Page 93 of Reluctant Bride

“Nobody wins a bet on a marriage that actually worked,” she announces to the tent at large, “so nobody’s collecting. Every dollar in that jar’s going to Mick’s hospital fund, and if anybody argues with me about it I will personally 86 you from pie for a calendar year.”

Nobody argues with Nell about pie. The valley learned that lesson before most of us could walk.

Eli goes first, glass raised, grin already loaded. “I’ve known this man since we were fourteen and he dared me to ride a horse that ended with me in a fence. I want it on record that Dawson Sullivan has spent the better part of two decades being wrong about exactly one thing, which is how long he could pretend he didn’t want this woman before somebody made him say so out loud. Sage, thank you for making him say so.”

Finn stands up next with a folded index card he’s clearly rewritten more than once, the edges soft from handling, and the sight of it makes the whole table go quiet before he’s said a word. Finn doesn’t plan things. Finn improvises weddings, ring tosses, and most conversations he’s ever had with a woman. Watching him smooth that card against the tablecloth is a vow all by itself.

“I wrote a version of this that had a bit about a mule in it,” he says. “I cut it. Sage deserves better than the mule bit, even though the mule bit was genuinely excellent.” He waits out the laugh, then lets his voice drop into something steadier than I’ve heard from him since Mick’s hospital room. “I watched my brother build a wall so tall I figured nobody was ever getting a ladder that reached it. Not our father. Nobody. Then I watched a Blackwater show up with a folder instead of a ladder, and negotiate her way past every brick of it, one clause at a time, until he didn’t need the wall anymore.” He looks at Sage, not me, and his voice catches on it. “You didn’t just marry my brother today. You gave me mine back. The version I remember from before he decided loving anybody was a liability. I’ve missed him. Thank you for finding him again.”

He sits down before the applause finishes, jaw tight, and doesn’t reach for a joke to cover it, which might be the first time in his life Finn Sullivan has let a room sit in something without rescuing it. I find Sage’s hand under the table and squeeze it once, because I don’t trust my own voice not to do what Finn’s just did.

Tate says four sentences total and somehow says more than everyone else combined. “Dawson taught me every credential he had access to could be stolen and used against him, and he still handed one more thing nobody could ever take. Her name, next to his, on paper he wrote himself. That’s not romantic. That’s just the bravest thing I’ve watched anybody do all summer.” He sits down before the applause even starts, uncomfortable with the attention the second he’s given it.

Knox doesn’t give a toast at all. He waits until the tables clear for dancing, catches me by the bar with a whiskey I didn’t order and clearly wasn’t meant to refuse, and leans in close enough that nobody else picks it up.

“You hurt her again,” he says, pleasant as a Sunday sermon, “and I will not need a warrant, a witness, or a reason. I’ll just need an afternoon.”

“Understood.”

“Good.” He claps me on the shoulder, hard enough to mean it, and walks off to go dance with his wife like he didn’t just threaten my life in a tent full of calla lilies.

Cora and Finn end up on the dance floor for a second, slower song neither of them asked for, and neither one leaves early. West’s camera finds them twice from across the lawn, and something crosses Cora’s face, careful and warm at the same time, that tells me I’m going to need to keep half an eye on that corner of the family for a while yet.

Ashley leaves before the cake cutting. I notice it like I notice everything now, an absence instead of a presence, her seat empty, Grant trailing after her toward the valet line with the confused expression of a man who has never once been told the whole truth about anything in his life. She doesn’t say goodbye to either of us. I decide I’m not owed one.

The gifts happen quiet, off to the side, away from the band and the cake and the four hundred guests who’ve already had two glasses of good champagne on top of cocktails and wine and stopped watching us closely.

I hand her the folder myself.

“This isn’t wrapped,” she says, turning it over.

“It’s not that kind of gift.”

She opens it under the string lights, and I watch her read the deed twice before she understands what she’s holding. The Sullivan border route. Every mile of the road the Corridor easement was always fighting over, signed over free and clear, no Blackwater entity attached to the transfer, no joint holding company, no clause requiring anything of her at all. Just her name, alone, on a piece of land my family has held for six generations.

“Dawson.”

“There was always a road, Sage.” I take her hand, thumb tracing the two new rings on her finger. “You just never let me show you where it went. I’m showing you now. It’s yours. Not Blackwater’s. Not ours, in the messy, tangled, both-families-own-a-piece-of-it sense. Yours.”

Her eyes go bright, and she doesn’t bother blinking it back this time.

“Then you’re going to want this,” she says, and pulls a folder of her own out of a bag she’d hidden under the gift table, thin, the kind of thing she’s clearly been carrying since before the ceremony even started.

I open it and find the Corridor easement. The same one she buried in a county hearing room the spring before last, the one that started every ounce of the war we just formally ended in front of four hundred witnesses. She’s signed it back over, full transfer, no strings, no clause requiring anything of me either.

“I spent fourteen months making sure you’d never get this without a fight,” she says. “I’m handing it to you without one. Happy wedding, Sullivan.”

I don’t have a joke ready. I don’t reach for one.

I kiss her instead, my hand pressing into the hair at the nape of her neck and neither of us needs an audience to know what just happened. Two people just handed each other the exact weapon they once used to destroy one another, and neither one flinched doing it.

West finds me, phone already out, tense despite the free-flowing alcohol. Whatever’s on that screen isn’t going to improve with a slower delivery.

“The ceremony camera,” he says. “The one I killed twice this week and it kept running anyway.”

“What about it?”

“I finally got the access log to cooperate. Somebody pulled a live feed off it during the actual ceremony. Ninety seconds, right around the vows.” He turns the screen toward me, the timestamp stamped and undeniable. “Not stored footage somebody grabbed later. A live pull, Dawson. While it was happening. While four hundred people sat there thinking they were watching us end a war.”