Five Years Later

Samantha Cole had worn her hair up for exactly three occasions in the last five years: her community college graduation, Heather's baptism, and now, standing in front of a gilded mirror in the Pinecrest Estate bridal suite, trying not to think about how her feet already ached in heels she'd bought secondhand for eleven dollars.

"Hold still," Christine said around a mouthful of bobby pins, her green eyes narrowed in concentration as she fussed with the delicate lace veil pinned above her chestnut updo. "If this thing falls off during the vows, I will personally haunt this venue."

"You look like something out of a magazine," Samantha told her, and meant it. The lace draped over Christine's shoulders like something spun from morning fog, and her whole face had that soft, glowing terror that brides got right before the doors opened. "Stephen's going to cry. I'm calling it now."

"He better. I paid for waterproof mascara for a reason." Christine turned, catching Samantha's hands in hers, squeezing once. "Thank you for coming early. I know dragging Heather across two counties in a car seat is its own kind of labor."

"She slept through most of it. Laura sang the entire soundtrack of some cartoon movie and knocked her right out."

Christine laughed, then her expression shifted into something more careful, more deliberate, the look she got when she was about to say something she'd rehearsed. "So, funny thing. Stephen's old crew from that construction job years back, before he went corporate, one of the guys actually showed up. Flew in yesterday. Stephen about fell over when he walked through the door."

Samantha reached for a stray pin on the vanity, only half listening, her mind already drifting toward punch and canapés and whether Heather had eaten enough at the hotel breakfast buffet. "That's sweet. Reunions are good for the soul."

"Mm. Benjamin, I think his name is." Christine adjusted the veil one more inch, oblivious to the way the air in the room seemed to still. "Big guy, kind of quiet, apparently used to bounce around from job to job before he settled wherever he settled. Stephen swears by him. Said the man saved his life on a scaffolding once."

The name didn't register right away. It was just a name, common enough, and there were a thousand Benjamins in the world. Samantha smiled, said something about being happy for Stephen, and slipped out of the suite before Christine could see whatever had crossed her face.

The garden courtyard opened up beyond a set of French doors, all trimmed hedges and strings of soft white lights not yet lit against the late afternoon sun. Round tables sat beneath a canopy of pale linen, and a long table near the back held sweating pitchers of lemonade and a crystal punch bowl that Heather had been eyeing since they arrived.

Samantha found her daughter tugging on Laura's hand near the dessert table, the little floral dress already smudged at the hem from crouching to examine a caterpillar on the garden path.

"She wants punch," Laura said, deadpan, adjusting her red-framed glasses. "I told her it's basically juice for grown-ups who can't admit they want juice."

"I'll get her some." Samantha crouched, tucking a loose curl behind Heather's ear. "Stay with Aunt Laura, okay, baby?"

Heather nodded solemnly, clutching her stuffed fox tighter against her chest, and Samantha rose and made her way toward the punch bowl, weaving between clusters of guests she didn't know, murmuring polite half-smiles at strangers in linen suits and pastel dresses.

She reached for a plastic cup, filled it halfway so Heather wouldn't spill it down her dress, and turned around too fast.

She hit something solid. A chest, a shoulder, the warm cedar-and-clean-linen smell of a man's cologne, and the cup tipped, red punch splashing across her wrist before she caught it against her stomach.

"I'm sorry, I wasn't—"

The apology died in her throat.

He was taller than she remembered, or maybe her memory had shrunk him down over five years the way memories did, sanding the edges off things too big to hold onto. But the eyes were exactly the same. Blue-gray, startling against a sun-worn face, the kind of eyes that had once looked at her like she was the only person left standing in a crowded room.

Benjamin Griffin stood frozen in front of her, one hand still lifted from where he'd reached to steady her, his mouth parted like he'd meant to say something and forgotten every word he owned.

The garden noise, the string quartet warming up somewhere near the arbor, the clink of glasses, the low hum of a hundred conversations, all of it fell away into a strange underwater silence. Samantha's pulse slammed against her throat. Her hand, still wet with punch, hung useless at her side.

"Samantha." Her name came out of him low and rough, like he wasn't sure he was allowed to say it.

She couldn't answer. Five years of imagined conversations, of things she'd wanted to scream at him in the shower at two in the morning, of every version of this moment she'd rehearsed and discarded, and none of it came. Her mouth was dry. Her knees felt unreliable.

"Sam?" Laura's voice, closer now, edged with the particular sharpness she reserved for anything that threatened the people she loved. Samantha felt her friend's presence settle beside her like a bodyguard, felt Laura's eyes cut between her and the stranger, reading the current running between them the way she read a bar fight before it started. "You good?"

Samantha opened her mouth. Nothing came out.

Benjamin's gaze hadn't left her face, hadn't so much as flickered toward Laura, and there was something almost desperate in the way he looked at her, like he was trying to confirm she was real and not some trick of the afternoon light.

Then small fingers tugged at the hem of Samantha's skirt.

"Mommy." Heather's voice, bright and insistent, cut through the frozen air between them. She'd wandered over from the dessert table, the stuffed fox dangling from one fist, and she planted herself right beside her mother's leg, tilting her face up at the tall stranger with open, unguarded curiosity. "Is that punch for me?"

Samantha's whole body went cold and hot at once.

Because Benjamin looked down, and whatever composure he'd managed to scrape together shattered completely. His eyes, blue-gray, sharp, unmistakable, dropped to the little girl staring up at him with an identical shade staring right back. Heather's curls caught the sunlight, and her small chin had a stubborn set to it that Samantha had spent years pretending she didn't recognize in her own reflection.

Benjamin's lips parted. No sound came out. He looked from Heather's face to Samantha's, back to Heather, and something raw and disbelieving cracked wide open across his features, the look of a man doing math he never thought he'd have to do.

"Benjamin," Samantha finally managed, her voice barely above a whisper, the punch cup trembling in her hand. "This is Heather."

The string quartet began to play somewhere behind them, soft and sweet and entirely unaware that the whole world had just tilted sideways in the garden.