Chapter 21
SAWYER
“Stop fucking with it.”
Dom’s voice is flat as he crosses the room toward me, already dressed and looking like he’s got absolutely zero patience for whatever I’m doing in front of the mirror.
He steps in and swats my hand away, already reaching for the fabric.
“I think you mean a psychopath,” I say.
Dom pauses. “What?”
I glance at him in the mirror. “Psychopaths are calculated and calm. Sociopaths are more impulsive. Less organized. They struggle with attachment.”
He blinks at me. “Okay, since it’s your wedding day I’m going to respectfully ask you to shut the hell up.” He straightens my bow tie with surgeon-level precision. “Jesus Christ.”
I bite back a smile. “Just trying to be helpful.”
“Well, be helpful more quietly.”
I grunt but don’t argue.
Dom looks good. He always does, which is irritating on principle.
Clean-shaven, his dark hair still damp from the shower but already pushed back like he didn’t even try.
The tux fits perfectly—black with slim lapels, tailored sharp through the shoulders—like someone designed it just for him.
You’d never know he flew in from New York last night after some Nike shoot, took his private jet, and claimed he’d sleep on the flight.
He showed up this morning looking like he’d just stepped out of a spa instead of a red-eye.
He’ll leave again right after the reception, off to Vegas for his next fight tomorrow.
But today, he’s here. Best man and all.
“You talk to your manager yet?” I ask.
He huffs out a breath, still adjusting the tie. “Yeah. He’s pissed.”
I raise an eyebrow.
“Says I’m fucking with the promo schedule. That it’s a bad look to vanish the day before weigh-ins.”
“Is it?”
He shrugs. “Probably. I don’t care.”
Dom straightens the bow one last time, steps back, and nods at the mirror.
“You almost look like someone worth marrying, Hart,” he says, smirking.
I glance at my reflection.
The tux fits better than I expected—clean lines, classic black that makes me look a hell of a lot more put together than I feel.
The white shirt beneath it is crisp, starched stiff at the collar.
My shoes are polished, the leather dark against the floor.
There’s a white rose pinned to my lapel—it’s the only soft thing about the whole look.
My hair’s freshly cut, stubble trimmed close.
I look like a man that’s about to get married.
Which I am.
Sort of.
I adjust the cuff of my shirt and breathe in once, slow.
Dom leans a shoulder against the wall, eyes on me in the mirror. “How are you feeling, man?”
It’s a simple question. One he already knows the answer to, but asks anyway.
He’s not asking if I’m nervous about standing at the altar.
He knows I don’t care about the crowd or the fucking bow tie or what kind of cake we’re serving.
He’s really asking what it feels like to stand here again, after all this time.
This is the second time I’ve stood in front of a mirror in a black tux, waiting to walk into a church and promise forever to someone.
And God, I’ve been thinking about that more than I’d ever admit.
Not because I’m comparing them—Wren and Julia are nothing alike—but because every time I look at myself like this, I feel like I’m replacing her somehow.
Even though this isn’t real. Even though it doesn’t count. That’s what I keep telling myself.
I never stopped being married, not in the ways that matter. Grief doesn’t hand you divorce papers. It just moves in and takes up space where your future used to live.
I didn’t leave Julia. I didn’t fall out of love with her. I didn’t wake up one morning and decide I wanted something or someone else.
She was just gone.
And for years, I told myself that moving on would mean letting her go. So I didn’t. I stayed perfectly, painfully still. Not numb—never numb. Just…quiet. Careful. I stopped making promises. Stopped imagining a future. Stopped wanting anything that came after her.
That’s why I agreed to this. A marriage that isn’t a marriage. A vow without the weight. A way to fix things without having to break myself open again.
But then there’s Wren, who complicates all of it.
I don’t know when it happened. I don’t know when the lines started to smudge, when the edges of this thing between us softened into something unrecognizable.
I don’t think it was a single moment. It’s been the accumulation of a hundred small, unremarkable things that, when stacked together, became impossible to ignore.
It’s the way she looks at me—really looks at me—without pity, without that quiet, aching need to fix me.
Like I’m not a broken thing to be reassembled, but a man, whole as I am.
It’s the way she sees me—not the ghost of who I used to be, not the hollowed-out version that grief left behind, but the man I am now. The one I’m still learning to be.
It’s her laugh—unexpected, unfiltered, like she’s forgotten, just for a second, to be careful with her joy. Like it’s something she doesn’t need to ration, but spends freely, recklessly.
Somewhere between the courthouse steps and the pinky promises and the ice rink—between her gloved hands gripping mine and the way the string lights caught in her hair as I stumbled around like a newborn fawn on skates—something inside me cracked open.
I feel it now when I look at her. This inconvenient, undeniable thing that takes root beneath my ribs every time she smiles or laughs. I don’t want it. I’ve tried to starve it, ignore it, outrun it.
But there it is anyway—persistent as a sunrise, quiet as snowfall, terrifying as a freefall.
Somewhere between “just paperwork” and “just friends” and all those “just kidding” moments that didn’t feel like jokes at all, she stopped being a stranger and she started being the person whose voice I listen for in crowded rooms. The one whose absence leaves everything feeling too big and too quiet.
We drew lines in the sand with such careful hands—logic, timelines, rules. But Wren moves through the world like the tide, eroding my defenses, grain by grain, without even trying.
Wren with her freckles and her laughter like a struck match in the dark and her terrible habit of reading my silence better than anyone has ever read my words.
And the worst part is, I don’t think she feels any of this. She’s clear. Steady. Unbothered. She’s always been better at knowing where the lines are and staying behind them. She agreed to one year, and I think she meant it. I think she’ll walk away without looking back.
Maybe because she doesn’t expect anything from anyone. Maybe because she’s scared of what happens when you do.
But me?
I’m the one who watches her too long and thinks too much. And I hate that I’m the one standing here, dressed in a too-stiff suit, tying a bow tie that feels like a noose and wondering how it would feel if this wasn’t all fake.
The silence stretches and I realize I haven’t moved. I’m still standing in front of the mirror like I’m waiting for it to show me a version of myself I can live with. I clear my throat. Adjust my cuff again—not because it needs it, but because I need something to do with my hands. “Hart?”
Dom’s voice cuts through the quiet, and I blink, realizing he’d asked me something—how I’m feeling, I think—but I never answered.
“I’m okay,” I say, softer than I mean to. “I’ll be okay.”
Dom doesn’t answer right away. He’s still behind me, arms crossed, watching the way a man watches the horizon before a storm—patient, knowing whatever’s coming can’t be stopped.
He’s always been like this. Never pushing, just standing there until the truth has no choice but to crawl out of me on its own.
“You know,” he says finally, voice steady as stone, “you’re not replacing Jules by doing this.”
I look up, meeting his eyes in the glass.
“You’re not erasing anything, either.”
No sugarcoating. No careful tiptoeing around the wound. Just the truth, laid bare between us like a knife on a table.
I nod once. I know he’s right. But knowing it doesn’t make it hurt any less.
“And it’s okay,” he adds, voice dropping lower, “if this thing with Wren maybe isn’t as fake as you’re pretending it is.”
The words land like a sucker punch to the ribs.
I let out a sharp, humorless laugh. “Jesus. Don’t start.”
“I’m not starting anything,” he says, the ghost of a smirk on his lips. “I’m just saying, you’re allowed to feel something. At some point, you have to give yourself permission to be happy again, Sawyer. You’ve gotta let yourself live a bit. Have some fun.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, glancing at him. “When the hell did you get so wise?”
Dom’s grin cracks through. “Therapy. I told you. Turns out it’s not complete bullshit after all.”
I shake my head, but there’s a smile tugging at the edge of my mouth.
“Ask me that again though after I shotgun some beers at your reception.”
That gets me. A real laugh this time—rough and short but genuine. It breaks the tension in my chest just enough to let some air in.
Dom walks over and claps a firm hand to my shoulder. “Let’s go play husband, brother.”
* * *
The venue is full.
Every chair is filled. People are lined up along the back wall, shoulder to shoulder.
Some are even pressed into the side aisles, fanning themselves with the paper programs Mom had printed last week.
A few toddlers squirm in their parents’ laps, and somewhere near the middle, I hear a baby start to fuss before a soft shushing settles it.
I shouldn’t be surprised. I’m a Hart. Vaughn Hart’s son.
My family name has a way of drawing people out in this town, whether you ask them to come or not.
My dad might be half retired from public life, but people still love him.
Still talk about him like he walks on water.
And Mom? She’s basically Summit Springs royalty.
And then there are my siblings. Shit, they could fill two of the rows by themselves.