Page 182 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

I drag a hand down my face.

The stubble rasps against my palm. I haven't slept right, haven't showered, still smell like twelve hours of spilled beer and other people's cigarettes under the citrus turning rancid in my own skin.

"I worked a double," I say. "That's the whole crime. The bar got slammed after last call. Packed like sardines, every stool full, Renzo down two people. I stayed to help break it all down. Then the pack showed up, weirdly enough. Amber first, then Sawyer and August drifting in behind her. Beckett was already there, working the floor, since he's got the experience and Renzo always calls him when it's a mess." I spread my own hands now, mirroring Theo without meaning to. "They hung around a while. Then they left. I stayed behind. That's it. That's the story."

"Renzo called me too, you know," my mother says mildly, sliding another pancake onto the stack. She has run the Tide Table long enough to keep every bartender and line cook in this town on speed dial, and she trades gossip like currency. "Said the place cleared out by two. Said Beckett hung up his apron and walked out with your Omega a good hour before you decided the mop couldn't live without you." She still doesn't look up from the griddle. "Funny, the details a man leaves out."

Theo arches one eyebrow, slow, and I already hate whatever's coming.

"Did you have to stay?"

"I was working."

"Yeah." He drags the word out. "You'd already been working, what, six, eight hours by the time they rolled in? You could've clocked out and walked out the door with them. Since when do you pull twelve-hour shifts like some broke teenager scraping together chump change for a used dirt bike?"

I open my mouth.

Nothing useful comes out.

I close it again.

My mother sighs. It's a small sound, but it lands like a dropped plate.

"So." She turns from the stove, spatula still in hand, and fixes me with the full weight of her attention. "Your whole pack cameto the bar. Including Beckett, who was also working. And in the end every one of them left…including Beckett, who'd been on his feet just as long as you. So no one held a gun to your head. You weren't forced to stay behind."

She lets that sit.

"You chose to stay behind."

"I—" The rebuttal dies in my throat, because she's right, and we both hear how right she is.

She arches an eyebrow in a mirror of Theo's, or maybe he learned it from her.

"And that's not even why you're in the doghouse."

I groan and pinch the bridge of my nose.

"No. That's not why."

"Then?" Theo props both elbows on the table and leans in, all mock-patience. "Come on, spit it out. Clock's ticking, and the sooner we know what you did, the sooner we can maybe scrape together some kind of redemption arc for your dumb ass."

"I don't need a redemption arc." My voice comes out harder than I mean it to. I plant it there anyway, because it's the only ground I've got left. "I'm confident in what I did. There's nothing to redeem."

The two of them go quiet in a way that should warn me.

It doesn't.

The truth is I don't fully understand it myself — why I keep finding reasons to be the last one left in a room, why the sight of that clean, happy table this morning made me want to turn on my heel and walk straight back out.

Leaving first is easier. It has always been easier. You can't get left behind if you're already halfway out the door with your keys in your fist. I am not going to say a word of that to the two people staring me down over a stack of pancakes, so I give them the safe version instead.

"Iris needed a ride," I say. "Her car wouldn't turn over in the lot. Dead battery, or the starter, I don't know. I tried to jump it off my truck, and it wouldn't take. So I drove her home. By the time I got her there, I was running on fumes, and she could see it, said she didn't want me getting back behind the wheel half-asleep and wrapping my truck around a tree. So she told me to crash for a couple hours. I took the opportunity. Slept on her couch. Drove home this morning."

I sit back, satisfied, waiting for the tension to break, for someone to sayoh, is that all.

Instead, they both stare at me like I've sprouted a second head right there over the syrup.

Mayday. Mayday.