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eight years ago

CHAPTERONE

tyson

“You needto come get cleaned up, Tyson,” I hear my dad call from the porch. I’m hunched over the open hood of my truck, looking down into it like it’s a black hole.

I close the hood, dusting off my hands and wiping them on the towel I have tucked into my jeans.

“Coming,” I say with a sigh.

Sadie Blackwell is getting married today.

An hour later, I’m in the front seat of my dad’s SUV, with my head resting on my hand as I look out the passenger window.

“What’s your deal?” my kid sister, Lola, asks from the backseat. She’s playing some game on her cell phone that my dad just got her, and the sound is driving me nuts. I moved back in with my dad a few years back once I graduated from college. And right when I was planning to move out last year, his wife, my stepmom, Lynn died in a car accident, leaving my dad alone with my younger sister, Demi, and our thirteen-year-old maniac of a stepsister. And I knew I couldn’t go yet.

He tells me all the time he’s ready.

But I don’t know if I am.

I don’t know if I’m ready to leave them.

But right now, I want nothing more than to be alone, hiding out somewhere dark and quiet, with a bottle of bourbon and my sorrows.

Because Sadie Blackwell is getting married today.

And the groom isn’t me.

When we get to the church, I almost roll my eyes as we walk inside.

“I’d never get married in a church, ya know? Feels so impersonal to me. I feel closer to God or…I don’t know, whatever’s out there, when I’m lost somewhere in the woods. That’s where I wanna get married,”she had told me ten years ago, when we were lying outside underneath the swingset in my backyard the night before we started our junior year of high school.

But her fiancé, Dallas…his family is big in his church. And it just ‘meantsomuch to him and his family,’ she had told me.

Gag.

I see my other sister, Demi, and my older brother, Tate, waving to us from across the hall, and we smile as we walk over to them.

“Ready?” Tate asks me, clapping me on the back. He’s the only one who knows—whoreallyknows—why this day has been giving me an ulcer for the last year. Why I know where all the emergency exits are in case I can’t handle it.

He’s the only one who knows, and I need to keep it that way.

I blow out a breath and nod slowly as we follow the rest of my family through the doors and into the main hall.

“Should we move closer to the front?” Demi whispers back to us.

“No,” Tate says for me. I nod a silentthankyouto him, and we slip into one of the last rows. But as luck would have it, we’re on the side where the bridesmaids have lined up. And I’m closest to the aisle. So, in a few moments’ time, I’ll have to watch her—a vision in white, no doubt, the most beautiful fucking angel in the whole goddamn world—walk down the aisle to the wrong man.

My stomach starts to swirl, and I tug on my tie to loosen it. But as the minutes tick by, nothing seems to be happening.

“What’s taking so long?” Lo whispers. My dad shrugs, and we notice that other people are starting to look around. Just then, I feel a tap on my shoulder. I turn to see Jamie, Sadie’s older cousin. She went to school a few towns over, but she hung out with us a bit as teens.

“Ty,” she whispers, her eyes big. “Can you, uh…can you come with me for a minute?”

My eyebrows knit together, but I nod slowly and stand up from the pew. I turn back to my family.

“Be right back,” I whisper.

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