Page 180 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

The quiet rushes in behind it.

I rise slowly, on unsteady feet, moving to stand at the top of the stairs with my back against the wall and both hands pressed flat to my mouth.

The anger's gone out of me all at once, the way a fire drops when the wind quits, and what's underneath it is so much worse.

Catastrophe. He said catastrophe. He said I'd blow it up again…like it was ever me who blew it up. Like I was the one who walked away.

My eyes flood.

My scent is turning under me no matter how hard I fist my hands, the sweet apricot going bruised and brown at the edges, the sharp green snap of broken stems threading through, the smell of a hurt I can't logistics my way out of.

I press harder against my own mouth, then turn away from the stairs and I try, I try so hard, to hold it in the way I've held everything in for five years.

Who am I kidding?

I don't hear him come up the stairs.

Beckett moves quietly for such a big man. I only know he's there when two warm, heavy hands settle gently over my shoulders from behind, careful, asking nothing.

I turn my head. I look up.

His knuckles are red. His jaw is tight.

But his eyes — his eyes are full of something that stops the breath in my chest, a conviction so complete it leaves no room for doubt.

I keep waiting, even now, some cowardly reflex in me braced for a man to flinch and choose the easier road.

Beckett doesn't flinch. He looks at me like he made this decision a long time ago, out by a stalled truck on the side of a road, when he swore he was done running and put himself between me and the worst of it, and every day since has only been him keeping the promise.

"Then there were four," he says softly.

His thumbs stroke once over my shoulders. A tear slips down my cheek, then another, and he watches them fall without looking away.

"That's all. That's the whole math of it, Apricot. Four."

I have no words.

There isn't a single sentence in me equal to the size of what's cracking open in my chest. So I do the only thing I can.

I nod.

His arms come around me from behind, folding me back against the solid warmth of him, wrapping me up in cedar and smoke and steadiness.

He tucks his chin over the top of my head and just holds me, the exact, uncomplicated comfort my whole starved soul has been yearning for, and never once dared to ask for out loud.

For five years the old rhyme only ever ran one way in my head.

One by one they'd left, until there were none, until there was just me and a wilting bouquet and the world's loudest silence.

Now I have this chance of redemption…only I’m the one in the driver’s seat, and it’s my turn to finally decide who gets to wield the cards of my life.

Then there were four...

CHAPTER 35

Run Toward Home

~CADE~