Page 206 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

My heart won't cooperate. My heart is light as a shed feather.

That's the strangest part.

An hour ago I stood in a wrecked tent and watched a man I once loved lose everything he had, and I felt no triumph in it, no grief either, just a clean and startling quiet.

We confirmed it.

Cade was the leak.

It played out live, on regional television, in front of a hundred neighbors and a rolling camera, and by now I'd bet the whole story is racing through Honeybell Harbor faster than a grease fire — Beatrice at the Salt and Honey, the men at the Driftglass, every phone in every kitchen lit up with it.

I keep waiting to feel the old fury swell up. It doesn't come. He made his choice. He sat across a table from a man who trusted him with everything and he sold that trust for a stranger's money and his own comfort, and now his career is the price of it.

That's not a thing I did to him.

That's a thing he did to himself, with his own two hands, over months, while three better men chose me on purpose every single day.

The anger I've carried about the past — the great cold stone of it that has taken up room in my chest for five and a half years— I feel it dissolving as I walk, grain by grain, like sugar in warm water.

It isn't worth the space anymore.

That's what finally lands.

There's a child coming now, a whole new person who is going to need every inch of room in my heart for love and not one inch of it for rage, and I refuse to raise a baby in a house I've let the past haunt.

Boy or girl, this child is going to grow up watching a mother who chose forward.

I want that so badly it aches.

So I let Cade go, right there on the ivory runner, the way you set down a suitcase you've hauled so long you forgot it was heavy. I told him he could come by the cottage and try to talk it through, and I meant it in the way you mean a door left unlocked. But that's wishful thinking, and I know it.

I've made my decision, and it doesn't have Cade in it. It has August and Beckett and Sawyer, three men who spent ten weeks earning back something they threw away, who bled for it and knelt for it and stood their ground for it. They earned their second chance.

He earned his exit.

There's a mercy in it I didn't expect.

For five and a half years I imagined the day I'd finally stop hurting over Cade Mercer would arrive like a thunderclap — some grand, cathartic reckoning. It came instead like this: a quiet Tuesday feeling on a wedding afternoon, an old ache simply packing its bags and letting itself out.

I hope, in some far-off future, he finds his way to whatever waits on the other side of all that fear. I truly do.

I just won't be there to watch it, and I have made my peace with the not-watching.

I don't even know how we're going to pull off an actual wedding of our own, once the dust settles. The logistics of it make my planner's brain itch — four people, one Omega, a town full of gossips.

I guess that's a problem for a woman who's about to have all the time in the world.

The house is nearly ready. I'm handing the business to Sawyer and the girls. By tonight, I'll finally get to be the bride instead of the one steaming the bride's train.

I reach the arch, and the music swells.

It's a good cue.

I built it myself, timed to the step, and the song that lifts out of the tent as I cross under the flowers reaches straight into my chest and squeezes tears up into my eyes before I can stop them.

Because I know this song.

It's the one that played this morning, at dawn, when Sloane Carroway married Nolan Reeve.