Page 184 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

Here's where the fear I've been swallowing for weeks finally claws its way up my throat.

"I've been getting threats," I say, low. "Real ones. It's only a matter of time before somebody makes a move, and I'm the one standing in front of it."

For a second I think it'll land.

I think he'll understand.

What I can't say, what lodges behind my teeth like a fishhook, is the real shape of the fear.

That it was never about me.

It's this house. It's the Tide Table with my mother's name painted over the door. It's the scholarship carrying my little brother out of this town toward something bigger than any Mercer has ever gotten near, the one thing in my whole orbit going right, and how little it would take for a man with money and a grudge to reach out and snuff it. I can't lay that on Theo.

So I let him keep thinking I'm just paranoid.

"That," Theo says, "is what we have laws for. And police. And a mother who knows every soul in this county and could raise an army with three phone calls. You don't get to torch your own future and call it a bodyguard."

The word cracks something in me.

"Wow." I hear how ugly it sounds even as it leaves me.

"My own brother. A coward."

"Mom." I wheel toward her, because Theo's a lost cause and she's always, always been my last resort.

She's set the spatula down, turned the burner off, and is standing there looking at me. There's no heat in her face at all, no anger I can push against.

There's only a quiet, bottomless disappointment, and it drops the floor out from under my heart.

"Mom, come on. Please. Defend me here. Tell him."

"Honey."

She says it so softly that both of us go still.

Theo's mouth closes.

The pancakes sit forgotten and cooling on the griddle behind her.

"Somehow," my mother says, "I raised you to believe that what you just did to that girl is okay. And that's on me."

I open my mouth to argue —the reflex is automatic, the deflection already loaded— and then I actually look at her.

Her eyes have gone bright and wet at the rims, and she's holding herself very carefully, the way she used to hold herself at the kitchen sink late at night when she thought we were asleep.

The argument dies on my tongue.

Wait.

"Mom?" Theo's up out of his chair before I've moved, crossing to her, one big hand settling gentle on her shoulder. The heat's gone out of him too, replaced by something careful. "Hey. What's wrong?"

"Like father like son," she whispers.

She says it to the window, not to me, like if she doesn't aim it directly at my face then she isn't really pinning those four words to my chest.

But I feel them land anyway.

I feel them sink in through skin and bone, and something I've spent my whole life refusing to look at rolls over in the dark.