Page 30

It was time to send everyone home. The music had faded. The lights had dimmed. The last of the champagne had gone warm in half-empty glasses, and most of the guests had slipped into the night on waves of laughter and exhaustion.

But we had stragglers.

Carol was trying to fish a drunk groomsman out of a haystack. Gabe was nowhere to be found, which likely meant he was emotionally spiraling in a parking lot somewhere. And I couldn’t find my mother.

Or Henry.

Which was deeply concerning.

“Aunt Hatty wants her coat,” Patrick said, rubbing his temple as he joined me by the entrance. “She’s very insistent. Something about no one needs to see her knees in this weather .”

“I’ll help look,” I muttered, already marching toward the coat closet.

Carol tagged along. “You sure she didn’t already leave?”

“She wouldn’t leave without making a point of it.”

“Touché.”

We reached the closet. It was technically a small room off the barn foyer, dark and full of faux-fur wraps, rental tux bags, and way too much cologne. I opened the door and immediately regretted every decision that had ever led me to this moment.

Because there, in the dim light of a low-watt bulb, pressed against the back wall like horny teenagers at prom, were?—

“Oh my God!”

Henry spun.

My mother gasped.

Everyone froze. Including me .

“Oh, sweet suffering hell,” Carol said flatly, turning right around and walking back out. Patrick stepped forward, blinked like he couldn’t quite trust his vision, then threw an arm in front of me like he could physically shield my brain from the image.

“Mom?” I choked out. “Henry?”

“Sweetheart,” Henry said, trying to straighten his shirt. “This isn’t what it looks like.”

“I think it’s exactly what it looks like!” I squeaked.

Patrick made a noise beside me. It was halfway between a laugh and a wheeze. “Dad?”

"He's banging my mother," I cried out.

Aunt Hatty, still waiting behind us, peered in and said, “Well. That’s one way to keep warm.”

Patrick chuckled behind me. That’s when I lost it. I turned on him without thinking. “That's your father! Do something.”

“Like what?”

“Get him off my mother, get him out of the closet!” I screeched.

He closed the door. "Ells, they're both adults, consenting adults?—"

"Oh, that's right. I'm sorry, for a moment I forgot that Saint Henry can't do anything wrong. Like banging my mentally impaired mother."

“She’s not mentally impaired,” he said gently. “Maybe a bit… crazy,” he added, wincing. “But you and I both know—she doesn’t do anything she doesn’t want to."

Both of my hands pushed against his chest; of course, it didn’t do anything, damn this man.

He didn't even stumble. He was right, too, but I wasn't in the mood to discuss my mother's mental state while she was…

was… fucking someone in the fucking closet.

The door was so thin that I could still hear their moans.

They hadn't even stopped. They were still going!

Patrick stood there like the world wasn’t burning down behind the door.

“Are you seriously defending them?” I hissed. “Right now? Today of all days?”

“I’m not defending anyone, and of course I’m horrified, Ells. But I can’t go kicking down a door over something I can’t control,” he said calmly, and God, that made me want to scream. “I’m just saying—this isn’t about them. It’s about you. And me. And how we deal with stuff when it goes sideways.”

“No, Patrick, this is about your dad having sex with my mother at our wedding. In a coat closet.”

“You think I’m not horrified?”

“You don’t look horrified.”

“Well, excuse me if I’ve had a little more practice than you in pretending things are fine when they’re not.”

That stopped me cold. Patrick exhaled and scrubbed a hand down his face. “Sorry. That came out wrong.”

“No,” I said, heart thudding. “It didn’t.”

We stared at each other. For the first time in months, I didn’t see the man I trusted with everything. I saw the boy who’d walked away ten years ago because pretending to be fine was easier than bleeding out in front of someone.

“You still do this,” I whispered. “You still act like keeping your cool makes you better at handling things.”

He flinched. “Ella?—”

“Well, newsflash, Patrick: I don’t want calm. I don’t want cool and steady. I want someone who will yell with me. Cry with me. Feel with me.”

“I do feel,” he said, voice tight. “I’m just not great at performing it for everyone’s benefit.”

“It’s not a performance! It’s a relationship! You don’t get to opt out of the ugly parts just because they make you uncomfortable.”

He looked down then, jaw working, eyes dark. “This isn’t about them,” he finally said. “This is about you needing everything around you to be predictable , and the second it’s not, you throw it back at me like it’s my fault.”

His words hit me. Hard. But he wasn't done. "I get it, with a mother like Lisa, I might have been the same way, needing to control everything in my life. But life isn't predictable, Ella."

We were spiraling. Fast. My throat hurt. My chest ached. His hits just kept coming, so I said the one thing I knew would hit him too, “Maybe we rushed this.”

Patrick’s head snapped up. The words hung there. Too sharp, too reckless, and I regretted them the second they hit the air.

“I didn’t mean?—”

“Yes,” he said stiffly. “You did.”

Then he stepped back. One step. Two. And turned away. I watched him walk out of the barn without looking back. My heart cracked like ice in boiling water. Because this time he wasn't just walking away from me, he was walking out on our wedding.

Carol appeared at my side seconds later, eyes wide, obviously having caught enough of it to get the gist. “Let’s get you out of here.”

She hooked her arm through mine and steered me through the last of the lingering guests, through the barn doors, down the moonlit path toward the little stone cottage that was supposed to be our wedding night suite.

I let her guide me, too stunned and too hurt to do anything but move.

When we reached the porch, I finally spoke. “I’m such an idiot.”

“No,” Carol said.

“I am.” My voice cracked. “I let myself believe that everything would be perfect. That I could trust his family. That I could just… slot into their golden, shiny, unbreakable legacy, and it would all work out.”

Carol didn’t reply; she just let me vent.

And vent I did. I kept going, words spilling out like a slow bleed.

“But of course not. Because I’m the girl with the broken family.

With the cold mother and the complicated past. He’s the saint.

They’re all saints. Saint Henry. Saint Gabe. Even Thorne, the fluffy martyr.”

Carol snorted. “Don’t give Thorne sainthood. That bear would set a church on fire for a cinnamon roll.”

I barked a laugh, then immediately pressed my fist to my mouth to keep from sobbing.

“And Patrick,” I said bitterly, “he’ll never admit they’re flawed. He’ll never say one bad thing about his perfect dad or his misunderstood brother. I was humiliated, Carol. My mother and his father . And I was the one who ended up looking crazy for reacting.”

Carol’s jaw tightened. “You’re not crazy.”

“He walked away from me.”

“He stormed away from you,” she corrected. “Big difference. Walking implies dignity. That man stomped like Thorne was driving.”

Another laugh slipped out. A weak one. But it helped.

She squeezed my hand. “You’re allowed to be mad. You’re allowed to want more than endless patience and silence from someone who promised to stand beside you. Even saints screw up.”

“I just thought he’d fight for me. Not with me.”

Carol didn’t answer right away. When she did, her voice was low.

“I love Patrick. You know I do. He’s one of my oldest friends. But he’s stubborn. And he’s spent his whole life being the glue for that family. He doesn’t know how to be the guy who questions them.”

I nodded, my throat raw. “And I’m not glue. I’m glass.”

“No,” she said. “You’re fire. And if he can’t learn how to meet you in the middle, he’s going to get burned.”

We stepped into the cottage. The room was beautiful. Candles flickered on the nightstand. The bed was turned down. Rose petals dusted the floor. The sight made me want to scream.

“This was supposed to be our night,” I said, my voice breaking.

Carol closed the door behind us. “Then maybe it still can be. Just not in the way you thought.”

I didn’t answer. I walked over to the bed, sat down in a pile of tulle and flowers, buried my face in my hands, and let myself cry.

I don’t know how long I cried. I only stopped when I realized I was gasping more than sobbing, and my cheeks hurt from the salt.

Carol sat beside me in the big chair by the fireplace, legs tucked under her, champagne abandoned on the side table.

She hadn’t said anything in a while, which I appreciated.

She was letting me unravel at my own pace.

Eventually, I wiped at my face with the hem of my dress—elegantly—and said, “He left.”

“He did.”

“On our wedding night.”

“Technically, you told him you might’ve rushed the whole thing.”

I flinched. “I didn’t mean it.”

“I know.”

Silence again.

Then she asked, gently, “Do you think maybe… he wasn’t entirely wrong?”

I stared at her. “About what? About me being an emotionally unstable lunatic with a god complex?”

She didn’t blink. “About control.”

I pressed the heel of my hand into my forehead. “God. Don’t start psychoanalyzing me.”

“I’m not,” she said. “I’m reminding you of things you already know but don’t want to say out loud.”

When I didn’t respond, she waited. And then, softly continued, “Remember in sixth grade, when you had to switch schools in the middle of the semester because your mom said the house had bad vibes ?”

I groaned. “Ugh. The energy shift . She saged the couch.”

“And when she made you pack everything in one day so you could leave before Mercury retrograded?”

“I missed finals. I had to retake math in summer school.” I remembered.

“How many times did the school office have to call her and remind her to pick you up?”

I winced. Carol was right. Mom would say she'd pick me up at two thirty, but at least twice a month, she never showed. “She said the cat wouldn’t eat. So she had to make chicken and rice and couldn’t get there in time.

” I responded weakly with one of her excuses.

Another had been a bird that had been hit by a car, and she had to take it home first before she could come and get me.

Carol’s voice was quiet now. “Remember what you said to me one time?"

I laughed dryly, because over the many years of our friendship, I had said a lot of things to Carol.

“You said, It’s okay. She loves the animals more than me .”

The words hit harder now than they did when I said them. Because back then, I’d said it like it was a joke. I had felt like it for a long time, and they just had to come out, but it was easier to make them sound like I was making light of it than to fully deal with it.

Carol reached over, took my hand. “You’re not broken, El. But you’ve been carrying around this deep, bone-level fear for a long time. That if you’re not on time, on task, on top of every little thing—someone will forget you. Or choose something else over you. Even a bird. Or a hungry cat.”

The air left my lungs in a slow, stunned breath.

“And Patrick,” she continued, “he’s not your mom. He doesn’t need a ten-minute buffer to remember you matter. He’s… always known.”

“I know,” I whispered, voice cracking.

“And yeah, okay, Screwing Saint Henry in the coat closet isn’t ideal. But your mom didn’t leave you this time. She showed up. She stayed. And she found someone she likes. That’s not on you to fix.”

I gave her words a moment to sink in. Slowly… ever so slowly… something shifted inside me. It wasn't a psychological breakthrough or anything like that, but I sat back against the pillows, tears still drying, and whispered, “It’s not normal, is it?”

“What?”

“To think people are late unless they’re ten minutes early. To panic if things don’t go according to plan. To immediately assume that if someone doesn’t answer their phone, it means they’ve forgotten me. Or left.”

Carol gave a half-smile. “No. That’s not normal. That’s trauma dressed up like scheduling.”

Another silence passed. Then I let out a long, unsteady breath. “If my mom wants to bang Henry in a closet… she can bang Henry.”

Carol blinked. “That is… surprisingly evolved.”

I laughed, hiccupped, and said, “Don’t get used to it.”

She patted my knee. “I’ll write it on a mug.”

Then she reached for her phone. “Now. Want me to text your husband and tell him he’s a moron for walking out?”

I paused. Then shook my head. “Not yet.”

She nodded, understanding. “Okay. But give me the green light, and I’ll put him in the emotional ICU.”

“Thanks,” I whispered.

“For what?”

“For being here. For staying. For… knowing me.”

She smiled. “Always. Even when you’re fire.”

I leaned my head against her shoulder.

And, for the first time since the fight, I let myself think: Maybe I could fix this.