And they had it.
Watching them laugh and drink and float in mineral water while the sun broke over the sea, I realized this was the last breath before the plunge. They were braver than they knew.
I sat on a chaise near the water’s edge while Vivienne re-read her vows out loud to herself, and Anna and Claire debated whether they could get away with dancing barefoot at their respective receptions.
Bea joined me at some point, a hibiscus drink in her hand, the breeze catching her hair.
“You okay?” she asked, not looking directly at me.
I nodded. “For now.”
“You feel like you’re falling, or flying?”
I gave a sad smile. “Both.”
She didn’t press. Just sipped her drink and said, “That’s what love feels like, sometimes. Right on the edge of the drop.”
We talked about Monte then. Not long. Just enough. How he’d said—over and over—that he’d be the invisible wall between this world and the dangerous one if it came to that.
He had been.
Now that wall was gone. But somehow, I felt like he was still here. Maybe in the silence. Maybe in the way Silas touched me with careful reverence every time we were alone. Like he was carrying Monte’s memory, too, even in the heat of love.
It was late by the time we all settled. My body was warm from the spa, my skin glowing, my muscles boneless with relief. But the tension was never fully gone. Not from me.
Because this wasn’t just a countdown to six perfect weddings.
It was a countdown to whatever else was coming.
To whatever price Silas was going to have to pay to end the war his mother started.
I hadn’t told anyone that the ribbon was back. A second one. Found in the pocket of my robe here at the resort. Crimson, curled. No note.
Just the scent of something familiar.
My Silas. Soon.
I sat there long after the others had gone to their rooms, the stars bleeding out above the sea like pinpricks in velvet. The waves came in slow and steady, a rhythm I couldn’t quite match. Everything in me pulsed too fast lately—my heart, my thoughts, my memories.
Especially the ones I’d buried.
Maybe it was the second red ribbon. Maybe it was the way Silas held me now, like I wasn’t just some detour in his life but the anchor in a storm neither of us fully understood. Maybe it was Monte—gone too fast, too quietly, leaving behind silence and unfinished sentences.
Or maybe it was just time.
I hadn’t thought about home in years.
Not really.
Not since the day I bought the cheapest bus ticket out of Arkansas and changed my name halfway to Atlanta.
Deborah Koltnow.
That had been my name.
Born in a trailer off County Road 17, second of five kids, daughter of a mechanic who never met a bottle he didn’t finish and a mother whose love came and went with the heat index. I’d grown up knowing how to make a dollar stretch and how to disappear when my father’s voice got low and quiet—that dangerous kind of quiet that always preceded a slammed door or a backhanded lesson.
I’d been seventeen the last time I saw my family. My real family.
