someone who's genuinely happy for a person she barely knows, which is such a kind thing that it makes my chest ache with guilt.
Because they're all so happy. Every single face I see—genuinely, radiantly happy for us. And I'm sitting here with a borrowed ring on my finger and a kiss I can still taste and a marriage that's built on a clerical error and a lie I'm telling to protect my cousin.
I reach for my water glass and take a long drink, letting the cold cut through the heat still prickling across my skin.
“You okay?” Henry murmurs, leaning close. His breath brushes my temple.
“Peachy,” I say.
“You're doing great.”
“I know I am. Stop checking on me. It's suspicious.”
His low chuckle vibrates against my shoulder. “Yes, ma'am.”
Then I feel a hand on my arm. Gentle. Deliberate. The kind of touch that asks permission even as it makes contact.
I turn and find Rebecca Blankenship standing behind me.
Henry's mother is the kind of woman who walks into a room and makes it warmer.
Not louder—warmer. She's got the same blue eyes as Henry, though hers are softer, bracketed by laugh lines she earned from raising five children and from being married to a man who thinks telling a joke at every family dinner is a constitutional right.
Her silver-streaked auburn hair is swept up tonight, and she's wearing a blue dress that would put a field of bluebonnets to shame. She looks beautiful. She always looks beautiful. Poised and put together in a way I’ll never be.
She also looks like she's about to cry, and if Rebecca Blankenship cries, I am going to lose it entirely, and all the composure I've been clinging to will disintegrate like wet sugar.
“Gracie.” She says my name, in that way only a mother can, loaded with warmth and the particular tenderness of a woman who watched you grow up in her kitchen.
Who once bandaged your knee when you fell off the tire swing in her backyard.
And who gathered you in a tight embrace the night she found you sobbing after her oldest son broke your heart.
As far as I know, she never knew why I was crying that night, but she hugged me and fed me ice cream and told me life wouldn’t always be so sad.
I stand up. It's instinct. You don't stay seated when Rebecca Blankenship comes to you with tears in her eyes.
“Mrs. Blanken—”
“Oh, stop that.” She pulls me into her arms before I can finish.
She smells like gardenias and the lavender sachets she keeps in her linen closet, and something about the familiarity of it—the sheer mom-ness of it—cracks something in my chest that I've been holding tight since this all began.
I miss my own mother with a ferocity that nearly makes my knees buckle, but I refuse to break down at this party.
Even before my own mom passed, Rebecca has been my second mother. Her arms around me feel like safety and approval and home in a way that makes my eyes sting.
“I am so happy,” she whispers against my hair. She pulls back, holding me at arm's length so she can look at my face. Her eyes are glassy and her smile is so bright, I’m fairly sure it could power a small city. “I am so happy, sweetheart.”
“Thank you,” I manage. My voice only wobbles a little. I call that a win.
“Now, I am still upset with my son for robbing me of a wedding.” She cuts a pointed look at Henry, who is wisely studying the label on his beer bottle with intense focus. “And we will be discussing that at length. Possibly for the rest of his natural life.”
“That's fair,” Henry says without looking up.
“But.” Rebecca turns back to me, and her expression softens into something so genuine it makes my ribs ache. She takes both of my hands in hers and squeezes. Her fingers are warm and her grip is sure. “I always hoped it would be you two. Always.”
The words land like a stone dropped into still water. I feel the ripple of them move through me—through my chest, my stomach, the backs of my eyes.
“I used to watch you kids,” she continues, shaking her head like she's watching a memory play out behind her eyes.
“Running around the yard, climbing the pecan trees, getting into everything.
And I'd watch the way Henry looked at you. Even when y'all were young. Even before he had any idea what it meant, I knew. I could see it in the way he’d run around catching you a whole jar full of fireflies.” She laughs softly, her thumbs rubbing circles on the backs of my hands.
“I'd say to James, that boy is going to marry that girl one day, you mark my words.
And he'd tell me I was getting ahead of myself.”
She glances over at her husband, who's standing a few feet away with a plate of brisket, looking suspiciously like he's pretending not to eavesdrop.
“I wasn't getting ahead of myself,” she says with quiet satisfaction. “A mother always knows.”
I can't speak. If I speak, I'll cry. If I cry, everything unravels—the composure, the story, the delicate architecture of pretending this is something I chose rather than something the universe dropped on me like a piano in a cartoon.
So I just squeeze her hands back. Hard. And nod. And hope that's enough.
She pulls me into one more hug, shorter this time, and a little tighter, and then presses a kiss to my cheek. “Welcome to the family, Gracie, officially. Even though you've been part of it for years.”
When she lets go, she turns to Henry and points one manicured finger at his chest. “You. Take care of this girl.”
“Yes, ma'am.”
“I mean it, Henry William.”
“I know you do.”
She gives him a look that contains entire volumes, then smooths the front of her dress, sniffs once, and walks back toward Pops and Mimz with the composed dignity of a woman who absolutely did not just get emotional in front of the barbecue.
I sit down. My knees are grateful.
Henry's hand finds my leg under the table. Not high. Not inappropriate. Just his palm resting against my knee, warm through the fabric of my dress, steady as a heartbeat.
“You okay?” he asks again, quieter this time. “I know she can be a bit much at times.”
I nod. Then, because honesty slips out when my defenses are down: “Your mom is going to make me cry.”
“She makes everyone cry. It's a skill. And I’m pretty sure her goal. Always.”
“She said she always hoped it would be us.”
Something shifts in his expression. It's subtle. A tightening around his jaw, a flicker in those blue eyes that's there and gone before I can name it. “Yeah,” he says. “She's said that before.”
I don't know what to do with that information, so I file it away in the ever-expanding drawer in my brain labeled Things About Henry That I Cannot Process Right Now and reach for a piece of brisket.
The fiddle player shifts into something slower.
Sweeter. A waltz, maybe, or something close to it.
Couples begin drifting toward the makeshift dance floor, a square of concrete, covered in cornmeal.
It sits between the pavilion and the smokers, now lit gold and amber under the canopy of string lights.
Pops leads Mimz out first. The crowd parts for them like water around a stone, and someone whoops. Mimz laughs, her bright, full-throated laugh that sounds like it belongs to a woman half her age. She tucks herself into her husband's arms with the ease of fifty-some years of practice.
Pops leads, pushing her backwards in steps so fluid, it looks as if they’re gliding on air. Clearly, two people who have danced a million times together.
My throat tightens.
Other couples follow. Henry's parents. Kelsie and Ethan. A few of the older couples from town who probably learned to dance at events exactly like this one, decades ago.
Then Henry pushes back from the table.
I feel it before he says anything, the shift in his posture, the way the air around him changes when he's made a decision. He stands and holds out his hand.
“Dance with me, wife.”
It's not a question.
My mouth opens to say something deflecting.
To tell him that I'm eating, that I don't dance, or my dress will get grass-stained…
but none of those things come out. Because he's standing there in those dark Wranglers and that white button-down with the sleeves rolled to his forearms, and the string lights are catching the angles of his face, and his hand is extended toward me like it's the most natural thing in the world.
And everyone is watching.
“Come on, Firefly,” he says, quieter now. Just for me. “It’s just you and me.”
I put my hand in his.
His fingers close around mine, and then I'm on my feet and he's leading me toward the dance floor.
We reach the edge of the floor and he turns to face me. For a second, we just stand there. The music shifts again—something slower still, something with a steel guitar crying underneath the melody.
He pulls me in. One hand settles at the small of my back. The other keeps hold of mine, our joined hands tucked between us. I have no choice but to put my free hand on his shoulder. And then he’s leading me in a classic Texas two-step, pushing me backwards as our boots scoot across the cornmeal.
I can feel the muscle and heat of him through the cotton, which means my brain immediately starts compiling a list of all the places our bodies are touching and cross-referencing it with that dream I had a few nights ago. helpful, brain, thank you.
“You're tense,” he says.
“I'm fine.”
“I can feel how tight your body is.”
I consciously release the death grip I have on his shoulder and try to relax.
It mostly works. My body settles against his by degrees, first my hand softens, then my arm, then the rigid line of my spine gives up the fight.
Finally, I let myself lean into him. Just a little.
Just enough to feel his heartbeat through his shirt, steady and slow and completely at odds with the chaos inside my own chest.
“There she is,” he murmurs.
“Shut up.”
“Yes, ma'am.”
We dance.
And I hate how good it feels. I hate how perfectly we fit together, his height to mine, the way his hand spans the small of my back like it was made to rest there.
I hate how the song seems to exist in its own little pocket of time, separate from the party around us, separate from the lie, separate from everything except the press of his body against mine and the slow steps of our feet.
I hate it because it feels real.
And the real parts are the dangerous parts.
“People are staring,” I say against his collar.
“Let 'em.”
“Easy for you to say. You're not the one the entire town is gonna hate when this is all over.”
“No one is gonna hate you. I can say for a fact that you are impossible to hate.”
“Henry.”
“Gracie.”
“This isn't real.”
He doesn't answer right away. The song carries us through another slow turn, and the string lights blur into streaks of warm gold at the edges of my vision. His thumb moves—one small, deliberate stroke against the fabric at the small of my back.
“Feels pretty real to me,” he says.
And there it is. That low, steady certainty in his voice that makes me want to believe him and run from him in equal measure.
The same certainty that made him haul Andrew up by the collar and announce to a bakery full of people that I was his wife.
The same certainty that put a ring on my finger tonight and introduced me to two hundred people as someone who chose him.
The song is ending. I can feel it winding down—the melody softening, the steel guitar fading into something that sounds like a sigh.
“Henry,” I say, and I don't know what I'm going to say next. Something sensible, probably. Something about boundaries. Something about the six-month timeline, divorce papers, and the fact that this is temporary. He needs to stop saying things that make my heart do stupid, reckless things.
But the song ends before I get there.
He steps back. Just enough to look at me.
Those blue eyes—warm and certain and so full of something I'm terrified to name—hold mine in the golden light.
“Thank you for the dance, Firefly,” he says.
And then he tilts my chin up and lightly presses his lips to mine.
My heart doesn't flutter. It detonates.