Page 66 of Reluctant Bride

“The first two days, yes. After the fence splice it was mine. Every page after that, I picked because it was true and you needed it. I never told you when it changed, because telling you meant admitting the first two days happened.”

“You decided what I could carry. Again.”

“I did.” He doesn’t reach for me. He doesn’t try to make it easier to hear. “I should have told you the day it changed instead of waiting for a room full of people to force it out of both of us.”

Maren, arms crossed against the wall by the window, doesn’t bother lowering her voice. “So both your fathers ran the exact same play on their own kids, and neither of you thought to compare notes all week.”

“We’re comparing notes now, Maren.”

“During a federal-adjacent security crisis. Incredible timing.” She shakes her head, but there’s no real heat in it, more like a woman watching a rerun she’s already seen the ending of. “Very on brand for this family.”

Tate’s back in the laptop before she’s even finished. “Timestamp’s clean on its face. Too clean. Whoever fired this had her real credential staged and ready before today, which means it wasn’t opportunistic. It was waiting for a trigger.”

“What kind of trigger?” Knox asks.

“Can’t tie it to anything yet. No explosion, no arrest, nothing on the county docket in the window before it fired.” Tate finally leans back, rubbing one eye with the heel of his hand. “Which almost worries me more. Whoever staged this didn’t need an excuse. They just needed the hour.”

Nobody says the obvious thing. Nobody has to. Every person in this room has watched me photograph a desk for a week and lie to my own father about it, and every one of them is running the same math right now. A woman who’ll spy on her husband for her family will spy on her husband’s family for herself. Holt hasn’t looked away from me since Mackenzie said my name. I make myself not look away either.

“Got it.” West spins his laptop around on the table so everyone can see the screen. “Knox’s badge reader never logged a physical swipe today. The credential that fired is real. Hers. Nobody put an actual card through the reader to use it. Somebody pushed her token straight into the login field from outside the system.”

“Which means it’s not her hand on a badge.” Tate taps the screen once, decisive. “It’s somebody who already had a working copy of her real credential and knew which terminal in this house to fire it from.”

Gideon’s jaw works once. He doesn’t apologize, not to the room and not to me, because Blackwaters don’t apologize in front of an audience, and I stopped waiting on that miracle years ago.

“I want the discrepancy in writing,” he says instead, to Tate, without looking at him. “Timestamped, before anyone leaves this room.”

“You’ll have it in an hour.”

Erin reaches over and squeezes my hand once, brief and warm, the kind of gesture that says I’ve got you without turning it into a performance.

“For what it’s worth,” she says, easy, like she’s commenting on the weather instead of a frame job, “I’ve built a hundred of these from the other side of the desk. This one’s sloppy on purpose. Somebody wanted it caught fast.”

“Why would anybody want it caught?” Knox asks.

“Because a frame that falls apart in an hour still buys the hour it takes to fall apart.” Erin doesn’t raise her voice. “Question is what they needed that hour for.”

Holt’s always quiet. That’s not new. What’s new is what he’s doing with his eyes.

He’s by the door, where he always is, weight balanced, watching the exits. Right now he hasn’t looked at Dawson once since this started. He hasn’t looked away from me either. Holt’s silence usually just means he doesn’t feel the need to talk for the sake of talking. I don’t know what this version of it means, and I don’t get an answer before Maren pushes off the wall and ends the meeting the only way anyone in this family listens to.

“We’re done accusing people in this room.” She says it in the voice she probably used on federal auditors twice her age before she turned thirty. “Sage didn’t do this. No physical swipe says so, and so does every single day I’ve watched my brother be an idiot about exactly one woman his entire adult life. We find who did it. We don’t waste another hour eating our own.”

Color climbs up the back of Dawson’s neck, the exact look of a man watching his own sister hand a room a confession he never signed off on. I don’t know what my own face is doing. Nobody’s ever said it plainly in front of me before, not even Dawson, and now it’s just sitting in the middle of the room where everyone can see it too.

Nobody argues with Maren Sullivan in that voice. I’ve never once seen it fail.

Dawson crosses the rest of the distance before the room’s even finished breaking apart, close enough that I catch cedar and gun oil and the quiet voice he only uses when he means something.

“I believe you,” he says, meant for nobody but me. “I didn’t need Tate’s report to know it. I knew it the second Mackenzie said your name.”

“You didn’t say that in front of everyone.”

“I’m saying it to you.” His hand finds mine, no showmanship in it at all, nothing like Erin’s easy warmth, hitting twice as hard for how plain it is. “I should have told you about Declan the day it happened instead of a week and a family meeting later. I’m not going to spend the rest of this marriage deciding what you’re strong enough to hear.”

I don’t have anything clever to hand back to that. I let the silence be the whole answer instead of covering it with one.

I need air more than I need the rest of this conversation, so I tell him I’m going to get Briar from Rae before the light goes. He doesn’t argue. He just watches me go, still braced, before the door shuts between us.