The Vows We Never Said

Chapter Four

Nora almost didn't go back for dinner.

She sat in her truck at the end of the drive for a full ten minutes, engine off, keys still in the ignition, running the math on how many ways this contract could go wrong versus how much the cancellation fee would cost her if she just turned around and drove home. The fee won. It always won; lately that was the whole miserable arithmetic of running your own business, that sometimes your professional integrity had a very specific, very inconvenient dollar amount attached to it.

She went back for dinner.

The dining room hadn't changed either: a long table, dark wood, a chandelier that had probably cost more than her truck, but it felt different with people in it, the particular strangeness of familiar furniture arranged around unfamiliar tension. Eleanor sat at one end like she'd been carved into the chair. Camille sat beside Theo, radiant in the candlelight in a way that looked, Nora thought, almost too perfect for a Tuesday dinner with the hired help.

"Nora." Camille's smile arrived exactly on cue, warm at the edges, precise at the center. "I'm so glad you could join us. I hope Theo gave you the full tour."

"The full tour," Nora agreed, taking the seat that had clearly been left for her, directly across from Camille, like a chess piece someone else had already moved into place.

"Wonderful. I do want the garden to feel special. Meaningful." Camille reached for her wine glass, and the diamond on her finger caught the chandelier light and threw it, briefly, directly into Nora's eyes. "You have such a specific talent for that, from what I understand. Turning something neglected into something worth looking at again."

There was nothing overtly wrong with the sentence. Nora sat with it anyway, turning it over the way she'd turn over a plant she suspected was diseased before she could see the rot.

"I try," she said carefully. "Though I'm curious how you heard about my work specifically. My firm doesn't do much high-profile press."

Something flickered behind Camille's eyes, there and gone so fast that if Nora hadn't been watching closely, she'd have missed it entirely.

"A friend recommended you," Camille said smoothly. "I don't remember who, exactly. You know how these things go someone mentions a name at a party, and six months later you can't remember who said it first."

"Funny," Eleanor said from the end of the table, not looking up from her plate. "I don't recall you being at any parties this spring where landscape architecture came up."

The table went very quiet.

"Eleanor." Camille's smile didn't move, but something underneath it tightened, like a wire pulled one notch too far. "I go to a great many parties you're not aware of."

"I'm sure you do." Eleanor finally looked up, eyes bright and entirely unbothered by the temperature of the room. "You do seem to know a great many people I've never heard of, dear. It's quite remarkable, actually, for someone who grew up two towns over from me."

"Grandma." There was an edge to Theo's voice, but it wasn't the sharpened alertness Nora half-expected; it was closer to embarrassment, the particular discomfort of a man watching two women he loved circle each other at his own table. "Can we not do this tonight?"

"I'm simply making conversation, Theodore." Eleanor took a slow sip of wine. "It's what people do at dinner."

Camille recovered fast, and Theo visibly relaxed the moment she did shoulders dropping, jaw unclenching, like her composure alone was proof enough that nothing worth worrying about had happened.

"You'll have to forgive Eleanor," Camille said lightly, turning back to Nora. "She's very protective of Theo. I find it rather sweet, honestly."

"I find it accurate," Eleanor said, "which is different from sweet, but I'll allow you the confusion."

Theo laughed at that, a real laugh, easy, the sound of a man choosing to treat the whole exchange as harmless family friction rather than anything worth examining. Nora watched him do it and felt something sink in her chest that had nothing to do with Camille at all.

He's not going to ask the question, she thought. He heard exactly what I heard, and he's already decided not to hear it.

The rest of dinner passed in careful, glittering small talk about venue logistics, flower budgets, and a story about the caterer that made everyone laugh, Theo loudest of all, like relief had a sound and he'd finally found it. Nora smiled where she was supposed to and said little, cataloging the gap opening up between what she'd noticed and what he seemed determined not to.

Camille excused herself near the end of the meal, "Just a work call; I'm so sorry, you know how it is," and Theo didn't so much as glance toward the hallway she disappeared down. He refilled his water glass instead and asked Eleanor something about the caterer's schedule, easy and unbothered, a man who had clearly filed the entire dinner-table tension under nothing to worry about and moved on.

Nora hadn't.

She made her own excuse ten minutes later the powder room, she said, which wasn't even a lie, just an incomplete one, and took the long way past the hallway on purpose.

The office door was closed. Not quite closed enough. Through the two-inch gap, low and urgent, Nora heard exactly enough of Camille's voice to freeze in place, one hand pressed flat against the wall.

"The timeline moved up. I don't care what your father thinks is reasonable; we close this before the party or we don't close it at all."

Nora didn't move. Didn't breathe, barely.

Footsteps behind her, unhurried, familiar. She turned to find Theo in the hallway, having apparently followed her under some pretense of his own, though his expression held none of the alarm she'd braced herself to see.

"There you are," he said low and easy. "Camille said you'd wandered off. Everything okay?"

Nora stared at him. Somewhere behind that door, six feet away, his fiancée was saying something about closing a deal before their engagement party, and Theo Castellan was standing in a dark hallway asking if Nora was the one who needed checking on.

"Theo." She kept her voice as level as she could manage. "Did you hear that? Just now, through the door?"

He glanced toward the office, briefly, the way you'd glance at a car alarm going off somewhere down the street, noted, dismissed, already moving on.

"Camille takes a lot of work calls," he said. "Her father runs an investment firm. Half of what she says on the phone would sound alarming out of context to someone who doesn't know the industry."

"Theo, she said close this before the party. "That's not industry jargon, that's..."

"Nora." Gentle, but with an edge underneath it now, the sound of a man closing a door on a conversation he didn't want to keep having. "I know this is strange for you. Being back here, seeing me with someone else. I understand that. But I need you to know Camille and I are solid. Whatever this sounds like from outside a locked door, I trust her."

Nora looked at him for a long moment at the easy, certain set of his jaw, at the way he'd already built himself a version of tonight where nothing needed questioning and felt something small and important settle into place.

He wasn't going to help her look. Not yet. Maybe not at all, unless something forced his hand harder than an overheard sentence ever could.

"Right," she said quietly. "Of course."

She walked back toward the dining room without waiting for him to follow and did not look back to see whether he did.