He didn't.
He clapped me on the shoulder on his way out.
I walked through the bungalow's kitchen, past the caterer who had claimed every inch of counter space, and out onto the back patio where the morning was coming in cool, with the river still in the air and the sun just getting warm enough to promise the afternoon.
The chairs were full.
The whole town had come. My dad was in the fourth row with my mom beside him, and Caroline was on their other side with Henry on her lap. Reese was behind them, in a dress I hadn't seen before, with her phone already out. My dad caught my eye across the chairs and gave me the thumbs-up. I gave him the nod back. My mom looked at me for a beat, and her eyes went stilland careful the way they did when she was reading me, and then she looked away.
I went up to the arch.
Easton was already there. Moose was at his left hip with the rings on his collar, the navy ribbon, and the small spray of pink rose that Audrey had tied and retied for a week. Easton's hands were at his sides. His jaw was set. He had the look of a man who had written a vow and read it four times and was about to find out if he could get it out without losing it.
I stood beside him. I didn't say anything. I didn't need to.
The band shifted.
Audrey came around the side of the bungalow.
She was in the sage dress. She had her hair pinned at the nape, pulled back clean, so her neck was bare, and the line of her jaw caught the light. Bouquet at her waist, pink and cream tied with ribbon. She walked at a pace she'd decided on and was not going to be moved off of, chin lifted, the half-smile she offered when she wasn't going to let herself give a full one.
My chest did something I wasn't ready for.
It wasn't the dress, although the dress was doing its job. It was the whole of her, the complete picture that landed in my body before my brain caught up with it. Three months I'd been in this woman's orbit. Three months of seating charts and playlist arguments, and her stealing fries off my plate at the diner like I wasn't going to notice. Three months, and I'd never let myself look at her head-on.
I was looking now.
She was Sports Illustrated beautiful. That was the phrase my brain supplied, and it was accurate, and it landed with the weight of a thing I'd been actively refusing to see. The collarbones in the neckline of that dress. Her shoulders moved when she walked, the gray of her eyes catching the late-morning sun. She was beautiful. Sharp and funny, the kind of woman whofilled silence like it was her personal enemy, and I'd have asked her out three months ago if she weren't the most royal pain in the ass I'd ever met.
She came up beside me at the arch. She turned to face the aisle. She was close enough that I could smell her perfume, something warm underneath the flowers in the bouquet, and I made myself look at the chairs.
She glanced over at me. Quick, like she was checking something.
"Rhodes."
"Callahan."
"Don't you dare make him cry before she gets out here."
"I wasn't going to."
"Mhm."
She looked away. I didn't.
I held the look one beat longer than I should have—the line of her jaw, the bare neck, the small muscle working at the corner of her mouth where the half-smile was holding on. She didn't catch me. Or she did, and she let me have it.
I looked at the chairs.
Easton couldn't get through his vow.
He got two lines in, and his throat closed. Astrid squeezed his hand. She said something to him I couldn't hear, and whatever it was, let the rest of it come loose.
I should have been watching him. I was watching her.
Audrey was three feet to my left at the arch, her bouquet at her waist, her chin lifted, and she was crying. Not the way Astrid's mother was crying—not the open, helpless kind. The quiet kind. The kind where the tears come, and you don't wipe them because wiping them would mean admitting they're there. She was watching her best friend get married, and whatever she was feeling about it was right there on her face, unguarded, and I'd never seen Audrey Callahan unguarded.
She glanced over. Caught me looking.
