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Cade's eyes come up slowly. "We were just kids.”

"You told me if I ever so much as looked at your sister you'd end me, and I said she was off-limits, and I meant it. But she made a plan and I went along with it because it gave me an excuse to finally get close to her. And I couldn’t keep our promise. But if I had just been honest with her, she would have never needed a plan in the first place. She was never a mistake."

Cade sinks onto the edge of the bed, and when he looks up his eyes are wet, and it takes me apart.

"You kept a stupid promise two young kids made, and it cost you and her years. And she's been sad for every one of them, and I just thought she hadn't met the right guy." A sound comes out of him, half a laugh, half something a lot worse. "She met him at twelve. He taught her to follow through on a wrist shot and stayed at our house for sleepovers."

"Cade"

"That’s what I'm angry about, Jax. Not you being with her." He waves a hand between us, at the whole impossible thing. "You think I'm mad you love her? I'd have handed her to you at nineteen if either of you had the guts to say the truth about your feelings. There’s not a man alive I trust with her over you, and you knew that, and you spent years protecting me from a thing I'd have thrown you a parade for."

He stands.

"I'm mad you wasted the time. And I'm mad you lied to my face. Those two things. And nothing else."

He crosses the room and takes me by the back of the neck, forehead to forehead, the way we've done since we were nine years old after a win.

"You promised me she was off-limits." His voice breaks clean through. "I'm releasing you from it. If my sister has to choose somebody, there’s nobody on this earth I'd rather she chose than you. You've got my blessing. You've had it the whole time. You just never had the guts to ask."

I can't get a single word out.

Cade lets me go and grabs his jacket off the chair.

"She texted me this morning." He's checking his watch, already moving. "Her flight's at two. God help me, and it's eleven-forty, which means we've got maybe an hour before she clears security, and Chicago traffic does not care about either of us. We still have a chance to stop her."

"Cade."

"Come on." He's already out the door ahead of me, both of us at a run now, two men who love the same stubborn woman. "You tell her all of it. And then you let her choose."

Chapter 23: Margot

I catch myself in the black glass of the terminal window and it’s not a good look.

Hair down and doing whatever it wants. Eyes swollen, face blotchy, the specific ugly cry face of a woman who did the right thing and cannot stand it.

I go to the kiosk and print out my boarding pass. Now it feels real, I’m leaving Jax behind.

And I get in line. I hand the gate agent the crushed pass, she scans it, it beeps me through and I hear my name.

"MARGOT."

That was really loud.

The whole gate turns. I turn.

Jax is coming through the terminal at a dead sprint, hair wild, vaulting a row of chairs like they're the boards. And a few feet behind him, red-faced, is my brother.

My brother. Running through an airport. With Jax.

Together.

Jax skids to a stop in front of me. "Don't get on that plane. I wasn’t drunk. I was a coward." He throws it out loud, in front of God and everybody, and it stops me cold. "You were never a mistake."

My heart stops dead. "You were drunk."

"I wasn’t." His eyes never leave mine. "I kissed you and when you pulled back and called me drunk, I let you believe it. I was scared. I didn’t want to lose you and Cade." His voice cracks straight down the middle.

And the floor of my entire life tilts sideways.