Chapter 29 #2
“Holt already cried once,” Mackenzie says, adjusting an earring in my vanity mirror. “In the mudroom. Denies it completely.”
“Holt doesn’t cry.”
“Holt cried. I have a witness. The witness is me.”
Maren arrives next in matching pink, matron of honor sash abandoned somewhere already because she says sashes are a war crime against good tailoring, and behind her comes Bree, the one person I faithfully keep in touch with from college, who flew out from Boston two days ago and has spent every hour since alternating between crying at nothing and demanding to know exactly what Dawson’s doing to earn a body like that, because she’s asked him three times now and still can’t get a straight answer out of him.
“I read that text over your shoulder and I need you to know my marriage counselor is going to hear about it,” Bree says, adjusting the fall of my veil where it’s slipped off one shoulder. “That man should not be legally allowed to text like that before a ceremony.”
“He’s had eight years to build up a backlog.”
“I hate that for me personally.”
Tessa laughs hard enough to need the wall.
Cora’s already got a flask out of her clutch that nobody’s questioning.
Laney’s crying the good kind of crying, mascara-proof and entirely on purpose, and somewhere past the noise I catch Mick’s voice through the open window, proud and delighted, holding court on the porch below with a cane in one hand and a beer in the other.
“Told you I’d walk into this wedding on my own two feet,” he says, to whoever’s listening, “and here I am, upright, employed, and only slightly more handsome for the limp.”
“Nobody asked you to add slightly more handsome,” Finn calls back, from somewhere nearer the tent.
“Nobody has to ask me anything. I earned this cane.”
I finish getting ready surrounded by every woman who’s ever mattered to me, laughing until my eyes water, until Josephine finally sets the veil in place and steps back to look at the whole of it, silk and lace and a hundred and fifty years of complicated family sitting quiet under the surface of one white dress.
“Ready?” she asks.
I look for him before I answer. I don’t scan the room for a body to hide behind or a conversation to duck into like I would have a year ago. I just ask.
“Where’s Dawson?”
Nobody blinks. Nobody exchanges a look, or laughs, or tells me to be patient.
A year ago I couldn’t have said the question out loud in front of this many people.
Today it’s just the truth, plain and easy, the same reason I stopped hiding behind Tessa at a diner booth and started standing in the middle of the room myself.
“Getting his tie fixed by Kathleen for the third time,” Bree says. “He looks completely edible. I’m furious about it on your behalf.”
“Ready,” I tell my mother.
The Sullivan grounds have been transformed from the ground up for this: four bars tucked at each corner of the lawn, two string quartets trading off under a canopy thick enough to blot out the sky, calla lilies and roses in every shade of cream and coral and the softest blush pink, spilling out of urns and arches and the ends of every row until the whole yard smells like something out of a memory I haven’t made yet.
Erin moves along the tree line in a dark suit instead of catering black today, radio at her hip, professional and steady and where trusted security is supposed to stand at an event this size.
Nobody watching would think twice about her.
I hold her gaze a beat longer than a bride has any reason to, long enough that her eyes give one flicker before she looks away first, and I let her have the small, private win of thinking that’s all it was.
Ashley’s seated four rows back on the groom’s side, Grant beside her in a suit that fits him better than his politics ever have.
She sits with her hands folded, something soft blue and expensive draped over her shoulders, watching the aisle with an expression that gives nothing away at all.
I let the old heat rise in me for one long breath, then let it go on the exhale. Today doesn’t belong to her.
Gideon’s waiting for me at the top of the aisle in a black tux that fits like every suit he’s ever worn, already thinking ahead of the ceremony he’s about to walk me into.
Then he stops being that man for a second, just looks at me, something softer moving behind his eyes that I’ve almost never seen from him.
He presses a kiss to my cheek, brief and rougher than he probably means it to be and offers his arm.
The quartet shifts into the processional.
Dawson’s groomsmen are already assembled at the altar around him, Finn steady at his shoulder, Tate, West, Knox, Holt, and Eli flanking beyond, Maren first, then Tessa, Cora, Laney, Mackenzie, and Bree, each one catching my eye through the doorway as she passes, and at the very front the same small cousin from Knox’s wedding scatters petals across white fabric like she’s been training for this job her whole short life.
Then the doors of the tent fall open, and I see him.
Black tux. Watch catching the light. Hair trimmed clean, jaw freshly shaved, and I catch the second his whole face changes watching me arrive, every bit of careful composure burning off him until there’s nothing left standing at that altar but a man who’s spent eight years learning to be dangerous and patient in equal measure and is finally done being patient.
Something low and hungry curls tight in my stomach, want and certainty tangled together so completely I couldn’t separate them if I tried, the same pull I felt across a tack room the night I decided I’d rather hate him up close than miss him from a distance.
Four hundred people rise to their feet at once, the whole lawn standing in a single motion like the valley itself finally exhaled.
I don’t look at any of them.
Behind me, past the last row and the tree line and the quiet woman in the dark suit walking her slow, careful circuit of the grounds, one small camera West swears he already disabled twice this week keeps running anyway, patient, where it shouldn’t still be.
I step onto the white runner.