Page 161 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

The Other Fire

~AUGUST~

Beckett carries Amber off like she weighs nothing, like the last five years never happened, like the wordsorrywas the only thing that had ever stood between him and the rest of his life.

Amber's arm loops around the back of his neck. Her cheek finds the flannel over his shoulder. She's mumbling something into his collar that makes him laugh low in his chest, and the sound of it travels back across the dark yard to the fire, to me.

Good, I think.Good for you both.

I mean it.

That's the part that surprises me.

I keep waiting for the old ache to knot up under my sternum, the one that used to arrive on schedule whenever I watched a man reach for her.

It doesn't come…

What arrives instead is a loosening. A warmth with nothing sharp buried in the middle of it. Five years I've watched Amber walk away from us, chin high, spine straight, every exit counted.

Watching her get hauled up the porch steps like a sack of feed while she swats at Beckett's hat and giggles into his neck feels like the first honest thing to happen in this backyard all night.

Beckett and I have carried the same drought for five years, though neither of us has ever said the word for it out loud.

Two men who decided, without once deciding it together, that reaching for anyone felt like a debt we hadn't earned the right to pay. I watched him go down on his knees tonight in front of the woman we both wrecked.

I watched her let him back in.

Something in my own chest unclenched a notch I hadn't known was screwed down tight since the Lantern House. If Beckett gets to stop paying, then maybe the rest of us do too.

Maybe the sentence has an end date after all.

The screen door claps shut behind them. The porch light snaps off a beat later. That's Beckett — even drunk on relief and forgiveness, he remembers to kill the light so the moths stop drowning themselves against the bulb.

Then it's quiet.

The good kind.

Marsh frogs sawing away past the tree line. The fire ticking down to a low orange breathing, more ember than flame now, throwing just enough light to turn the smoke gold before it climbs into the dark. A half-built s'more abandoned on the arm of a camp chair, the marshmallow gone stiff and glossy. Somebody's empty bottle sweating a ring into the wood of the table.

Just me. Alone.

Except I'm not.

Sawyer hasn't moved. He's still on the far side of the pit, one boot propped on a split log, elbows on his knees, a longneck dangling from two fingers like he's forgotten it's there. He isn'twatching the porch where Beckett disappeared. He's watching me watch it. He has been for a while, I realize.

The magnolia in his scent has gone thick and slow in the night air — sweet, heavy, cut through with black pepper and the caramel burn of aged bourbon. It curls across the dead space between us and settles over the smoke like a hand laid flat on the back of my neck.

He's been waiting.

"You're doing it again," he says.

His voice is easy. Charleston-slow, the vowels stretched out like taffy. Everything about Sawyer is unhurried in a way I've never once managed to be.

"Doing what?" I ask.

"Managing." He tips the bottle toward the porch, toward the two people who just vanished behind that door. "You watched them go up those stairs, and I could see you filing it. Cataloguing whether everybody's okay. Whether the fire's safe to leave. Whether I've had too much to drink to drive home." He takes a slow pull off the beer. "You keep a courthouse in your head, Bellamy. You put everybody on trial but yourself, then you go quiet and call it manners."

I feel my jaw tighten.