Page 240 of What We Become

Not a single fucking point to Holden.

Knox wins his own bachelor-party competition and first place in the honeymoon queue.

Damn. This really backfired on me.

“We don’t have to talk about it,” Holden says.

“I’m going to talk about it at every opportunity for the rest of our lives,” I reply, smiling at him sweetly.

We settle the bar tab and pack our bowls. There’s a pretzel ground into the bottom of my bag. I choose not to investigate.

The drive home is loud. Windows down. Radio on. Eli keeps changing the station, and Micah keeps changing it back.

The streets go quiet as we leave the commercial district. The streetlights thin out. The ocean appears between buildings, dark and breathing.

Tomorrow we get married.

The thought keeps hitting me from different angles, like a pop-up I keep closing that opens somewhere else.

Tomorrow I marry all of them.

After the barn, I spent the first month waiting for the door to open—that’s how it works with me, something terrible happens, the permissions reset, and my brain hands back a file I put away for a reason. A night on a hook with a knife in my thigh should have blown the whole system.

Nothing came back. I sleep fine. I picked out a tie.

Some doors stay shut. I’ve decided not to knock on this one.

The ring I bought two days after we met is already on Sage’s finger. Now I have vows that made me cry in the bathroom and a dog who needs to look pretty in her tutu.

We pull into the driveway. The house is warm. The lights are on. Through the kitchen window I can see Sage at the counter, hair up, still in her pajamas. Amy’s car is gone—she must have left earlier.

“There’s our wife-to-be,” Knox says from the back seat.

My chest does something stupid and involuntary.

We pile out of the car and head inside. When we get through the door, Sage looks up from whatever she’s eating straight out of the container and says, “How was lawn bowls?”

“Knox won,” I report. “Holden is banned from sports.”

“So normal, then,” she says.

“Very normal.” I cross the kitchen and kiss her. She tastes like ice cream and lip balm. “The most normal night we’ve had in months.”

She smiles against my mouth. “Good. You all deserved some normal.”

“We deserve a lot of things,” I say. “Normal, bowls trophies, and you.”

“In that order?”

“Never.” I pull back. “You’re always first, kitten. Even before trophies.”

“Even before eating me out?” She grins, wicked.

I freeze. “Who told you about the stakes?”

“Knox texted me as soon as you made the bet.” She chuckles. “He gave me very explicit instructions on what he wants.”

I spin toward Knox, who is standing at the fridge with his back to me, radiating innocence at a frequency I didn’t know he was capable of.