Chapter 27
TWENTY-SEVEN
SAGE
The next morning, I’m on the porch steps playing tug with Cricket when Dawson comes out with two mugs of coffee and a look on his face I haven’t seen since the courthouse.
“Sit with me,” he says, nodding toward the swing.
“That’s ominous for a man holding coffee instead of whiskey,” I say, letting go of the rope so Cricket can win it outright, and cross to the swing.
“I’m saving the whiskey. This needs a clear head.
” He sets both mugs on the rail and sits down beside me instead, close enough that his knee finds mine, and the swing takes his weight with the same complaining creak.
He doesn’t kneel. He doesn’t perform it.
He just turns to face me and everything in me goes tight and hot at once.
“Dawson.”
“I already married you,” he says, his face stripped down to something I’ve only seen once before, the night he finally told me the truth.
“In a courthouse, twelve minutes, a judge who looked bored the entire time. I don’t regret one second of it.
But you never got to choose a single thing about that day, and I’ve spent eight years taking choices away from you without asking first. I’m done doing that. ”
He pulls a ring from his shirt pocket, not the plain platinum band from the courthouse, something new. A sage green sapphire set low between two rows of diamonds, its color the exact shade of the ink hidden on his own wrist.
“Sage Pearl Blackwater.” My name in his mouth, slow and enunciated, like saying it right is half the point of the question.
“Do you want the wedding you actually dreamed about? The one nobody’s father ordered and no county judge rushed through in twelve minutes?
I want to give it to you. All of it. In front of everyone who ever doubted either one of us. ”
My throat closes. I don’t have a single clever thing to hand back, which might be the first time in my whole life that’s happened.
“Yes.” Cracked and certain at once. “Yes, Dawson.”
He slides the ring on, and it fits perfectly, because of course it does. Then his mouth finds mine, soft at the edges and starving underneath, the kind that says everything the ring already said and means every word of it twice.
“Three weeks,” I say, when I finally get my breath back. “Not three months. I’ve waited long enough for both of us.”
“Three weeks from Saturday.” He says it like a man signing a contract he actually wants to be bound by. “Your father’s going to have opinions.”
“My father’s going to have a stroke. Get the defibrillator ready.”
Both sets of parents arrive inside the hour, one loud convoy of trucks pulling up the drive before I’ve even changed out of my yoga tights.
“There’s no version of this family that gets safe,” Gideon says, standing in my kitchen like a man who’s spent his whole life making himself at home in rooms that aren’t his.
“Waiting for safe means waiting forever. I’d rather bury this war in front of three hundred witnesses than let it keep bleeding in the dark. ”
“For once,” Declan says, adjusting his cuff like agreeing with a Blackwater is a tax he’s decided to gladly pay, “your father and I agree completely. A wedding this size, this public, tells every enemy either family has that we’re not hiding.
It tells the county the Sullivans and the Blackwaters aren’t at war anymore.
It’s the best press either name has had in a decade. ”
“Romantic,” I mutter.
“I’m being accurate. It can be both.” Declan almost smiles, which on him looks like a threat assessment resolving in your favor. “Sullivan Ranch. Three weeks. We’ll have the crews out by Thursday.”
Kathleen’s already got both hands on Dawson’s jaw, her face doing three things at once, thrilled and terrified and already mentally redecorating a lawn into a spectacular venue.
“Three weeks. And you didn’t think to warn your mother before you proposed on a porch swing in front of God and Cricket.”
“I didn’t plan it, Mom. It happened.”
“Nothing in this family happens, Dawson Sullivan. Everything gets decided and then it happens to the rest of us five minutes later.” But she’s crying the good kind of tears, and she pulls me into a hug that smells like rosewater and kindness.
“I’ve been waiting for this exact chaos since you were nineteen. ”
My own mother’s been standing back the whole time, letting the Sullivans have their moment, and she finds my hand once the kitchen finally quiets. Josephine doesn’t do speeches. She’s never needed one.
“I watched you spend years convincing yourself you weren’t allowed to want this out loud,” she says, quiet, just for me.
“That you weren’t the one who gets chosen.
I should have told you sooner that you were always allowed to choose, and to be chosen right back.
I’m telling you now instead.” She squeezes my hand once and lets it go before either of us has to explain it to the rest of the room.
I don’t know yet how much I’ll need those exact words back by the end of the day.
The house fills up fast once the wedding word gets out. Kathleen commandeers the dining table with a legal pad. Maren and Tessa argue about caterers over the sink.
It’s the middle of that chaos, folder already open on the kitchen table, that Erin sits down across from me for coffee.
“Wedding security,” I say, sliding the folder across like it’s the only reason she’s sitting in my kitchen.
“We just decided this morning, holding the ceremony to Sullivan Ranch. Bigger footprint, more gates, more strangers with cameras and no idea what they’re walking into.
I want your read before anyone else touches the plan. ”
Erin doesn’t blink. That’s the first thing I notice, before she’s even through the folder. She flips it open, scanning fast, the same clean economy she brought to a rifle at the fundraiser.
“You’ll want a second perimeter at the tree line here.” She taps a spot on the map that isn’t marked on anything Tate gave me. “Blind spot in the current camera coverage. I walked that stretch already.”
“You’ve walked the Sullivan tree line?”
“Preliminary site visit.” She says it easy, doesn’t even look up.
Dawson leans in the doorway behind her, arms crossed. “You walked ground on a venue nobody outside six people in this house knew we’d chosen before nine o’clock this morning?”
For half a second her eyes give her away before the pleasant mask resettles.
“I like to stay ahead of the work,” she lies.
“So do I,” Dawson retorts, and doesn’t push it further.
I catch his eye over her shoulder for a second. He doesn’t nod. He doesn’t have to. We’ve gotten good at saying the whole conversation in one held look.
She knows the tree line. Nobody told her the tree line.
“This is great,” I tell her, closing the folder before she finds anything else to be useful about. “I’ll loop you in once the guest list’s finalized.”
“Look forward to it.” She stands, in no rush, and pauses at the door. “Congratulations, by the way. Both of you. This valley could use a happy ending.”
She’s gone before I can decide whether that was warmth or a threat wearing warmth’s coat.
The house empties out by noon, one truck at a time down the drive, and Dawson finds me in the kitchen once the last of them clears, two coffees gone cold between us. He doesn’t dress up what he’s about to say.
“I don’t have all of it,” he says. “What Ashley used against me. She had a photograph of us on the boundary house porch. And she had paper.”
“What kind of paper?”
“Sweetgrass border crossing. The summer I came home from Boulder, my father put me on the night terminal to learn dispatch from the bottom, and two months in I caught one of our drivers running undeclared loads into Alberta under manifests he’d doctored himself.
Cattle weights that didn’t match the trailer.
Seals that had been broken and reset.” He says it like a man reading his own indictment back to himself.
“I didn’t report it. I pulled the driver, rebuilt the route logs, and buried the whole thing so clean my father never knew it happened on his son’s terminal.
That’s a federal customs violation with my handwriting on the cover-up.
The paper Ashley had wasn’t the crime, Sage.
It was the fix. Every log I rewrote, in order. ”
“Declan would have ended you.”
“Declan would have ended me quietly. The feds would have ended Sullivan Transport in public. I was twenty-four and I’d already decided which of those I could survive, and it was neither one, so I did what she wanted and told myself it was the only move on the board.”
“And I never told you after, not that summer and not in all the years since, because telling you meant handing Gideon Blackwater’s daughter the only paper in Montana that could end my father’s company.
I loved you. I still couldn’t put that file in a Blackwater’s hands.
That’s the part I’m least proud of, Sage.
Not that I folded. That I trusted you and didn’t trust your name. ”
He rubs a hand over his jaw. “What I don’t have is who handed her those logs.
Ashley never had access to a Sullivan terminal in her life.
Somebody inside our own system pulled them and put them in her hands, and that same somebody paid her, twice, eight years apart.
Tate’s three days into an account that was built not to be traced, and every time I think I’ve got the shape of it, it moves.
I promised you the day I knew who. I still don’t know who. ”
“I believe you.”
“You shouldn’t just believe me. You should make me earn it.”
“I did make you earn it. You’re telling me before I have to drag it out of you. That’s the earning.” I set my mug down. “I’m going to see her.”
He goes very still. “Alone?”
“Alone. On purpose.” I hold his eyes, watching him choose, deliberately, not to argue it. “Ashley’s never once told the truth to a room full of people. She might to one woman with nowhere else to look.”