was happy for her sister. She longed for her parents and grandmother. But overriding all that was the fear that something awful was going on inside the best man’s head.
Her heart hammered in her chest, but she had to keep it together.
“Birdie and Scooter,” Tom began, breaking into her thoughts, “Lori and I wanted to thank you both, here, in a place that means so much to us all now, and we have something special for you.”
She stole another glance at Soren, who remained stone-faced.
“You go first, honey,” Lori said, handing Tom a gift bag.
“Is this going to get sappy?” Soren asked.
“Yeah, pretty sappy. Deal with it, dude,” Tom answered with a playful clap to his best friend’s shoulder before handing him the bag.
Soren held the item awkwardly.
“Open it!” Cole and Carly cried.
“Yeah, okay,” he answered, lost in a fog.
Slowly, he removed a picture frame from the bag, and his expression softened.
“I didn’t know you had this,” Soren said, staring intently at the frame.
She glanced over, expecting to see a photograph. Instead, a worn metal plate with the numbers twelve twenty-four engraved in the muted silver sat mounted in the center.
“What is it?” she asked.
For a fraction of a second, she would have sworn she’d seen Soren’s lip quiver. He held out the frame for everyone to see. “It’s a doorplate for a dorm room.”
“Thomas, did you steal that from boarding school?” Grace asked, a mix of incredulity and humor in her question.
Tom gave his mother a good-natured grin. “Steal is such a polarizing word. Hypothetically, if one jammed a ruler underneath a doorplate until it popped right off the wall, that wouldn’t actually be stealing. It would be revealing a design flaw.”
“Always the lawyer,” Russ called as everyone except Soren chuckled.
“Why did you take it? And why didn’t you mention it to me?” he asked, looking truly mystified.
“It was our first room together, and our first year at boarding school. I felt like I wanted to keep a part of it, and I was pretty sure if I told you that back then, you would have called me a p—”
“Tom! Kids,” Denise said, cutting off her brother.
Tom gave a quick salute to his sister, then turned back to Soren. “Here’s the kid-friendly version: it was the place where I met my best friend, and I wanted to remember it.”
Soren nodded, clearly moved by the gift. “Thank you, Tommy. This brings back a lot of good memories.”
“I’m glad you like it, Scooter. But I can’t take all the credit. It was Lori’s idea to frame it and give it to you. She’s thoughtful like that. You know that if it was completely up to me to get you a gift, I’d probably pick out a beer koozie,” Tom replied with another clap to Soren’s arm.
“This was your idea?” Soren asked her sister.
Lori waved off Tom’s praises. “Tom and I were going through some of his old boxes, and we found some of your old boarding school things in it. I thought it might make a perfect best man’s gift. That’s all,” Lori replied as that muscle on Soren’s cheek ticked again.
“It’s a very thoughtful gift. Thank you,” he answered, barely able to crack a smile.
What in the world was going on with him? Could it be the attention?
“And, Birdie, I have something for you that I’ve held on to for a long time, and now feels like the right time to give it to you,” her sister said, retrieving an envelope from the front bench.
“What is it?” she asked, but there was something vaguely familiar about it.
“Look at the handwriting,” her sister instructed.
Bridget turned the envelope over, and the breath caught in her throat at the sight of Grandma Dasher’s delicate cursive handwriting.
She ran her finger over the wrinkled surface. “But it’s addressed to you.”
“It is. But there’s a part in it that’s meant for you, Birdie.”
Her hands trembling, Bridget pressed her lips together, trying to hold back the emotion as a tear slid down her cheek. The letter her grandmother had left her didn’t have a special message for Lori in it. They’d never read each other’s letters either. But Lori had never mentioned that her letter contained a separate message.
She lifted the flap cautiously as if this letter were a portal to one last conversation with her grandmother. One last dance around the kitchen. One last offering of wisdom. She had no idea what her grandmother could want to convey all these years later.