“All I’m saying is that I know it feels like you’re tied to a railroad track with a train coming straight at you. It feels like it’s this or nothing. But, I’m telling you, you have a giant pair of scissors in your hands that you can cut that rope with.”
“Betty…”
“It may be difficult,” she said, cutting me off. “You might get rope burn and you may cut yourself and bleed a little. You may let some people down. Hell, you may uproot everything you knew about your life before, about what you thought it’d be, and you may walk into something completely different, something you never expected.” A smile bloomed on her pale lips, then. “But, my dear, isn’t that the best part of being young? The possibilities are endless, the paths limitless, and you have so many different directions you can walk.” She shrugged. “You just have to decide if you want to walk the path of least resistance, the one where you are merely another traveler on the road. Or, if you want to forge a new path with those scissors, bit by bit, limb by limb, and discover something you never could have imagined.”
“It sounds selfish.”
She scoffed. “Selfish. What a silly word. Should you give to the ones you love? Absolutely. But should you lose yourself in order to better their lives at the expense of your own? Never.”
With that, she stood, stretching her arms above her head with a yawn before she started walking.
I frowned. “You’re leaving?”
“I’m going to take a nap, like an old woman should,” she said, glancing back at me over her shoulder. “And I’m going to leave you alone to think. To really think — without your mom in your ear, or your sister, or Noah, or Annie, or me. I just want you to sit here, on this bench, in this garden, and I want you to ask yourself the tough questions.”
“I know the questions,” I said on a sigh. “It’s the answers I’m having trouble with.”
She smiled knowingly. “Well, then, sit here until they come.”
“And if they don’t?”
“Then you didn’t sit long enough,” she tossed over her shoulder.
Then she rounded an old oak tree, and she was gone.
* * *
Later that night, I knocked on my father’s office door before letting myself inside.
He looked up at me from where he sat at his desk, his reading glasses low on his nose and hands still typing away on his keyboard. “Hey, pumpkin.”
I swallowed, letting myself in and closing the door behind me with trembling hands. Anthony and Mom were out on the front porch, drinking sweet tea like Mama loved to do after dinner, but just in case, I wanted another barrier between us.
“I need to talk to you,” I said when I was inside.
“Okay,” he answered, but his eyes were back on his screen now, fingers flying over the keys. “I’ll be out in an hour or so, just have to finish this up.”
I ignored his request and sat down in one of the chairs on the opposite side of his desk, folding my hands in my lap.
Dad glanced up at me, and I watched the concern wash over his face when he saw me — when he really saw me.
I had to look as tired as I felt. I knew it. I knew there were bags under my eyes, that my blotchy skin had to be betraying the fact that I’d cried all evening after leaving the nursing home. I had barely eaten at dinner, which Mama covered up by saying I was worried about fitting into my wedding dress.
Ever the damage control.
But now, sitting across from my father, I didn’t want to hide it anymore. I didn’t want to pretend like everything was fine.
Dad swallowed, pulling his hands from the keyboard and steepling them together as he sat back in his chair. “Or we can talk now.”
My next breath was a shaky one, one that burned as much as it brought relief in the form of fresh oxygen. I looked down at my hands, at my manicured nails, at the engagement ring on my finger.
“I know about the deal you made with Anthony and his father.”
I couldn’t look at my father, then.
I couldn’t glance up from my nails and see the man I’d admired my entire life paling at the realization that his little girl knew about the debt he owed, about the way he planned to pay it.
My gaze stayed fixed in my lap, and that was the only way I had the courage to keep talking.
“I want you to know that I understand why you did it. I understand that, sometimes, sacrifices have to be made to keep a family afloat. You and Mom have taught me that.” Tears flooded my eyes, and the next words choked out of me with less steadiness. “But, I also want you to know that I have never been so hurt in my entire life. And I never thought my father would ever be capable of selling me to the highest bidder.”
“Pumpkin…”
“No,” I said, shaking my head, effectively letting the first two tear drops fall into my lap. “I’m not finished.”
Silence.
I sniffed, wiping the back of my hand against my nose with my heart thundering hard in my chest now. “Anthony doesn’t love me. I know that now, and I also know that it doesn’t matter. You and I both know that at the core of my heart, of who I am — I am a giver. Just like you. Just like Mom. We sacrifice for others, and more than anything, we put this family first.”
My heart ached, Noah’s face the only thing I could see as I shut my eyes and freed another set of tears.
“I will do this for you,” I whispered, breaking with the admission. “For our family. Because it would kill me to do anything that would ever hurt you, or Mom, or Mary Anne.” I sniffed, finally pulling my gaze up to meet my father’s.
When I saw the tears on his cheeks, his eyes red and glossy, I broke again.
“But, you will do something for me in return,” I choked out on a sob. “You have to get help, Daddy. You can’t keep doing this — not at this expense. You have to go to Gamblers Anonymous. You have to stop with the casinos, and the card nights, and the horse tracks. It may have been all fun and games at one point, a way to pass the time and wheel and deal with the good ol’ boys in this town, but now, it has affected not just your life, and not just my life, but our entire family’s.”
Dad rolled his lips together, two tears streaming parallel down his cheeks as he watched me. He was quiet for a long while, the air in his office stuffy and suffocating.
“I’m so sorry,” he finally whispered. “I know… I know I’m sick. I know I have a problem. I… I never thought it would get to this point, I never thought…”
He paused, face crumpling as a sob broke through. In all the years I’d been alive, I’d never seen my father cry.
Not once.
But that night in his office, he broke, reaching for a tissue on his desk and wiping the tears away, wiping his nose before his gaze sat miserably somewhere in the distance between us.
Now, it was him who couldn’t look at me.
“I don’t know when it got this bad,” he said. “I used to have a hold on it. I’d walk into the casino with what I was okay to lose, and if I lost it, I left. But, when I started going to Pat’s club… I don’t know. Everything changed.”
Pat was my father’s affectionate pet name for Patrick Scooter.
The man he now owed so much money to that he couldn’t pay his own debt.
“When my money ran out, I’d just hang around, drink, smoke cigars with the other city council members. But, Patrick would entice me, tell me to get in on the next hand, that he had me, he’d lend me the bet. It was innocent at first, and I easily paid him back. Somewhere along the way, though…” Dad shook his head. “I don’t know. I got pulled into something I didn’t even realize. It was bigger than I could have ever known. And when I started losing more, I would ask for more — small, at first, but bigger and bigger as time went on. I just thought one more hand, and I’ll win it all back.” A shadow passed over his face, like he was trying to pinpoint the exact moment it all happened.
Like if he could, he could go back and change it all.
His mouth hung open for a long pause
before he continued. “Before I knew it, I was in over my head in a debt I couldn’t even wrap my head around.”
I swallowed, trying my best to find sympathy somewhere in my heart for my father, for the man who raised me.
I came up empty handed.
“Your mom didn’t even know until it was too late,” he said, his voice low and cracking. “We were going to lose everything… and then… Anthony came to ask for your hand.”
Just the sound of his name made my stomach roll so violently I nearly vomited what little bit of dinner I could choke down. Tears flooded my eyes again, so fast I couldn’t even try to stop them before they rolled down my cheeks.
“That’s enough,” I whispered, voice shaking through the shallow breaths I managed to sip. “It doesn’t matter. What’s done is done.”
Dad opened his mouth, but after one look at me, he shut it again.
“I just needed you to know,” I said definitively. “I needed you to know that I’m aware of what you did, and I needed you to know that as much as it hurts me, I will do what needs to be done for this family.” I shook my head. “Even if I wasn’t given the opportunity to make my own choice in the first place.”
Dad didn’t say anything else, which was wise, because I was in perhaps the most unstable state I’d ever been in in my entire life.
I nodded, the conversation over, and then I stood and walked to his office door, taking a moment to wipe my face before I opened the door. I glanced back at the big, broken man at that desk, and in that moment, I didn’t recognize him at all.
“For the record,” I said, standing tall. “Even if you do get help — and you will — I will never forgive you for this.”
And with the most painful decision of my life made, I turned my back on my father and shut the door on everything I ever thought my life would be.
Chapter 18
Noah
I wasn’t going to go.
I swore on my father’s grave, on the Bible that I was not going to go to the wedding.
There was no reason to go. My mom was right — I needed to walk away from Ruby Grace, from what we had, what we could never have, and leave her behind. I had to let her start her new life with another man, because that was the decision she had made.
It was set in stone.
I was set in my resolve.
And for the past two weeks, I’d told myself I wasn’t going to go to that wedding — no matter what.
But all of that changed last night.
I had stayed late at the distillery, working overtime for as long as Gus would let me before he finally kicked me out and made me go home. I’d been at the distillery more than anywhere, trying to throw myself into work so I could take my mind off the impending wedding. I couldn’t go ride Tank, couldn’t go to the treehouse, couldn’t go anywhere I used to find solace — because now, all I found in those places were memories of her.
When I finally made it home, it was well past sunset, and I noticed a white envelope half tucked under my front door as I twisted my key in the lock.
I bent to retrieve it with a frown, and that frown had deepened when I read in small, neat script on the front of it:
Read this before tomorrow. It’s important.
My heart had leapt into my throat, and I instantly thought it was a letter from Ruby Grace.
I’d flown inside, thrown my shit haphazardly on whatever surface was nearby, and torn into the envelope with greedy hands, greedy eyes, a greedy heart. But, the letter wasn’t from Ruby Grace at all.
It was from Betty.
And in that letter, she’d revealed the missing piece to the puzzle I’d been trying to solve since the moment Ruby Grace left me in the rain at the treehouse my father built.
That letter was tucked into the inside pocket of my tuxedo, and as if it possessed the courage I needed to walk through the church doors, I brushed a hand over my chest where it was hidden, taking a deep breath. My eyes scanned the large wooden doors of the church — the ones I had walked through nearly every Sunday morning since I was born — and I wondered how they could look so foreign.
Inside those doors, there was an aisle lined with flowers and twine — both of which I’d helped Ruby Grace pick out.
Inside those doors, there were hundreds of people, nearly the entire town of Stratford, and then some.
Inside those doors, there was a man waiting at the end of the aisle for the woman I loved.
And inside those doors was the woman I couldn’t let go of.
My breath was surprisingly steady as I finally found the will to open those doors, like I knew what I was going to do when the reality was I didn’t have a fucking clue. But, I extended one steady hand for the wedding program being offered to me, took my seat at the end of the back left pew, and I waited.
I was practically invisible to everyone inside, and in that moment, I was thankful my entire family had declined the open invitation to the wedding. I knew they had done so on my behalf.
None of them knew I was here today.
The other wedding guests were all chattering with their friends or families or dates, commenting on the beautiful decorations or the stunning music coming from a harp player near the organ at the front. It was a shushed sort of chatter as we all waited for the ceremony to begin.
And it would.
In less than ten minutes.
It’s too late, the realistic part of my brain warned me as I sat there, both hands on the wedding program, eyes cast toward the altar. She’s marrying him. Today. There’s nothing you can do.
But, there was something more powerful floating inside my chest, calming my breaths, easing my racing heart. It fluttered and filled me from the inside out with an inexplicable anticipation, like something epic was about to happen.
Hope.
I recognized it faintly as time warped and faded. I couldn’t even be sure I was truly in the church — that’s how detached I felt from my being. It wasn’t until the moment I noticed a familiar pair of eyes watching me from the third pew that I came back to the moment.
Betty smiled, casting me a wink. I returned her smile, and it was as if that notion alone brought on all the jitters I’d been surpassing. My heart thundered to life in my chest, my hands shaking where they held the program, and I swore my feet were about to move without permission from my brain to hightail us out of there just as the harp died and the organ began to play.
The same camera crew that had followed Anthony and Ruby Grace around the Soirée was scattered throughout the church, cameras pointed in all different directions, with one free moving around the church and capturing the chatter before the ceremony. That camera moved to the center of the aisle, crouched low and out of view once the familiar hymn filled the air.
Pastor Morris stood at the altar now, smiling, his eyes scanning the crowd as he nodded silent hello’s. Ruby Grace’s mother was escorted down the aisle by an usher, but Anthony’s parents were nowhere to be found. I frowned, wondering where they were, but didn’t have time to process it much before a door opened to the right.
Anthony walked through it, along with some guy I didn’t recognize. He stood next to Anthony and Pastor Morris at the altar, which told me he was the best man, but I couldn’t keep my focus there for very long.
Because it took every ounce of willpower I possessed not to fly down the aisle right then and pummel Anthony’s grinning face with my fist.
He stood tall and confident at the altar, wearing a light gray tuxedo with a coral pocket square and bow tie. His hair was neat and styled, his jaw freshly shaved, and to anyone else in that church, he looked like the perfect groom. He looked like what every girl had ever dreamed of when they pictured their wedding day.
But I knew the truth.
I knew the evil things he’d said about the best woman in the world, knew the pain he’d caused her, the way he’d treated her like some pawn in his game of life.
And now, thanks to Betty, I knew about the deal he and his father had ma
de with Ruby Grace’s parents.
That was what upset me the most. Anthony may not have owed Ruby Grace anything, but the fact that her parents could trade her hand in marriage in exchange for some debt to be paid off made me physically ill.
My fists tightened around the wedding program, all but crushing it. A couple I didn’t recognize in the same pew as me eyed the crumpled up piece of paper in my hands before casting me a worried glance, to which I just offered a tight smile, relaxing my shoulders a bit.
Breathe, Noah.
A flower girl was the first down the aisle, and she sprinkled daisy petals behind her, smiling shyly at everyone in the pews.
Next was Mary Anne. Even though she’d been gone for a few years, it was impossible not to recognize her. She had the same red hair as her mother and sister, the same button nose, the same freckles dotting her cheeks. She was taller than Ruby Grace, though, and her features were less bold, somehow. She looked older than she actually was, but when she smiled, I saw the resemblance like they were twins.
The last one down the aisle before the bride was Annie, the flowers in her hands balanced on the swell of her belly in the creamy, coral dress that she wore. Her smile was sad, though she tried to brighten it as much as she possibly could as she scanned the pews. I kept my eyes on her, heart thundering as I realized who would be the next down the aisle.
When Annie reached the altar, she turned.
And her eyes locked on me.
She paled, her pink-painted mouth popping open just as the organ changed tune and the congregation stood.
All the blood rushed to my face before draining completely as I numbly rose to my feet, turning to face the back of the aisle along with everyone else. The organ played, and I adjusted my tie, forcing one calm, cooling breath as the doors to the church swung open.
The first thing I saw was a long, slender hand clutching the grey fabric of a tuxedo-clad arm. Her nails were painted a neutral pink, the tips white, and she held onto that arm like it was the only thing holding her to the Earth.
Fall in Love Book Bundle: Small Town Romance Box Set Page 302
