Page 93 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

You're still the one deciding.

I have spent an entire evening being decided for —by a government, by a father, by three men who once decided I was survivable to lose— and this near-stranger hands the wheel back to me before I've even climbed in.

I get in and close the door.

The cab smells like him.

Magnolia and cracked black pepper and that low aged-bourbon warmth, sharpened now with clean sweat and the leftover adrenaline of the run. Under my own bruised apricot it braids into something I don't have the composure to examine. I reach for the seatbelt.

"Hold on."

His voice drops.

He isn't looking at me anymore. He's looking past me, into the side mirror, and whatever he finds there pulls a frown down over the whole of his face. He goes very still — the way I imagine he goes still at the precise moment a wedding starts to fail, and he's the only one who knows it yet.

Then he looks at me.

Direct. No performance left in it.

"Do you want them to find you?"

The question is so simple it takes the wind clean out of me.

I make myself think about it, actually think, because he asked, and because a real answer is the only currency that man seems to accept.

I think about the sealed room.

About Cade going gray. About the exact arrangement of guilt and regret on three faces I once knew better than my own — the look of men who finally grasped the size of the thing they broke and still, still, waited to be told what to do about it.

I think about how it would feel, right now, to watch Beckett's truck come around that curve. To watch them climb out. To hear the careful, sorry, reasonable words begin.

I think about it long and hard.

"No," I whisper.

The word comes out small.

Weak, even for me, and I hate the sound of it, because I have spent five years making certain my voice never once did that infront of anyone. But it's true, and I'm apparently only telling the truth tonight.

Sawyer nods once, the way he'd confirm a delivery window.

Then he moves fast.

He reaches down and shoves his own seat back on its runners with a hard mechanical clunk, opening the footwell, and points at the dark space beneath the steering wheel.

"Hide. Now."

I arch a brow at him, because some reflex of dignity survives even this. Folding under a dashboard is not a thing Abercrombie Whitlock does. It is not in the brand.

He doesn't argue.

He holds my eyes. The mirror throws a wash of pale light across his jaw. There are headlights coming around the curve behind us, and no time at all to lose to my pride.

I fold.

I drop off the bench seat into the footwell and tuck myself into the dark under the wheel, knees to my chest, my cheek nearly against his knee. It should feel absurd.

A grown woman with a wedding empire in her name, curled under a steering column in a stranger's truck to hide from the men she was going to marry. It should feel ridiculous.