I'd make it real when I got there. When I had his face in front of me and an explanation in his mouth.
Five minutes.
The dress shifted, and the bodice dug in harder. I reached up and worked two of the top buttons loose with one hand. My mother had been so careful with those buttons that morning, her fingers steady and unhurried where mine would have shaken.
I turned that thought off.
Three minutes.
The GPS said I'd arrived before I could see anything, and then the trees broke and the cabin materialized in my headlights. Smaller than I'd imagined. Dark wood, a covered porch, a truck parked out front that I didn't recognize. A light on inside.
Someone was here.
I sat in the car for a moment with the engine ticking around me. The light in the window was warm and still. I'd driven three hours in a wedding dress to knock on a stranger's door in the North Carolina mountains because a man who hadn't shown upto marry me told me to. Now I was here, and the only thing left to do was go find out what any of it meant.
Okay.
I got out of the car.
The tulle caught on the door handle, and I yanked it free without looking. Gravel shifted under my heels—heels, because I was still in my wedding shoes, because I hadn't thought to grab anything else—and I picked my way toward the porch steps.
The night air hit my bare shoulders all at once. I hadn't been outside since the church. I'd forgotten what outside felt like.
The porch steps held. I crossed to the door.
I knocked.
For a second, nothing. Then footsteps, unhurried, moving toward the door from somewhere inside. My hands found each other at my waist, fingers laced tight, and I stood up straight the way my mother had taught me to stand when I didn't want anyone to see that I was falling apart.
The door opened.
The man standing in front of me was not Dane.
He was taller than Dane by several inches and wider through the shoulders, with the kind of build that came from actual work, not a gym membership. Dark hair. A jaw that hadn't seen a razor in a few days. He was in a flannel shirt with the sleeves pushed to the elbows, one hand wrapped around a mug.
He took in the whole of me in one long look—the dress, the shoes, the mascara I could feel dried in tracks under my eyes, the way I was holding myself together with nothing but locked knees and laced fingers—and his expression didn't do what expressions usually did.
He didn't look surprised. He didn't look uncomfortable. He didn't look like a man working out what to say.
He just looked at me like he already knew what he was going to do about it, and then he stepped back from the door and held it open.
"Come inside," he said.
And I did.
2
HAYES
I'd seen a lot of things come up that driveway in the two days I'd been here.
A deer at dawn yesterday, picking its way across the gravel like it owned the property. A hawk that had spent about twenty minutes on the porch railing this afternoon, watching me with the contempt of a creature that had decided I wasn't worth the energy. And tonight, a woman in a wedding dress.
She was still standing in my doorway, taking in the room behind me, and I was doing the thing I'd learned a long time ago—staying still, not filling the silence with noise, letting her find her footing. She had the look of someone who'd been white-knuckling it for hours and wasn't quite ready to let go of the wheel. Wedding dress, bare shoulders, mascara dried in tracks down both cheeks. Chin up anyway. Whatever had brought her to this door, she'd arrived at it standing straight.
My heart started slamming against my ribs as I stepped back and held the door. She came inside.
She stood in the middle of the main room, twelve yards of wedding dress pooled around her feet, hands clasped at her waist, chin up. The mascara had tracked down both cheeks anddried there. She hadn't wiped it away. I got the sense she hadn't noticed, or hadn't cared, or both.