Page 735 of End Game

At the dice that started all of this years ago.

Then I raise my spoon toward Ronan. “Best fucking campaign ever.”

He inclines his head. “I'll take that under advisement.”

Chapter fifty-one

Oath of Devotion

Micah

Winter moves faster once we're engaged.

At Thanksgiving, Dex's mother spends most of dinner asking questions about the wedding while Dex insists we have plenty of time, then changes his mind halfway through dessert and starts a shared note titled Things We Absolutely Need, which somehow includes cake flavors, first-dance songs, and whether fog machines are “classy if used responsibly.”

By Christmas, we have a venue.

The gallery is an old industrial building that was converted without trying too hard to hide what it used to be. Exposed brick. Steel beams. Concrete floors. Huge windows. White walls broken up by rotating local art.

Dex walks into it for the first time, turns in a slow circle, and says, “Okay, this is aggressively us.”

He's right.

By New Year's, we've chosen food, argued about invitations, and established that Dex's definition of a small wedding is approximately thirty people larger than mine.

In January, he informs me that he wants a real wedding cake.

Not cupcakes.

Not some trendy dessert table.

A tiered cake that we cut together because, apparently, there are traditions he has spent his entire adult life pretending he thinks are stupid when the truth is that he wanted them for himself.

That surprised me.

A few weeks later, he tells me he wants to wear white.

That one surprises me enough that I ask him twice if he's serious.

He is.

By Valentine's Day, the wedding is close enough that our dining room table has become a rotating storage area for contracts, seating charts, envelopes, fabric swatches, and one increasingly abused notebook Ronan started using to keep us from forgetting things.

Dex and I spend Valentine's night at home with everyone else.

At some point, he stretches his legs across my lap, looks down at his engagement ring, and says, “Six more weeks.”

Something in my chest shifts.

Not nerves exactly. It's more like my body finally understands that the date we've been discussing for months is close enough to become real.

Then March gets here.

And suddenly I'm standing in an art gallery in a black suit waiting to marry him.

The space looks different with people in it.

When we first toured it, I noticed the bones of the room first—the height of the windows, the way the black beams cut across the ceiling, where light fell on the brick and where it disappeared into shadow.