It hadn't been subtle. Allie, my cousin, first with dinner at the diner, low-stakes, no pressure. He'd gone because I'd asked him to, and come back the same. Cassie after that. Jen. Maddy the librarian. The CRNA from Linden, whose name I couldn't remember now. I'd run through every woman I knew and a few I'd dated myself, and he'd said no to all of them in the way Easton said no, which was to say yes and then sit across from a perfectly good woman for two hours and come home unchanged.
I'd kept trying because I didn't know what else to do. His grandmother had died, Penny was getting old, and the house on Maple was too quiet. He'd closed a door I couldn't get through. Not because he'd locked it. Because he didn't know it was closed. He went to shift. He came home. He ate Halsey's eggs, checked the engine compartment, did the job, and went back to the empty house. When I asked him if he was alright, he saidyeahin the flat voice that meant he believed it.
Then Astrid moved in across the street, and everything changed.
I didn't do it. I didn't arrange it. I'd spent a year trying to shove the right woman in front of him, and the right woman had shown up on her own with a U-Haul and a dog and a set of coffee mugs she'd picked out herself. I'd watched it happen from the outside the way you watch a season turn—slowly, and then all at once. The eggs went untouched at the firehouse counter the morning he told me there was somebody. His voice had been different. Not the flat voice. The other one, the one I hadn't heard since before his grandmother died.
That was the moment I'd stopped worrying about him.
Now I was standing in his spare bedroom on the morning of his wedding, trying to get a tie right, and the thing I felt was relief. A year of watching him be a closed door. The door was finally open, and the woman who'd opened it was somewhere on the other side of this bungalow putting on a dress, and in anhour, I was going to stand beside him at the arch and mean every word of the toast I'd spent three months writing.
I was happy for him. The uncomplicated kind, the kind that didn't need anything underneath it. My best friend had found the person, and the person had found him. The yard was going to be full of everyone they'd ever known, and it was a good day.
I got the knot close enough to pass and looked at myself in the mirror.
I'd always done casual. That wasn't a wound. It was a preference, the way some people liked cities, and some people liked small towns. I liked Tuesday nights. I liked a drink at the bar and a weekend if she was good company, and the easy goodbye at the end of it when the goodbye was what both of you wanted. I'd never lied to anybody about it. I'd never had to. The women who walked through my life walked out of it on good terms, and most of them still waved when they saw me at the diner, and that had always been enough.
It had always been enough.
But watching Easton with Astrid—watching her look at him across a room, watching him look back, watching a man I'd known most of my adult life become someone I almost didn't recognize—I'd started to wonder: was there a version of that for me? Did I want one?
I didn't have an answer.
I straightened the tie under my collar. It wasn't perfect, but it was close.
The question could wait. Today wasn't mine.
Easton came in at eleven-fifteen.
He was already dressed. Navy suit, white shirt, cuffs unbuttoned.
"Rhodes."
"Ford."
"You can't tie a tie."
"I can tie a tie. This tie is the wrong tie."
"That's the tie Audrey picked."
"I'm aware."
He came over and took the two ends. I let him. He did the four-in-hand without thinking about it, with the quiet competence of a man who had learned a thing once at fifteen and never needed to learn it again. He tightened it at my throat. He straightened it under my collar.
He looked at me in the mirror.
"You good?"
"Yeah."
"You sure?"
"Ford."
"Yeah."
"Don't."
