I laugh, and his arm tightens, and I think:this is what it feels like when the ground doesn’t shift.
Ethan doesn’t leave my side for the next few hours. His hand rests on my waist, my shoulder, or the small of my back, touching me like a man confirming I’m real. Each point of contact sends warmth radiating through the lace of my dress.
Tom gives a toast that starts sentimental and ends with a joke about Dorito being the best man. Henry raises a glass with the quiet authority of the eldest cousin and remarks on the Sutton tradition of falling hard and fast, noting how Ethan did both in record time. Maggie cries through the whole thing; she hasn’t stopped crying since the ceremony.
Beckett stands at the edge of the gathering, beer in hand, positioned where he can see every approach to the property. Even at a wedding, the man is on watch. George, his fiancée, stands beside him, her hand resting on his forearm, and every now and then, he tips his head toward her and says something that makes her smile. He’s not relaxed, but he’s present. For Beckett, that’s the same thing.
Daniel finds us at the edge of the dance floor, which is really just a patch of packed dirt that Tom swept clean with a barn broom and declared good enough.
He’s holding two beers. He hands one to Ethan and keeps the other, and for a moment, the brothers stand side by side, looking out at the yard full of family.
“Vance checked out of the motel this morning,” Daniel says, low enough that it’s just for us. “Beckett’s guys tracked him south onRoute 9 as far as the interstate, then lost the tail in truck-stop traffic.”
Ethan’s hand tightens on my waist. “Lost him on purpose, or lost him lost?”
“Beckett’s read is on purpose. He made the tail ten miles in and shook it deliberately. He’s not running. He’s taking a harder angle.” A beat. “He’ll be back. Different hotel. Maybe a different face. But he’ll be back. This isn’t what ‘giving up’ looks like for a man like Julian Vance.”
I should be afraid. Julian Vance, my former boss, the man who orchestrated the contamination of these ranches, was in this town, drinking coffee at the diner and asking about a woman with brown hair and glasses. He was looking for me.
But I’m standing in a yard full of people who kept this wedding quiet to protect me, and the man beside me has his arm around my waist, and I can’t find the fear. It’s been displaced by something bigger.
Daniel's mouth twitches in the closest thing to a smile I’ve ever seen on his face. “But tonight, you’re off duty, brother.”
He claps Ethan on the shoulder, and the gesture holds everything Daniel doesn’t say out loud:I’m proud of you, she’s good, and we’ve got the watch.
The evening softens, and the music slows. Couples drift together with a gravitational pull I recognize as the Sutton frequency: Henry and Shay swaying by the speakers, Tom spinning Kitty until she laughs so hard she has to hold on to his shoulders, and Angus and Luna standing close with a quiet intensity that is uniquely theirs. Daniel and Delaney are in the same chair—ofcourse they are—with her legs draped over his lap and his hand drawing absent patterns on her knee.
And then there's Gabriel, again at the fence line, hat pulled low, drink in hand. Watching the gathering the way a man watches something he wants but doesn’t believe is for him. I catch his eye across the yard, and he raises his glass. The gesture is warm, but the distance behind it isn’t.
Wherever Gabriel Sutton is headed, it’s going to hurt before it heals. I know this as intimately as I know my own scars.
“Dance with me,” Ethan says.
“I don’t dance.”
“Neither do I.”
He pulls me onto the packed dirt anyway, and we sway in the way people do when they don’t know the steps but don't care. His chin rests on the top of my head, and my hand rests over his heart, feeling its steady rhythm. The wire ring presses between my fingers and his chest, the twist of metal he made on the porch now joined by a gold wedding band that matches the one I put on his finger. The handmade ring is more valuable than any diamond because he made it with the same hands that are on me now.
I glance across the yard once more. Gabriel hasn’t moved from the fence. He’s held the same drink in the same position for the last ten minutes.
“Ethan.”
“Mmm?”
“Why didn’t Gabriel go into the military?”
Ethan is quiet for a moment.
“His heart,” he finally says. “Congenital. Mild enough for him to live a normal life, but not mild enough to pass any military physical.”
I press my hand flatter against Ethan’s chest, feeling the steady thrum of his heartbeat beneath my palm.
“Does he talk about it?”
“Gabriel doesn’t talk about most things.”
“Does your dad know it bothers him?”
