Page 91 of Reluctant Bride

“I’m not telling you this to ruin your morning.” She smooths one hand down my sleeve, the same gesture she’s used on me since I was small enough to need steadying before school photos. “I’m telling you because you asked me once, a long time ago, whether I was ever angry that I married into a story that already had an ending written before I arrived. I never answered you honestly. I’m answering you now.”

“Are you angry?”

“I’m patient.” Her hand finds my jaw, and her grip is stronger than I expect, sure and brief, gone almost as fast as it lands. “Ask me again when there’s a Blackfeet name back at that table. Not a guest. A name that belongs there.”

She releases my face and steps back before I can answer, before either of us has to decide what answering would set in motion. It stays with me anyway, heavy and patient, for the rest of my wedding day.

“You look just like her,” she says instead, nodding at the mirror. “My mother. Same jaw. Same refusal to look away first.”

“I inherited the refusal from you.”

“You inherited it from all of us. That’s the whole point of a family, Sage. Nobody gets to keep the good parts to themselves.”

Mackenzie finds me twenty minutes later in a dress the exact shade of the calla lilies stacked in buckets on every surface of the house, blush pink deepening at the hem, cut different from Tessa’s off the shoulder version and Cora’s halter and Laney’s sweetheart neckline, because that was the one rule Kathleen actually enforced. Same color, whatever silhouette makes you feel unstoppable in it.

“Holt already cried once,” Mackenzie says, adjusting an earring in my vanity mirror. “In the mudroom. Denies it completely.”

“Holt doesn’t cry.”

“Holt cried. I have a witness. The witness is me.”

Maren arrives next in matching pink, matron of honor sash abandoned somewhere already because she says sashes are a war crime against good tailoring, and behind her comes Bree, the one person I faithfully keep in touch with from college, who flew out from Boston two days ago and has spent every hour since alternating between crying at nothing and demanding to know exactly what Dawson’s doing to earn a body like that, because she’s asked him three times now and still can’t get a straight answer out of him.

“I read that text over your shoulder and I need you to know my marriage counselor is going to hear about it,” Bree says, adjusting the fall of my veil where it’s slipped off one shoulder. “That man should not be legally allowed to text like that before a ceremony.”

“He’s had eight years to build up a backlog.”

“I hate that for me personally.”

Tessa laughs hard enough to need the wall. Cora’s already got a flask out of her clutch that nobody’s questioning. Laney’s crying the good kind of crying, mascara-proof and entirely on purpose, and somewhere past the noise I catch Mick’s voice through the open window, proud and delighted, holding court on the porch below with a cane in one hand and a beer in the other.

“Told you I’d walk into this wedding on my own two feet,” he says, to whoever’s listening, “and here I am, upright, employed, and only slightly more handsome for the limp.”

“Nobody asked you to add slightly more handsome,” Finn calls back, from somewhere nearer the tent.

“Nobody has to ask me anything. I earned this cane.”

I finish getting ready surrounded by every woman who’s ever mattered to me, laughing until my eyes water, until Josephine finally sets the veil in place and steps back to look at the whole of it, silk and lace and a hundred and fifty years of complicated family sitting quiet under the surface of one white dress.

“Ready?” she asks.

I look for him before I answer. I don’t scan the room for a body to hide behind or a conversation to duck into like I would have a year ago. I just ask.

“Where’s Dawson?”

Nobody blinks. Nobody exchanges a look, or laughs, or tells me to be patient. A year ago I couldn’t have said the question out loud in front of this many people. Today it’s just the truth, plain and easy, the same reason I stopped hiding behind Tessa at a diner booth and started standing in the middle of the room myself.

“Getting his tie fixed by Kathleen for the third time,” Bree says. “He looks completely edible. I’m furious about it on your behalf.”

“Ready,” I tell my mother.

The Sullivan grounds have been transformed from the ground up for this: four bars tucked at each corner of the lawn, two string quartets trading off under a canopy thick enough to blot out the sky, calla lilies and roses in every shade of cream and coral and the softest blush pink, spilling out of urns and arches and the ends of every row until the whole yard smells like something out of a memory I haven’t made yet.

Erin moves along the tree line in a dark suit instead of catering black today, radio at her hip, professional and steady and where trusted security is supposed to stand at an event this size. Nobody watching would think twice about her. I hold her gaze a beat longer than a bride has any reason to, long enough that her eyes give one flicker before she looks away first, and I let her have the small, private win of thinking that’s all it was.

Ashley’s seated four rows back on the groom’s side, Grant beside her in a suit that fits him better than his politics ever have. She sits with her hands folded, something soft blue and expensive draped over her shoulders, watching the aisle with an expression that gives nothing away at all. I let the old heat rise in me for one long breath, then let it go on the exhale. Today doesn’t belong to her.

Gideon’s waiting for me at the top of the aisle in a black tux that fits like every suit he’s ever worn, already thinking ahead of the ceremony he’s about to walk me into. Then he stops being that man for a second, just looks at me, something softer moving behind his eyes that I’ve almost never seen from him. He presses a kiss to my cheek, brief and rougher than he probably means it to be and offers his arm.