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“Well,” she managed to say when she was sure that she could speak, and she wasn’t sure she liked the sound of her voice when she did, “our marriage won’t be anything like that.”

And then, because his eyes were so blue they seemed to blister inside of her, she turned around and ran down the stairs.

Later, she decided that it hadn’t been running away, really. Nothing so dramatic. She had just understood that the conversation was over, and had then made sure that it was. That was all.

Yet for some reason, that look on his face seemed to haunt her as she was trying to sleep. And when she had to face her friends and tell the same non-story she’d told her sisters, which they seemed to believe in the same way her sisters had.

“Somehow,” Esther Wayne said with a laugh, “I should have expected this would be how you find your person.”

Kitty had no idea what that meant, or why Juliet and Sara Jane laughed as if they had similar expectations.

And then, soon enough, it was her wedding day.

She came down the stairs in her usual clothes. Her sisters looked at each other, then looked back at her, and spoke in unison. “No,” they both said.

“What?” Kitty demanded.

“No sister of mine is walking down an aisle looking like that,” Flannery proclaimed.

“Looking like what?” Kitty asked, because she was wearing what she always wore. Overalls. A nice pair of overalls, even. This wasn’t a date. It was… an appointment with the judge, that was all. She thought she looked perfectly presentable. “And also, there’s no aisle. It’s a courthouse.”

“My god, Kitty,” Indy muttered. “How are we even related?”

Against her will, she was bullied into a pretty pale-yellow dress that Flannery produced from the back of her closet. Before she knew it, they had done some things with her hair, hung necklaces around her neck, and forced her into a pair of sandals that she would never in a million years have worn on her own.

And while she was arguing with Indy about her hair, Flannery actually knelt down before her, and painted her nails right there in the sandals, because she said she couldn’t bear looking at them all bare and unpolished.

“Does Finn Patrick know what he’s getting into?” Indy asked when they finally got a complaining Kitty into the car. “Because I feel like he can’t possibly know.”

“You can ask him yourself,” Kitty said as they drove out of Cowboy Point, down into Marietta. “We’ll be moving him in tonight.”

“Into our house?” Flannery asked with a laugh. “Does he know that?”

“Why would he stay in an apartment when we have a house?” Kitty asked. Very reasonably in her opinion.

“I can’t decide if this is the weirdest thing that’s ever happened or if this is one hundred percent reasonable once we take the Kitty factor into account,” Indy said. Making it clear that she was talking to Flannery.

“Tell me about it,” Flannery muttered back.

Kitty refused to give them the satisfaction of asking what the Kitty factor was.

Down at the courthouse in Marietta, the Lisles and the Patricks were waiting outside in one big, animated group.

They all gathered around, and Kitty felt that she was on display in a way she definitely didn’t like. She glared at Raleigh Patrick to make herself feel better. “I’m not pregnant. People can get married for other reasons, you know.”

Raleigh only grinned, a slow unfurling that should have been irritating, but there was nothing about that man that was as irritating as it should have been. Or maybe that was what was irritating.

“My apologies,” he drawled. “I was trying to insult my brother, not you. I couldn’t think of a single reason a fine-looking woman like yourself would condescend to marry someone as deeply boring as Finn.”

“Raleigh,” Peyton Patrick said then, “stop talking to the bride.”

She came over and hugged Kitty, which felt… strange.

“Welcome to the family,” she said. Peyton seemed to look a little too deeply into Kitty too, just like her son liked to do, but all she did was squeeze Kitty’s shoulders and step back.

And all Kitty could think was that Peyton couldn’t have been more different than Kitty’s mother, who would have made this moment all about herself. She would have thrown a fit, making sure that no one would ever remember this wedding day unless they were thinking about her tantrums. That was the kind of person she was. At the very least, she would have made certain to go on and on about how she hadn’t been consulted, and how could Kitty marry a man she didn’t know, and so on and so forth until Kitty herself might have turned around and just gone home.

Everything about her parents was exhausting, but Kitty had the strangest feeling that the Patricks and the Lisles didn’t work like that. Because no one was questioning her. No one was making a scene. They might have all looked a little surprised at this turn of events, but instead of assembling so they could perform some kind of intervention, it seemed as if they’d all just turned up to be supportive. Cat had even dragged her husband, Wilder Carey, along. And Matilda Stark was with Tennessee—and had managed to elope with him without a crowd, if the rumor mill was right.