CHAPTER 9
Nora
The arch was in the truck by seven Friday morning. I know because I heard Beckett load it — both uprights, the curved top piece, the hardware bag — while I stood in his kitchen wearing yesterday's clothes and drinking coffee I barely tasted.
We hadn't talked about it. Not the workshop, not what happened after, not the specific quality of silence that had filled the house Thursday night when we'd come back from finishing the arch and moved around each other like two people trying not to bump into the same wound.
He'd gone to bed. I'd gone to the spare room.
The door between us stayed shut, which was new, and which said everything the quiet didn't.
Now his truck was running in the driveway, and I had forty-five minutes before I was due at the Ridgewood estate for rehearsal setup, and my phone had eleven unread messages in the family group chat, and I was fine.
I smoothed the front of my shirt. Caught myself. Stopped.
The drive to the venue was twelve minutes of NPR and nothing. Beckett's hands stayed at ten and two. His jaw was set in a way I'd learned to read over the past five days — not angry, just locked down, running whatever internal calibration kept him level when everything else wasn't.
"The arch needs to be placed by ten," he said. "Eli's uncle is bringing the riser for the officiant. I'll anchor it once I know the ground's stable."
"Great."
"Rehearsal's at four."
"I know."
He nodded once. That was the conversation.
At the estate, the meadow was already busy.
Willa's wedding planner — a woman named Gretchen who communicated primarily through clipboard gestures — had the rental crew setting chairs in rows facing east. The light at this hour was pale and flat, nothing like the warm four-o'clock gold that would hit from the left during the ceremony tomorrow.
Beckett backed the truck across the grass and started unloading. I watched him lift the first walnut upright out of the bed — steady, one-armed, his shoulder flexing under the T-shirt — and then made myself stop watching and go find my sister.
Willa was near the tent with our mother and Aunt June, holding a seating chart and looking like she hadn't slept.
"There you are," she said. "I called you twice."
"My phone was on silent. I'm sorry."
"It's fine. I just needed to confirm — you're walking with Beckett, right? In the processional?"
"We're maid of honor and best man. That's how it works."
"I know how it works, Nora. I'm asking if I need to worry about you two today."
Something about the way she said it — not teasing, not prodding, just worried — made me look at her more carefully. "Why would it be weird?"
Willa glanced toward where Beckett was measuring the ground with a tape, then back at me.
"Mae texted me this morning. She said Donna's been telling people you two are basically living together and that it's serious.
Like, serious serious. And Mom —" She lowered her voice.
"Mom has been talking to Donna. They're already doing the thing where they plan ahead. "
"Plan ahead for what?"
"Nora. They're talking about holidays."
The coffee turned to cement in my stomach.
"That's — they're getting ahead of themselves."
"Are they?" Willa wasn't smiling. "Because after the bonfire, it didn't seem like they were wrong. The way he talked about you — that wasn't casual. Everyone saw it."
"Willa—"
"And I'm happy for you. I really am. I just need today to go smoothly, and if there's anything happening between you two that might spill into the rehearsal, I need to know now."
She was looking at me the way she'd looked at me at the welcome dinner — love and worry and the specific guilt of a bride who couldn't separate her joy from her sister's chaos.
Except now the chaos was worse, because the story had grown past anything I could manage with a bright smile and a subject change.
"It's not going to be complicated," I said.
She didn't look convinced. But Gretchen called her over about chair spacing, and I was temporarily free.
I stood in the meadow with the morning sun hitting the rental chairs and the arch going up fifty yards away and the full weight of what we'd built pressing down on my chest. Donna Lane was planning holidays.
My mother was in on it. The bonfire story — he heard her laugh through the wall — had hardened overnight into the version of us that Laurel Creek now held as true.
And the version was beautiful. That was the problem. It was so beautiful that correcting it would look like cruelty.
By noon the arch was anchored and the meadow was set.
I'd spent three hours on bridesmaid logistics — confirming the processional order, walking the aisle path twice with Gretchen's tape measure, fielding six calls about tomorrow's hair schedule, and helping Aunt June figure out where to pin her corsage without puncturing a vintage brooch.
I hadn't spoken to Beckett since the truck.
He was still in the meadow, checking the arch's stability with a level, adjusting something at the base with a mallet. Working. Quiet. Useful. The version of him that made everyone in this town believe he was the steadiest man alive.
Rehearsal call was at three forty-five for a four o'clock start.
The bridal party gathered near the tent.
Eli's groomsmen in khakis and shirtsleeves.
Willa's bridesmaids in sundresses they'd pulled on for rehearsal.
The officiant — a family friend named Pastor Russell — with his notes and reading glasses and the calm authority of a man who had married half the county.
Beckett came in from the meadow with dust on his boots and his sleeves rolled to the elbow. He took his place beside Eli without looking at me.
We walked the processional. We practiced the spacing. Pastor Russell talked us through the arc of the ceremony — entrance, readings, vows, rings, kiss, recessional — while I stood where I'd stand tomorrow and felt the distance between me and Beckett like a weather system.
Then Donna Lane arrived.
She wasn't in the rehearsal. She'd come for the rehearsal dinner setup at the house afterward, but she was early, and she came bearing two foil-covered casseroles and a purpose that had nothing to do with food.
She crossed the meadow toward the tent, saw me, and her entire face opened into something so warm and certain that my lungs locked.
"Nora, sweetheart." She set the casseroles on a table and took both my hands. "I have been meaning to tell you all week — I have never seen my son like this. Not once. Whatever you're doing, don't stop."
She said it at full volume. In front of Pastor Russell, Willa, my mother, Eli, the entire bridal party, and Tyler Webb, who was standing six feet behind me because he was a groomsman and had been there the whole time.
My mother's face went luminous.
Willa's went careful.
Tyler's — I didn't check Tyler's.
"Donna, please don't," I said.
It came out quieter than her voice, but it still landed. The little pocket of meadow around us changed temperature. Pastor Russell looked down at his notes. Danny stopped mid-sentence. Even Gretchen, thirty feet away with her clipboard, glanced over.
Donna blinked. "Sweetheart?"
I made myself keep my smile in place. It felt like holding glass in my mouth. "I mean it. Please don't make plans around us. Not yet."
My mother straightened in her chair. Willa's eyes flicked to Beckett. Across the tent opening, I saw him go very still.
"I wasn't trying to pressure you," Donna said. Her voice had lost its easy certainty. "I just meant—"
"I know what you meant." I heard the hollowness in my own voice and hated it. "I'm sorry. I just — please don't get ahead of us."
Donna let go of my hands. She looked hurt, which was fair, because she'd come over carrying casseroles and joy and I'd just put a crack through both in front of everyone.
"All right," she said carefully. "I hear you."
No one spoke for half a beat too long.
Then Pastor Russell cleared his throat and said, with the purposeful brightness of a man who had spent decades rescuing awkward family moments, "Why don't we take it from the top once more?"
The rehearsal continued.
We walked the processional again. I stood in my spot. Beckett stood in his. The four feet between us was the longest distance I'd ever measured.
After the third run-through, Pastor Russell said something about the transition to the dinner, and the group started to scatter. I was heading toward the tent when I heard Tyler behind me.
"Hey, Nora?"
I turned. He had his hands in his pockets and that easy, generous expression that used to make me feel like the center of everything and now made me feel like a footnote.
"You okay?" he asked. "That was a lot."
"I'm fine."
He nodded, like he knew I was lying and had no intention of calling me on it. "For what it's worth, weddings make everybody insane. People hear one story and build a whole future on it by dinner."
I stared at him.
He gave one small shrug. "I just mean — you don't owe anyone a timeline because they got excited."
"Thanks, Tyler."
"Sure." He smiled, not unkindly. "And for the record, Lane's still terrifyingly competent. So maybe it's not just the town losing its mind."
He walked off before I could answer.
Tyler wasn't the problem anymore. Tyler hadn't been the problem since Wednesday.
The problem was that I'd used his arrival to start something, and now the something had outgrown him entirely, and the people who loved Beckett most in the world — his mother, his sister, his best friend — were invested in a story I had never earned the right to start.
I walked toward the parking area. Beckett was by his truck, loading the level and the mallet into the bed. He looked up when I got close.
"Your mom," I said.
"I heard."
"I just embarrassed her in a meadow full of people."
He didn't answer.
"She thinks this is real."
Something shifted behind his eyes. "Parts of it are."
"The parts that are real only got here because of the lie at the start. She doesn't know that. Nobody does."
He was quiet.
"I let your mother believe this started clean," I said. "I let my mother believe it. I let a yard full of people at that bonfire believe it too."
My voice was steady. My hands were shaking.
"It matters that I never told them how it started, Beckett. And now if I try to fix that, your mom is the one who gets hurt for being happy."
He looked at me. Green eyes, steady, stripped of every defense he usually wore. "What are you saying?"
"I'm saying I can't stand up at that wedding tomorrow and play the woman your mother thinks I am. Not when the reason she thinks it is because I lied."
His jaw set. His fingers found the edge of the truck bed and pressed.
"So what do you want to do?"
"I don't know." My throat closed. "But I can't keep pretending the foundation isn't cracked just because the house looks beautiful."
He didn't answer. I waited. The meadow stretched behind us, the arch he'd built catching the late-afternoon light, the chairs set in rows for a ceremony that would happen tomorrow with or without us being okay.
"I'll drive you back," he said finally. Flat. Careful.
I got in the truck.
The ride was silent. When we pulled into the driveway, the cottage next door was still dark. Still unusable. Still the reason I was here in the first place.
I went inside, walked past the kitchen where his second coffee mug was still sitting by the machine, and closed the spare room door behind me.
On the other side, I heard him stop in the hallway. Stand there. And then walk away.