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Chapter 1
CAMERON
“Okay, wedding planning. I’ve been to weddings. I can do this.” I searched my brain’s limited archive of common wedding items, which was built mostly from being dragged to romantic comedies by various women over the years and from the one wedding I’d been in when I was three, at which I lost the ring I was supposed to be carrying on a tufted pillow. I wasn’t invited to participate much in weddings after that. Until now. My sister’s wedding. This was important. But still, I was probably not the best guy to help. “Doves? Want to release doves? I think people do that.”
Maddie’s eyes widened, but she’d just put a marshmallow between her lips and couldn’t respond. She stared at me across the fire pit we sat around in front of my small house.
Connor, her fiancé, answered for her. “No birds. No livestock of any kind.”
“Birds don’t qualify as livestock.” I said it definitively, but then realized I had no idea what qualified as livestock. Birds might.
“Why are you arguing for birds?” Maddie asked, finally able to speak, though her mouth was still full.
I shrugged. Why did I do half the things I did lately? I’d been living a while in a state of simplicity. Just being. It kept me from thinking too much, from worrying too much. “Okay. No birds. Well, you definitely need children. Flower girl, ring bearer.”
“We all remember how that turned out,” Maddie said, laughing.
“Not all of us,” Connor said. “You guys seem to forget not everyone is a part of your secret sibling knowledge bank. I don’t know all the stories.”
“Just most of them,” I said. It felt like we’d known Connor a long time—maybe because we had known him as kids. At least for a summer.
“Let’s just say, you shouldn’t trust Cam with the rings.”
“Um. He’s the best man. He’s going to be holding the rings.” Connor said, looking concerned.
“This is why you need a ring bearer,” I confirmed. “Any four-year old will be more trustworthy than me when it comes to wedding rings. I have a history, man.”
Connor shook his head and took a long pull on his beer as I stuck another marshmallow over the fire to brown. The sparks from the low flames danced over the pit and the light cast a reassuring glow in a circle around us. The fire hissed and popped in the silent mountain evening.
“I don’t know about decor and stuff, but what about this,” Connor leaned back in the Adirondack chair with a bottle held between his palms, and gazed up at the wide indigo sky beyond the illumination of the fire pit. “The room falls to a hush and maybe the lights go out. We get a mist machine going and this cool thick mist begins to rise from the ground. Maybe we get some lights to come up from the floor, along the aisle, kind of swinging around and illuminating things from below, shining up through the mist—like searchlights. And over the speakers, ‘The Final Countdown’ by Europe starts to play.” He hummed the beginning of the song: “na na na naaaa, na na nuh-nuh-nuh, na na na nuhhhh...”
“‘The Final Countdown’?” My sister practically leapt from her chair, getting to her feet and dropping her hands to her hips. “You think I should walk down the aisle to ‘The Final Countdown’?”
“Sit down,” I suggested. They barely needed me present for this conversation, but I’d put my sister off so many times she’d basically insisted she was coming tonight no matter what I said.
“Is that how you feel about getting married, Connor? We’ve only been engaged for a half century now. Is that why you’ve been dragging your feet about planning anything? Because you feel like it’s the end of the world or something?”
Maddie was getting spun up and I wished I had the right words to make her feel better. It was pretty ridiculous—both Connor’s idea, which I knew he was just tossing out to mess with her, and the fact that she was getting worked up. The guy was head over heels in love with my sister, and she knew it. The long engagement spoke more about that than anything else. They’d been enjoying things as they were, felt no need to rush into anything else. In another life, I’d known that feeling.
“Maddie,” Connor said in that low voice that always seemed to soothe her. “You know I want to get married.” He put his beer down and stood, pulling her into his arms. The firelight danced on their faces and I could see her melt the second he touched her, despite the fact she was trying to look angry. There was so much love and attraction radiating between them, I felt an odd pull of emotions. I was happy for my sister—really, truly happy. But it was hard to watch, so I let my eyes drop shut and tried to turn off my mind.
Connor whispered soothing words and my sister said something back. I didn’t focus on their words; I thought about soft blond hair splayed across my pillow in the morning sun, about a laughter filled with high notes like chimes in a breeze, about a cool slim hand I’d once been lucky enough to hold in my own. It hadn’t been perfect. And maybe it had been something far less than that, but I still missed it. Mourned it.
“What do you think, Cam?” My sister was back in her chair, the crisis averted.
“It’s your wedding, Mad. You should have it the way you want.” I had no idea what she was asking me, but this seemed like a pretty solid blanket response.
“Yeah, totally agree. Actually I think the whole world should work that way, but it doesn’t seem to.” She paused and inclined her head, catching my eye. Her voice softened. “I asked if you’d be willing to walk me down the aisle. You know, since Dad...”
“Dad can do it,” I said, knowing there were probably a thousand reasons why that was a bad idea.
“What if he’s not lucid that day, Cam? What if he wanders off or gets confused or scared?” Her eyes grew round, her face serious, and I had a glimpse of the wild-haired little girl my sister used to be. My resolve softened.
“Yeah, okay. Of course I will, Maddie.” I couldn’t let my sister down. She was all I had in the world. Her and my dad, and Dad hadn’t been himself for a long time now.
“Thanks, Cam. I know weddings are probably hard.” Maddie had always been better at talking about things than I was, and she’d been trying to get me to talk about Jess—my wife—for a long time. But Jess was the reason I’d let myself stall out for the last two years. Talking about her was more than hard. Hell, thinking about her was hard. And doing just about anything else felt damn near impossible sometimes.
“Hey Cam,” Connor was staring past me, toward the big house set just down the driveway from the little house I lived in. “When are you going to move into the main house? It seems crazy, you living in the guest shack when that incredible house sits there, empty.”
