I hang up, grab my jacket off the sawhorse, and walk out of the half-finished kitchen without looking back.
35
Beth
I arrive at the venue looking like I got into a fight with the wind and lost.
One side is plastered flat against my skull. The other side has achieved a volume that suggests I stuck my finger in a socket. There's a smudge of something on my blouse that could very well be engine grease.
I hope it's just chocolate, though.
I push through the doors of the Arbor House event hall and immediately spot Harper across the room, standing near a trellis archway with a clipboard pressed against her chest and her mother hovering at her elbow. She's wearing the specific expression of someone who is holding it together by a thread. Maren and Luna are already there, huddled near the floral display, and they both look toward me when the door bangs shut behind me.
"Beth!" Harper drops the clipboard and crosses the room, grabbing my arms. "Oh my God, you're here. You're actually here."
"Told you—I would be." I'm slightly out of breath. "I'm sorry I'm late, I—"
"It's fine Beth, you're here, that's all that matters." She pulls back and looks at me, and something in her face shifts from relief to confusion. "Wait. How did you get here?"
"Hitched a ride."
"You—" Harper blinks. "With who?"
"A very nice woman named Dolores," I pull in one last, deep breath, letting it out slowly as my heart rate finally settles back to normal. "She drives a livestock trailer and has strong opinions about the current season of The Bachelor."
Harper stares at me. "You rode in a livestock trailer."
"The cab of a livestock trailer." I pause. "Important distinction."
Ben appears at Harper's shoulder, looking relieved and slightly harried in his rehearsal-dinner button-down. "Beth, thank God. I can't believe they found you and—" He glances past me toward the doors. "Wait, where are the guys?"
I frown. "What do you mean?"
"Knox, Mason, Arthur." Ben looks at me like I've asked him what color the sky is. "They picked you up, right?"
Harper turns to Ben with a look like she's delivering a eulogy. "She got here in a livestock trailer, Ben."
"Fuck." Ben drags a hand down his face. "They left over an hour ago to come get you."
The floor tilts slightly.
"Theywhat?"
"Mason called me," Ben says. "Or—I called Mason. After Harper got your text. And he just... mobilized. All three of them. They've been driving toward your location pin since—"
"Since before I got picked up," I finish, something enormous and slightly terrifying expanding behind my ribs.
They're on the highway right now. Crammed into Mason's truck, burning down the interstate toward a blue dot on a map where I'm not even standing anymore.
"Oh no," I say softly.
Harper's eyes go wide. "Oh no."
Ben already has his phone out. "I'm texting them right now. Turn around, she's here, she's fine." He types fast, then looks up. "Okay. Sent. But they're at least an hour out even if they flip a U-turn immediately and—Fuck, let me call them."
Harper presses the clipboard to her forehead. "The rehearsal starts in twenty minutes and we only have the venue for another hour..."
"Shit," I say.
