Page 212 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

I keep thinking about the way Mom slid that plate across the table tonight. She didn't lecture. She didn't cry, not where I could see it. She just made the pot roast I've loved since I was six. She watched me eat every bite.

When I was done, she carried the plate to the sink and said, quiet,Drive safe, honey.Three words. That was all.

A woman who raised me alone, who worked doubles at the Tide Table so I could have cleats, and I handed her a scandal that'll trail the Mercer name around this town for a decade. She'll wear it at the register every single day. She'll smile through it, because that's who she is.

I did that to her…

I climb into the cab. The door shuts with that familiar tired chunk, and I sit for a second in the dark with my hands on the wheel, trying to swallow down the sheer black weight of the defeat sitting on my chest.

I'm leaving Honeybell Harbor tonight.

I don't have a choice. Nolan made that plain in his text —move your business well outside this town— and even if he hadn't, I couldn't stay.

Not with my face and my name plastered across every screen in a fifty-mile radius.

I won't see her for a long time.

My mother.

That's the thought that finally cracks something loose behind my ribs as I turn the key.

However long soul-searching is supposed to take, however far a man has to drive to find whatever's left of himself, I'll be doing it far from the one woman who never once stopped setting me a plate.

I pull out onto the road, and I leave the radio off.

I can't stomach it.

The one time I let myself flick it on this afternoon, my own name came out of the speakers —local event planner Cade Mercer, at the center of a leak scandal that thre— and I killed it so fast I nearly cracked the dial. The whole harbor is chewing on me tonight.

I can feel it out there in the dark houses, phones lighting up kitchen counters, the story passing hand to hand the way stories do in a town this small, growing teeth with every retelling.

Half of them are wondering aloud whether Sloane and Nolan already got secretly married, since Nolan announced a six-week hiatus from his shows this evening with no explanation. The other half have decided the hiatus is my fault too.

Everything's my fault tonight.

For once in my sorry life, they're not even wrong.

That's the part that guts me worst, driving through it — I can't even argue.

Every furious text I imagine firing back at this town dies before I type it, because what would I say? That I didn't do it? I did. That I had reasons? I had fear, dressed up as reasons, and fear isn't a defense. It's just the truth under better lighting. I pass the darkened front of the Driftglass, the Salt and Honey with its porch light still burning, the turn that drops down to the harbor where I learned to swim.

Every landmark of a whole life slides past my window for what might be the last time, and not one of them so much as looks at me.

I tried the contact one more time before I packed.

Sat on the tailgate and typed out something desperate and pathetic —you got me caught, you owe me a way out of this— and hit send into the void. The message didn't deliver. The number's dead. Disconnected, like it never existed at all, which I suppose is the point of a number like that.

Whoever was on the other end got exactly what they wanted out of me and cut the line the second I stopped being useful.

Am I surprised?

No.

I just feel more like a fool.

That's the sensation that won't quit — not rage, not even fear anymore, just this bottomless, marrow-deep foolishness, the specific humiliation of a man who realizes far too late that he was never the player.

He was the piece.