Page 20 of Reluctant Bride

He doesn’t answer that one directly. “Both, I’d guess. Peace looks good on everybody’s books.”

“You’ve worked security for us since I was six. You taught me to shoot before I could drive.”

“I remember.” His voice goes fond, unguarded for exactly a second, and I lean into the opening.

“Where were you three weeks ago? Tuesday, the east gate.”

His hands don’t move on the wheel. His shoulders don’t change. That’s the tell. Cruz has never once in all the years failed to have a ready answer for a question about his own whereabouts, and today he doesn’t have one at all.

“Working,” he says. “I work most Tuesdays.”

“Which gate?”

“Sage.” He says my name like a door closing, gentle, final. “You’ve got a lot on your mind today. Let’s not turn a drive into an interrogation.”

“I’m not interrogating you, Cruz. I’m making conversation.”

“You’re your father’s daughter making conversation, which is interrogation with better manners, and we both know it.” He glances at me once, and there’s nothing in his face I can use, no flicker, no tell, just the same steady calm he’s worn my entire life. “Ask me something easier.”

I don’t. I let the silence sit instead, watching the fence posts blur past. Not a name, not a flinch, not one thread I can bring back to Dawson. A lie would have given me a handhold. This gives me nothing at all, and somehow that’s worse. A locked door instead of a bad excuse.

The boundary house is empty when Cruz drops me at the porch, everyone else still finishing up in town, Dawson pulled aside by Declan for whatever conversation fathers have with sons on their wedding day that can’t wait until tomorrow. I have the house to myself for at least thirty minutes and no plan for either.

The windows are open, the day fading to a cloudless sky, and I keep one ear on the road while I let myself do the thing I have absolutely no business doing. I go looking through his room because I have thirty minutes and a marriage license and apparently no self-respect left to speak of, and that’s how I end up standing in front of his nightstand with the top drawer open and a paperback in my hand that I recognize before I’ve even read the cover.

The Solace of Open Spaces. Gretel Ehrlich. I underlined half of it the summer I was twenty, sprawled on the porch steps of this exact house, reading passages out loud to a boy who used to steal it out of my bag just to watch me chase him for it.

My handwriting is still in the margins. Twenty years old, looping and unguarded, before I learned to write like I write now, precise and armored, built for depositions. This is exactly it, says the girl I used to be, next to a line about the land teaching you to endure. Read this part to D. He’ll pretend he doesn’t get it and then not shut up about it for a week.

He kept it.

Colorado for his undergrad, then Illinois for his MBA at Northwestern. Me in Ithaca, finishing Cornell. A war between our families the whole time. A hundred women who would have thrown themselves at him for free. And he kept a paperback with my twenty-year-old handwriting in a nightstand drawer, like it was worth protecting.

The rage comes first, fast and clean, simpler to hold than anything underneath it. You don’t get to keep pieces of the girl you destroyed. You don’t get to walk away from her like you did at twenty-four and then build a shrine to who she used to be, safe behind glass, effortless to love because she never has to actually stay in the room with you.

If he’d forgotten me, I could hate him without complication. This doesn’t come with an expiration date.

I flip to the page I know is there before I even find it, the one near the end about the storm rolling through the cornfield, everything ripening and dying in the same breath, and my own handwriting stares back at me, and underneath it, in different ink, added later, his:

She was right.

Three words. No date. I have no idea if he wrote them right after I left or last week, sitting alone in this house waiting for a woman he’d already lost.

I sit down on the edge of his bed with the book still open in my hands and I don’t cry, because I already used up my one allotment of dignity today refusing to cry in front of a judge, and I’m not spending a second round of it on my own book, on his handwriting in the margins of it.

I put it back exactly where I found it. Then I take it back out and read the storm passage twice more, because apparently my self-control checked out somewhere around the county courthouse and hasn’t come back yet.

Cricket finds me first. She noses the door open, hops onto the bed, and sits there watching me with her head cocked, the sincere judgment of a dog who knows something is wrong and has no idea what to do about it.

“Don’t look at me like that,” I tell her.

She doesn’t stop.

I don’t plan on touching myself thinking about him. It happens like a held breath breaking, all at once and past the point where I could have stopped it if I’d wanted to. I lie back on my own bed, door shut and tell myself I’m just lying down for ten minutes before everyone descends with boxes and opinions about counter space again. Instead, I’m replaying the hallway at Nell’s, his mouth close enough to my ear that I could still feel the ghost of it there hours later, rough and warm, telling me he contains exactly one personality trait. I’m replaying the boundary house kitchen, his forehead against mine, the inch neither of us closed.

I try to stop it. I get almost a full minute of successfully thinking about anything else, the Corridor easement, Cruz’s non-answer, the raw betrayal of a paperback with my own handwriting in it, and none of it works, because underneath all of it is the same low, insistent fact: I want him.

My hand moves before I give it permission. My skin is already too warm, my breath already gone shallow and quick, and when my fingers finally slide lower I find myself slick and aching, wet enough that it startles a sound out of me I don’t recognize as my own voice. I press the heel of my hand there and just breathe for a second, furious at how little it takes, how fast my body hands over everything my pride spent so many years trying to keep.