“Are they sacred if they hurt the people you love?”
Glenda said nothing.She didn’t look at her, but at the sound of a door closing, they both looked over at the house.
The Bennet brothers stepped out onto the porch.Sam’s heart clutched a little bit, in that way it did when something about Nate caught her as slightly unexpected.
Like how good he looked in a suit, or how much going to a wedding together left her feeling… a little jittery and weird about her own future.
“Good men,” Glenda rasped.
All dressed in suits and freshly shaven, they looked even more alike than they usually did.The dark hair and eyes.All tall and broad—Cal was even putting the weight he’d lost last year back on so that he didn’t look quite so… sickly.
“Not so hard to look at,” Sam murmured.
But Glenda was right.All three of them, in very different ways, had somehow taken all the bad Benjamin Bennet had thrown at them and turned it into something good.
Secrets had hurt them all.Secretshad made their lives harder.Maybe the truth hadn’t always been safe.Not when Benjamin Bennet had been terrorizing them or their mother behind the scenes, but the truth wasalwaysthe real answer.
“Good men deserve the truth, Glenda.”
But Glenda said nothing in words.Just hummed a little tune under her breath Sam didn’t recognize.
And she didn’t want to push when Nate came and sat on her other side.When Cal took the seat in front of Nate.
Landon and Aly weren’t doing any attendants, so Landon kept on until he was standing under the archway with the minister, waiting for Aly.
Jill appeared and went over to the little music setup and clicked something on her laptop.The strains of the bridal march started coming out of speakers attached as Jill hurried to her seat next to Glenda.
Then Aly stepped out onto the porch.
The dress was simple, but elegant white satin in clean lines.Really beautiful.Aly didn’t wear a veil, and her red hair was carefully braided into a coil at the base of her neck.Her makeup was as simple as the rest, and it all suited Aly and Landon down to the bone.
No one walked Aly down the aisle.She proceeded herself and met Landon under the arch.It was beautiful and perfect and none of it would have mattered anyway, because the two only had happy, loving eyes for each other, like every moment of their lives had led them exactly here, exactly where they belonged.
Sam had the strangest wave of nostalgia for the two motherless girls she and Aly had been.Not unmarked by tragedy or the hard stuff, but still with enough hope to make being a teenager… well, fun.Fun and somewhat carefree.Giggling together about all the roads they could take as the future unfurled out before them.
Then Marie Bennet had been murdered and everything had changed.A fifteen-year trudge through darkness and terrible things and all the hope being sucked out of life.
But then they’d found the truth.Nate had come home.Landon and Aly hadfinallygotten together.
The truth did all this.Sam had lost things in the truth—her father, her aunt, some of her steadfast surety—but she’d gained so much in its place.
So it felt like somehow, fifteen years later, they were mending everything that had been ripped apart back then.They couldn’t bring Marie back, but her children could find love.Happiness.Contentment.
Sam had lived without hope for a while.She knew how bleak and dark it could be.
Nate’s hand curled around hers, brought it to sit on his leg.His bad leg.Yeah, they’d all had some really dark days.So dark, it was hard to believe in the light.
But Sam wanted to.Because there was plenty of bad in this life, sacred secrets included, but who could deny that good was part of it all?Certainly not her.Not when Landon and Aly looked at each other with love and devotion in their eyes and said I do.
Not with her hand in Nate’s.
All of this had come from finally finding thetruth.So she wouldn’t be convinced to stop looking for it.
Not even for Glenda’s sacred secrets.
*
The reception, suchas it was, included music on a speaker being played from a playlist Jill had made for the couple on her computer.Landon and Aly danced, such as it could be considereddancingwhen two people just swayed together no matter the beat of the music.
