Page 73 of Reluctant Bride

She doesn’t drink it. She just holds it, both palms around the glass like she’s warming them, and comes to stand near the window instead of near me.

The mountain fills the whole pane behind her, silver-blue and enormous, and for one stupid second I think about how many nights I’ve stood at a window somewhere, Chicago, my house, staring at some skyline or another and not letting myself think her name on purpose.

“Eleven weeks,” I say. No lead-in. If I try to build up to it I’ll talk myself out of the middle before I reach it. “That’s how long it lasted. Ashley and me. Eleven weeks, and I never once touched her.”

Her face loosens, just barely, before she catches it and pulls it back.

“You’re going to have to do better than never touched her, Dawson. I watched her arms around your neck at the fairgrounds. I built my entire life story on top of that picture.”

“I know what you watched.” I make myself hold her eyes instead of the mountain. “I let you watch it. That’s the part I’ve never told you. I didn’t fix it because letting you believe the easy version was safer than telling you the true one.”

“Which is.”

“I lied to you, Sage.” My hand tightens on the glass. “I told you it was over. I told you Ashley was real, that the summer had just run its course, that we were better off, and I said it enough times in enough different ways that you finally stopped fighting me on it.”

Sage doesn’t move. “I didn’t stop fighting you. You stopped answering.”

“You fought.” My voice comes apart on it, worse than anything before. “You stood on the porch of this house and asked me why, over and over, and I gave you the same lie every single time. You’re heading back to Ithaca in a few weeks, and I’m gone to Evanston in September. It’ll only get messier, only hurt more the longer we let it go on. Better to stop now, clean, before it gets too strong to walk away from.” I have to stop and breathe before I can say the rest. “I remember your face. Mascara running, asking me to just tell you what you did wrong so you could fix it, and there was nothing to fix because you never did anything. I did. I stood there and watched you beg me to change my mind, and I told myself I was being strong by not giving in. I wasn’t strong. I was a coward reciting a script.”

“You made me run.” Sage’s voice is very quiet, very even, the voice she uses right before something breaks. “I didn’t leave Rimrock because I stopped loving you, Dawson. I left because you handed me a version of you I couldn’t stay in the same valley with. I flew back to Ithaca six weeks early because staying here loving you and watching you not love me back was the only thing I couldn’t survive.”

“I know.” My voice cracks on it, and my eyes go hot and wet in a way I don’t try to hide from her. “My heart broke that day too. I want you to know that.”

This house was a guest house back then, empty most of the year, nobody using it but us. We made love on that porch more nights than I could ever count sober, and the night I ended it, I waited until she cleared the trees, out of sight, before I broke down. I sat right there on the same boards, back against the same post, and sobbed like a boy who’d just done something he couldn’t undo, alone, where nobody would ever have to know it happened.

“I don’t get to say it like it earns me anything,” I tell her now, “but you didn’t cry alone on that porch. I just made sure you never saw it.”

She doesn’t say anything right away. Her free hand comes up and presses hard against her own mouth, like she’s trying to hold something in that wants out anyway, and her eyes are wet and glassy in the moonlight, fixed on me like she’s seeing the boy on that porch instead of the man standing in front of her now. For a moment neither of us moves, and the only sound in the room is her breath going ragged and mine right behind it.

Then I watch her pull herself back from it. Her jaw sets. Her eyes clear, the grief still sitting underneath but banked now, put away where she can use it later, like I’ve watched her set aside a fence-line splice or a forged warrant so she could think instead of feel.

“Ashley got paid six figures that year,” she says finally. “Tate found the record. I did the math the second Mackenzie said her name, and it lines up with the exact summer you decided to break my heart for no reason you’ve ever been able to give me. So don’t tell me it was just a lie you told badly, Dawson. Someone paid for that lie. I want to know who.”

“There’s one more piece.” I don’t make her pull it out of me. “Not who. I don’t know who, and that part’s the truth. What she had on me. I know exactly what it was. I’ve known since the day she used it.”

“Then say it.”

“Not tonight.” I hold her eyes and don’t dress it up as anything kinder than it is. “It’s the worst thing I’ve ever done, and it isn’t only mine. My father’s whole company is tied to it. I’ve never said it out loud to anyone, and I’m not saying it for the first time as a footnote to everything I just told you.”

“You don’t get to protect me from it. Not after tonight. Not after the porch.”

“I’m not protecting you from it. I’m asking for the chance to hand it to you right instead of fast.” I don’t look away. “You can hate me for the wait. I’d rather that than hand you the worst thing I’ve ever done like it’s an afterthought.”

She holds my eyes a long moment, unconvinced, furious, and doesn’t say fine. She doesn’t say okay.

“Blackmail,” she says instead, quiet and even. “You said that word once before, Dawson. The day after we were married, showing me your tattoos, you said you wanted something permanent nobody could talk you out of or blackmail out of you. I noticed it then. I let it go because I didn’t have anything to hang it on yet. I have something now.” Her eyes don’t waver. “That’s the word, isn’t it? Somebody didn’t just pay Ashley. Somebody used something against you.”

I don’t answer that. I don’t have to. My silence answers for me, and she hears every word of it.

She exhales hard, and the fight in her shoulders settles into something colder, banked rather than spent.

“You get until Ashley’s in a room with me,” Sage says. “Not until you feel ready. Until she’s standing in front of me. That’s the deadline. It’s not yours to move.”

“Understood.”

The silence holds a moment, neither of us moving, and I realize she’s still standing there because there’s more she hasn’t heard yet, and she knows it. I owe her the rest of it whether she asks for it or not.

“It wasn’t only that I let you believe it,” I confess. “I made it happen on purpose. Nobody in this valley ever knew what we were to each other, so there was no public story to manage, no rumor to kill. The only audience I ever needed was you. I let Rimrock see me standing next to Ashley at things, the feed store, the fair, because I needed you to see it more than I needed anyone else to. I never slept with her. Not once. But I let her stand close enough that your face seeing us together was the whole point.”