Page 142 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

"But?"

"But it's the bill coming due." I meet his eyes over the engine. "I didn't give her my all the first time. I had the most precious thing anyone ever placed in my hands, and the moment it got hard, I let go of it to save other people their trouble. So this—" I gesture at the truck, the dirt, the whole humbling shape of theevening "—this is the consequence. I don't get to be bitter about the natural consequence of my own cowardice. I get to suck it up, try again, and do it right this time. If she ever lets me."

Sawyer's quiet a moment, just watching me work.

Then…

"Can I ask you something, and you can tell me to mind my business?" I nod. "Why is it only you? Out here in the dirt, doing the actual work of it. Beckett, Cade…I don't see them breaking a sweat over what they did. Do they even feel it?"

I don't answer straight off.

I ease the corroded connector loose, scrape it clean with my thumbnail, and consider how much of my packmates' hearts are mine to hand a near-stranger.

Not much, is the honest answer.

But some things are true enough to say out loud.

"Beckett feels it," I say. "Don't let all that granite fool you. He carries it like a stone in his boot, every single step, and he'd sooner die than admit as much. But you heard him yourself, that night out on the road." I glance up. "When he stopped fighting you. When he said he'd follow whoever actually knew how to lead this pack, even if it turned out to be you. That was Beckett confessing. That is the loudest that man will ever be about being wrong in his life." I fit the connector back into place. "He wants to fix it. He just hasn't the first idea how, because nobody ever taught him a feeling was a thing you couldacton instead of only endure."

Sawyer nods slowly.

"That, I understand. I spent nine years in a pack full of men who could build anything you put in front of their hands and couldn't say one tender word to save their own lives." He picks at a fleck of rust on the hood. "Feeling the thing was never the hard part. Doing something with the feeling — that's the whole mountain."

"You'd know," I say, and I mean it as the compliment it is.

He glances at me, and something passes between us in the cooling air that I decide not to examine too closely.

"And Cade?"

My hands still on the wire.

"Cade," I say slowly, "is harder."

I let myself sit in it a second.

"Cade's got exactly one true flaw, and it's this…that in the ways that matter most, he is no different at all from his father."

Sawyer waits.

He's good at that, the waiting.

"You don't know his history, so here's the short version," I say. "Cade's father walked out. On Marina, on Cade, on the whole of it, back when Cade was young enough that it set the shape of him permanently, like a wire bent before the plaster dries. And the man had himself a whole philosophy about it, the way men like that always do." I twist a wire snug. "His gospel went…you don't dwell. You don't hold grudges. If something goes wrong, ifyoudo the wrong, you suck it up, you box it away, and you move on down the road, and you do not look back. He raised Cade on that scripture. Keep running toward the next thing. Never once sit in the wreckage of the last one."

"And Cade bought it."

"Cadelivesit. It's why the man's got a tattoo that readsrun toward homeand a suitcase that's been half-packed since he was nineteen years old." I seat the last wire. "Here's the flaw underneath it, though. The thing his father never understood, and Cade's only now beginning to. That same tidy philosophy…just move on, don't hold a grudge, suck it up and go, it feels like pure strength when you're the one who did the leaving." I look up at him. "But it can be spun clean around and aimed straight back at your own chest. Because if grudges truly don't matter, and moving on is the highest virtue a person can have, thenwhat on earth is meant to stop the woman you left from doing the exact same thing to you? From looking you dead in the eye, shrugging, and moving on down her own road?"

Sawyer goes quiet, turning it over.

"You think that's what he's counting on. That Amber hasn't got it in her to hold it against him. That she'll take all of you back no matter what, because grace is just who she is."

"I haven't heard him say it in those exact words." I shut my eyes a moment. "But yes. That's the bet I think he's quietly making, underneath all that silence he's been keeping lately. That her grace is a guarantee written into the contract. That she'll movetowardus, not past us, because a grudge is beneath a woman like her."

I shake my head.

"He's a fool to bet on it. And I think, deep down in him, he's beginning to suspect he's a fool, and it's frightening him mute."

Sawyer frowns.