Page 97 of Reluctant Bride

I set my coffee down harder than I mean to.

“I need Dawson’s laptop charger,” I say, mostly to have something to do with my hands that isn’t reaching for a man who’s gone completely rigid beside me. “Mine’s dead and still in the truck.”

“Top drawer,” he says, distracted, already turning to Mackenzie with a dozen questions stacking up behind his eyes.

I cross to his desk, the one I spent a month photographing for my own father, the one he’s never once locked against me since the day he decided to stop hiding what was on it. I pull the top drawer open expecting a tangle of cords.

I find a folder instead, plain, unmarked, sitting where a charger should be.

I shouldn’t open it. I open it anyway, because years of training myself to read every room I walk into doesn’t switch off just because I got married yesterday.

Sole liability. Full and irrevocable surrender of Sullivan Transport leadership, transferring every operational and legal exposure to Dawson personally, severing the company, Declan, Maren, all of it, from whatever’s coming.

Signed. Notarized.

Dated the day before our wedding.

THIRTY-TWO

DAWSON

“Dawson.”

Sage’s voice carries down the hall from the office, cutting clean through whatever Mackenzie’s still saying at the kitchen island, and my stomach drops through the floor right before I understand why.

Not looking for a charger. Something’s gone wrong in the pitch of it, careful in a way she never is with me, the voice she’d use reading a hostile deposition back to the man who wrote it.

Mackenzie’s tablet is still glowing on the island behind me, federal division letterhead lit up like a verdict already written, her sentence trailing off half finished. “—which means the filing’s got a paper trail predating the breach itself. If they can show intent instead of just opportunity, you’re not looking at a defense anymore, you’re looking at a⁠—”

I’m already moving.

I know exactly what Sage is holding before I’ve cleared the doorway.

Friday. The day before the wedding, caterers and cousins and Mom’s seating chart crisis colliding in the same eighteen hours. Somewhere in the middle of it I sat down at that desk with a stack of documents from Foster and Reyes and signed my name to the one that mattered most. I meant to burn it. I meant to tell her. I shoved the folder in a drawer instead of a shredder and told myself I’d deal with it after the vows, after the cake, after every excuse a wedding hands a coward looking for one.

What was I thinking.

I wasn’t. I was doing the only thing I’ve ever known how to do with something too heavy to hand someone I love, which is carry it alone and hope she never has to feel the weight of it.

Sage is standing at my desk, the folder open in both hands.

“Sage.”

“Sole liability.” Her voice comes out even, county-commissioner cool, the one she saves for men who’ve already lost the argument and don’t know it yet. “Full operational and legal surrender. Severs Declan. Severs all your siblings. Just you, Dawson, standing alone in front of a federal indictment that hasn’t even been filed yet.” She looks up. “Dated Friday.”

“I can explain.”

“Then explain.” She doesn’t blink, the folder held against her chest now like a shield instead of evidence.

For half a second I consider reaching for the easy way out, some line about paperwork being romantic if you squint hard enough. One look at her face kills it before it ever reaches my mouth.

“I signed it the day before our wedding,” I say instead, and every word comes out heavier than the last. “In between the florist and my mother’s third seating chart meltdown, I sat down and signed away my entire company so that if this ever came back on Sullivan Transport, it landed on me and nobody else. I told myself I’d deal with it properly after the ceremony. Tell you. Tell my father. I didn’t. I put it in a drawer and let the wedding swallow it.”

“You decided to end your own career and hand yourself a federal target alone,” Sage says, her voice climbing somewhere I’ve never once heard it go, “the day before you married me, and you didn’t think that was information your wife might want before she said yes?”

“I already said yes for both of us. That’s what the document does. It doesn’t touch you. It doesn’t touch Maren, it doesn’t touch my father, it doesn’t touch anyone I love. It just makes sure that if this whole thing collapses, it collapses on me instead of them.”

“You keep saying it doesn’t touch me.” Her hands are trembling around the folder, the paper shaking in a way her voice refuses to. “Dawson, I am your wife. Everything that touches you touches me. You didn’t protect me by cutting me out of this. You made sure I’d find out the same way I found out about the mutual spy order, the same way I found out about Ashley, alone, after the fact, holding a piece of paper that already decided everything without me in the room.”