Chapter Text
In hindsight, Ed figured he probably should have seen something like this coming, because Annie had been acting squirrely for the whole week before her wedding. For the entire two decades of her life, that had always been a sign that she was up to some sort of scheme. But Ed, too stressed out about the wedding planning to care, had just put it down to pre-nuptial nerves, and that was that.
Which is why it hit him like a beer bottle in the back of the head during a bar fight when, the day before Annie’s wedding, he carried an armful of chipped old plates to the dusty disused storage shed behind the restaurant and gift shop and, before he could open the door, heard a very familiar voice coming from within.
“Well, I must say, this isn’t quite the kind of accommodations I was expecting.”
Ed froze in his tracks right there outside the shed door. What the fuck, he thought, but didn’t get any farther than that before he heard a second voice respond.
“Yeah, you would say that, wouldn’t you.”
Holy SHIT, Ed thought this time, still stuck there staring uselessly at the door.
“And what’s that supposed to mean, exactly?”
A scoff. “Just that you haven’t changed a bit. You know you’ve got a lot of fucking nerve showing up here?”
“Alright now, there’s no need to be rude!”
“Yeah, Jizzy,” said a third voice, mockingly. “You know, you haven’t changed either. Same old stick up your ass.”
Oh. My. God. Ed thought.
“And you’re just as much of a jack -ass as ever.”
A snort. “Yeah, yeah, funny, like I haven’t ever heard that one before.”
Ed’s arms, which had been nerveless for about the past sixty seconds, chose that moment to give out on him entirely and send the stack of dishes crashing to the ground. He stared down at the pieces uncomprehendingly, the sound of the crash still bouncing around in his head.
And that was when the door of the shed opened and Ed looked up to see three faces he had genuinely never expected to see again. Older than the faces he remembered, but undeniably the same.
Jack Rackham. Izzy Hands. And-
“Hello, Ed,” said Stede fucking Bonnet, warmly, as if not a day had gone by, as if he’d never done anything wrong in his life.
Nope , Ed thought, and turned tail and ran.
Annie was sitting at the bar with her two bridesmaids when Ed burst back into the restaurant, the three of them laughing over mimosas Annie must have helped herself to the bar supplies to make. Well, at least someone was having a relaxing morning.
Annie paused mid-laugh when she saw the look on Ed’s face. “Uh oh,” she said, as Ed paced over and looped his arm through hers.
“Sorry ladies,” he said to the other two, forcing a smile. “Got to steal the bride-to-be for a minute.”
He half-dragged Annie off her chair, behind the bar, and into the kitchen. It was empty except for Fang, who was doing some food prep. He looked up when they burst in; with one look from Ed, he set down his knife, wiped his hands on his apron, and slipped out the delivery entrance.
“So,” Ed said when they were alone, “Do you know anything about what’s going on in my storage shed right now?”
Annie winced. “God, that really didn’t take long, huh?”
“Did you invite them here?” Ed said. “Wait. Actually. How do you even know about those guys?”
“Ok, don’t be mad—”
“Little late for that, kid.”
“—But I found your old journal. From the year I was born. It was in a box in the attic, and I’m sorry, but I was curious, I mean, you barely ever talk about those days!”
Ed felt like he needed to sit down, but there was no chair nearby. From what he remembered, there were a hell of a lot more details in that journal than he figured any man would want his daughter to know. “You read all that,” he said faintly, “And you still thought it would be a good idea to invite all those men here?”
“I just…” Annie looked at him pleadingly. “I just wanted to know who my other dad was. I wanted him to be here. For my wedding day.”
“Annie, I don’t even know who your other dad is,” Ed said. Which was true. He had definitely tried to figure it out, some nights when he couldn’t sleep, but it didn’t help that Annie, regardless of who had sired her, took almost exclusively after Ed. The same teak-colored skin, the same thick curly black hair, the same expressive mouth. When she had been younger, looking at her had been like looking at an old photograph of himself, before he grew into the man he always knew he was. And though her brown eyes were a shade lighter than Ed’s, and her nose a bit smaller, that really did not help narrow it down at all.
“I know you don’t,” Annie said. “But I think, once I get to know them a little bit, I will know. I just will.”
“I don’t think that’s how it works, kid.” Ed pinched the bridge of his nose. “And anyway, there are things I didn’t put in that journal, Annie. You don’t know the whole story, and you shouldn’t have gone behind my back like this.”
“If you’re talking about how Stede didn’t—”
“ Annie .” Ed said sharply. “I mean it. I’m going out there and I’m kicking them out of my shed and I’m sending them back to wherever the fuck they came from.”
He started to stomp towards the back door, but Annie caught him by the arm.
“Dad,” she said fervently. “Please don’t. I really do want them at my wedding. Please?”
Ed looked at her. God, he thought for about the thousandth time that week, she really was so young. Too young to be getting married, and this whole thing just proved it. But that was another issue entirely, and under the force of her big pleading eyes, Ed wavered, then quickly crumbled.
“Alright, fine,” he sighed. Then, as an afterthought. “But I want my journal back.”
“Oh, right,” Annie said, and then reached into the knitted boho bag she had slung across her body to pull the thing out, the old leather cover all battered and worn. “Here you go.”
Ed took it. “You’ve just been carrying this around with you?” He narrowed his eyes. “You didn’t read this to your friends, did you.
There was a short, guilty pause. “. . . No,” Annie said.
Ed just rolled his eyes. “I’m surprised it was even comprehensible,” he said, thinking about how fucked up he used to get in those days, and how often.
Annie giggled. “Well, sometimes it wasn’t,” she said. “You really used to go hard, huh Dad?”
“Let’s not talk about that right now,” Ed said, tucking the journal under his arm. “By the way, I mean it about kicking them out of the shed. They can stay on this island, but they can’t stay here. Find somewhere else to put them. And not at our house either.”
“That doesn’t leave me with a lot of options,” Annie said.
“Then they can sleep on the beach for all I care!” Ed said, and swept out of the kitchen.
Out front, Ed squinted against the mid-morning sunlight up at the sign above the door to the restaurant. It needed a new paint job; the words “Blackbeard’s Bar and Grill” were looking a lot more faded than he liked, as were the three smaller signs in a cascade of decreasing size beneath it (“And Other Delicacies and Delights;” “And Fishing Equipment;” “Gift Shop In Back”). It was the same sign he had somewhat manically made himself fifteen years ago when he’d first opened this place, and he liked the authenticity of that, but it wouldn’t do for it to look like he was running some sort of dump here. There were about a thousand restaurants here in Nassau, the full force of Caribbean tourism crammed onto one little island, and as much as Ed hated dealing with tourists sometimes, he relied on their thick wallets to keep this place open. This needed to look like a place worth coming in to, especially since it had been more and more difficult in recent years to keep their finances out of the red.
That would have to get done another day, though, because Ed’s list of things that needed doing before the wedding was a full one. He had to help decorate the cove where the actual ceremony was going to take place, and then he had to come back here and set up for the reception, and then he had to do some cooking of stuff that could be made ahead of time. At least he didn’t have to deal with running the restaurant today on top of all that; he’d closed for the day, and paid his kitchen and waitstaff to instead help with catering and set-up.
And all that would have been stressful enough, not to mention his persistent doubts about Annie even getting married in the first place, but now, NOW, he also had to be on the lookout for three of his ex-lovers running around the island. One of which he’d rarely interacted with sober, one of which he’d parted with on bad terms, and one of which had absolutely broken his stupid fucking heart.
Ed took a deep breath in, let it out slowly, and then turned and walked down the seashell-paved street at a faster than normal pace because Annie was probably going to bring said ex-lovers around to the front in a minute and Ed did not want to so much as be in sight when that happened.
It only took about ten minutes to get to the cozy pale-blue bungalow where he and Annie lived, just steps away from the beach and the soothing crash of the surf. Ed stepped up onto the porch, washed the sand off his feet with the hose they kept there, and went inside. He stood there in the entranceway for a moment, feeling oddly that this place which had been his home for twenty years seemed all at once strange and unfamiliar.
Seeing those three felt like it had knocked Ed loose from his moorings and sent him careening back through time, back to when he’d been some wild reckless hungry thing that treated this island like his own personal playground. That version of himself could have never imagined this quiet little house, the patterned hand towels in the kitchen, the shoe rack by the door. But that version of himself was the only one that those men in his storage shed had never known.
It was dangerous, to be reminded of that version of himself, because old habits were easy to fall into, and Ed could not let himself make the kind of mistakes that had almost killed him in a number of ways back then.
So: time to focus. Decorate the cove, set up the restaurant, cook the food. These were the items on his agenda today and if he didn’t make sure they were done, he’d have to face the prospect of ruining his only daughter’s wedding. Annie could forgive him a lot of things but he wasn’t sure she’d forgive that, especially since it wasn’t exactly a secret Ed thought it shouldn’t be happening in the first place.
It wasn’t that he didn’t like Annie’s fiancee, James something-or-other that Ed could never remember because it was long and Polish and had Z’s in strange places. Ed did like him in fact, he was a nice guy with a good sense of humor and a healthy appetite for adventure. Ed just resented him a little for popping the question so soon. They weren’t even old enough to drink in some countries yet.
Not that Ed could or would make any serious attempt to stop the wedding, especially now that Annie knew some of the truth about how brash and foolhardy he had been at her age and could easily call him out on hypocrisy to which he had no real defense. Except for the wisdom of years and experience, but what 20-year-old ever really bought into that?
Ed went over to Annie’s bedroom, pushed the door open, and was greeted by a total disaster of flowers, ribbons, banners, and other assorted wedding paraphernalia scattered across her room. This morning he had charged her with sorting out which decorations she wanted and packing them up so all he had to do was grab them and bring them to the cove, but clearly the task of rounding up and hiding her three potential fathers had kept her busy instead.
For a fleeting moment the decades-old memory passed through Ed’s head of many a morning in which he had stepped out on the deck of his boat after a long night of revelry to find it covered in the detritus of the night, bits of food and sticky stains and passed out people, and how he never gave a single shit about the state of it all except to check and see if any of the bottles rolling from one side of the boat to the other in time with the rocking of the waves still had anything in them.
He sighed, stepped into the room, and picked up the empty cardboard box sitting on the floor. Sometimes it really sucked to be responsible and old.
Forty-five minutes later, Ed stepped out of the house, struggling to open and then close the door with the unwieldy box of decorations in his arms, and so he didn’t look up until he’d already stepped off the porch and into the sand, and then stopped dead in his tracks at the sight of one familiar Izzy Hands sitting in one of the Adirondack chairs Ed kept out in front of the house. For a second they just stared at each other, Izzy sitting as stiffly as it was possible to sit in an Adirondack chair.
“I told Annie not to bring you guys here,” Ed said, looking around half-expecting to see Stede or Jack hiding behind a palm tree or a sand dune.
“She didn’t,” Izzy said, rising from the chair.
“Then how did you know—” Ed began, then cut himself off. “You know what, never mind. I don’t care. What do you want, Izzy?”
Izzy shifted around, opened his mouth, closed it again; as if the question hadn’t so much as occurred to him. “I dunno,” he said eventually.
Ed swallowed. “You know, I think you might actually be the one I’m most surprised to see,” he said. “Considering the last time we saw each other I’m pretty sure I threw a bottle of rum at your head.”
Izzy huffed a laugh, as if it was a fond memory. “I think it was whiskey, actually.”
“Right,” Ed said, bemused. “How could I forget.”
There was a pause; Ed could sense the both of them wavering on the edge of things they didn’t know how to say. Ed sighed, and gestured forward with his chin.
“Walk with me,” he said.
He set off down the beach, and Izzy followed him easily. Just like he always had.
They didn’t say anything for a few moments. Ed watched Izzy take in the sights all down the beach: sunburned tourists, kitschy gift shops and overpriced restaurants, and way down towards the port, goliath cruise ships gliding towards the high rise luxury hotels.
“Nassau sure has changed a lot,” Izzy said.
“Man, you don’t know the half of it,” Ed said. “Take my advice and don’t go anywhere near the city center if you don’t want your wallet bled dry.”
A displeased slant settled across Izzy’s mouth. “This place used to be wild. Remember the shit we used to get up to? Drinking and drugs and debauchery and avoiding getting arrested by the skin of our teeth. And we weren’t the only ones.”
“I remember,” Ed said, because of course he did.
“Do you miss it?” Izzy asked.
Ed hesitated. Those years of his life he’d been fueled almost entirely by strong spirits and fire, some sort of insanity taking root in his rib cage. It had been fun, in its way; he and Izzy and that boat they’d stolen, wreaking havoc on clueless vacationers and rich people in their big clumsy yachts. They’d nearly died a number of times, nearly got caught even more times than that, but every narrow escape just made them more convinced they were invincible. Made Ed feel alive in the most sublime excruciating way.
“Sometimes,” Ed admitted. “No kind of life for a kid, though.”
Even Izzy could admit that much. “Guess not.”
They walked for a few more quiet seconds, then Izzy said, “Annie. That a nickname for Anne?”
Half a smile hitched up a corner of his mouth. “Yeah.”
“Like our boat?”
Their boat. Ed had suggested they take it in a state of manic drunken euphoria, stumbling through the marina in the dead of night. Izzy, even a hell of a lot more sober than him, had gone along with it, because it didn’t take much to get him to do whatever Ed wanted back in those days. They’d untied it and sailed it around to a secluded cove on the other side of the island where’d they’d pulled it up onto the sand. Over the course of the next few days they’d hauled buckets and buckets of black paint out there and made that boat unrecognizable, made her theirs. Then, because Izzy was the better artist and steadier hand as evident from the numerous stick-and-poke tattoos they had given each other, Ed had held a ladder steady for him as he climbed up with a bucket of red paint and given her a new name in beautiful script: Queen Anne’s Revenge.
“Yeah,” Ed said again, the half smile unfurling into a full one. “Like our boat.”
“You sentimental bastard,” Izzy said, so blatantly fond that Ed turned fully to look at him. There was a certain gleam in his eyes, something that had always reminded Ed of fever, back when they were young and he’d catch Izzy watching him unawares. To see that same expression still there, twenty years on, kicked Ed’s heart rate into a higher gear because he’d never really known how to deal with it, and still didn’t.
Ed cleared his throat and started walking again. “So, what have you been up to, all these years?”
“Oh, you know,” Izzy said, strolling just beside him with his hands clasped behind his back. “This. That. And prison, in between.”
Ed whipped his head towards him and caught his foot on a weird divot in the sand, causing him to stumble. “Shit, really?” he said once he’d caught himself. “You went to prison?”
Izzy shrugged. “I went south, to Cuba, after…” he trailed off for an awkward moment. “After I left here. Started running with this crew that … well, that wasn’t as clever as you. Couldn’t make the kinds of last minute saves you used to do. We got into a tough scrape where our only options were get caught or get killed. Figured it was an easy enough decision.”
“Christ,” Ed said faintly. “How long did you get?”
“Ten years, about,” Izzy said, so casually it nearly sent Ed reeling. “Got out early for good behavior, though.”
Ed laughed in sheer disbelief. “Hard to imagine you and ‘good behavior’ ever in the same sentence.”
Izzy smiled wryly. “There’s a hierarchy in prison, same as anywhere,” he said. “Once you figure it out, make your place in it, the rest is easy.”
Ed wasn’t sure what that meant. Wasn’t sure he wanted to know what that meant, exactly. It’d been a long time since he’d lived that hard. He felt a swift and sharp stab of regret for … well, for abandoning Izzy to it, sort of. He’d pushed Izzy out of his life even before he’d known about Annie.
“And you?” Izzy prompted. “You’ve been here this whole time?”
“Yeah,” Ed said with a shrug.
“Raising a kid,” Izzy observed neutrally. “Opening a restaurant. With a gift shop.”
“Yes,” Ed said, a little warily. “What about it?”
“Just not what I expected, ‘s all,” Izzy said. “You always talked about … bigger things than this. New places. More excitement.”
“Oh, I’ve had plenty of excitement, Iz, believe me.”
“I just mean … Is it enough for you, this life?”
Ed was silent for a moment. He’d nearly forgotten this about Izzy, the way he could make Ed doubt things about himself even when he wasn’t really trying to. And Ed didn’t think he was trying to at this moment, not like he used to back when they were young and Stede was this new and shiny thing in town that had totally turned Ed’s head. Right now, there was none of the frustrated rage that had become a near-permanent fixture on Izzy’s face back in those days. But it was still reminding him rather unpleasantly of all the things that had led up to him chucking that bottle at Iz’s head.
Because that question, Is it enough, had been on Ed’s mind more and more lately as Annie prepared to get married and sail off into the sunset with that boy of hers, both of them still just kids as far as Ed was concerned. And Ed had been trying hard not to face up to the fact that when she was gone it would just be him and his struggling restaurant left here, surrounded by decades of memories of all the wonderful and terrible things he’d done in his life on this island.
“And what is it you do these days, exactly, Iz?” Ed chose to deflect instead.
Izzy chuckled and looked down at his feet. “Point taken,” he said instead of answering, although whatever point Ed had apparently just made was a mystery to him.
Ed exhaled hard and kept walking. The stumble he’d taken a minute ago had twisted his bad knee a bit. The limp it gave him was near imperceptible—to anyone but Izzy, apparently, because he gave Ed one sideways look and then wordlessly took the box of decorations from Ed’s arms. Ed let him, also saying nothing. They walked like that the rest of the way to the cove, where several members of Ed’s waitstaff were in the middle of setting up wooden folding chairs in front of the wedding trellis.
Well, that’s what they were attempting to do, anyway. But apparently it took three people to figure out a single chair, because Wee John and Pete were mid-argument with Frenchie about a chair that he was visibly struggling to open.
“You have to do it the other way,” Pete was insisting. “The other direction, look.”
“I tried that way already,” Frenchie said through gritted teeth. “It didn’t work .”
“It’s just stuck, it needs some muscle,” Wee John said, then snatched the chair away from Frenchie and began straining against it with his not-insignificant strength.
“Stop, stop, you’re gonna break it!” Frenchie cried, trying to grab it back.
Then Jim, who had been silently affixing flower garlands to the stone walls of the cove, strode over and swiped the chair from Wee John’s hands. In one swift and fluid moment, they snapped the chair open and set it on the ground before returning, still silent, to their own task.
“Thanks, Jim,” Frenchie called after them sheepishly, and moved on to the next chair.
Izzy raised an eyebrow. “These people work for you?” he asked, clearly dubious.
“They’re better servers than they are decorators,” Ed admitted. “Here, set that box down over there.”
Izzy did so. Ed pulled a few lengths of ribbon from the box, went over to the first row, and started tying them to the chairs in decorative bows. He looked up to see that Izzy had followed suit.
“You don’t have to help with this,” Ed protested. “You can go—I don’t know, enjoy the island or whatever.”
Izzy scoffed. “There’s a thought. Me, a tourist, on the island I used to terrorize for years.”
Ed laughed. “Good point. Would you even know how to relax if you tried?”
“Probably not. Just let me help, would you?”
And Ed did, because it would, in fact, make his life a little easier, and because as he recalled, an Izzy without a task to do was an Izzy more likely to start kicking up trouble. And not the fun kind, either. This older Izzy certainly seemed more settled than he used to be, but he still took well to being told what to do. He took the chairs on one side of the aisle and Ed the other. At one point, Ed paused and straightened to stretch his back. He surveyed the bows that Izzy had tied: perfect, precise knots of the sort you would expect from a proper sailor.
Not that Izzy had ever been a “proper” anything. Ed watched him for a minute with an unexpected surge of fondness: weathered, scarred, tattooed Izzy, tying pretty silk ribbons to delicate wooden chairs with a furrow of utter concentration in his brow.
Eventually they both finished with the bows and Izzy came back over to Ed’s side and said, “What next?”
“Well,” Ed began, but was interrupted by the familiar voice of his daughter.
“ There you are!” Annie strode towards them barefoot in the sand. She’d changed into her bathing suit and denim shorts, her favorite heart-shaped sunglasses perched in the dark hair she’d tied back into a voluminous bun. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you.”
“I told you at breakfast I’d be here today—“
“Not you, Dad.” She reached out and looped her arm around Izzy’s, pulling him a step forward. “You,” she said to him. “We’re going on an outing.”
Izzy looked startled and confused as much by her touch on his arm as by the prospect of an outing. “We’re doing what?”
“What sort of outing?” Ed asked, suspicious.
“Never you mind,” Annie said, and started to drag Izzy along. “We’re going to have fun!”
Ed snorted. “You got your work cut out for you with that one.”
Izzy flipped him off out of Annie’s sight line. “I can be fun,” he said sullenly.
“Yeah, keep telling yourself that, mate,” Ed said.
“I’ll get him back to you later!” Annie called behind her as she left the cove.
“I don’t care if you do, in fact I’m pretty sure that’s the opposite of what I told you to do!” Ed shouted back at her.
Izzy shot him one last offended look, and then they were gone.
Ed let out a deep breath, not even realizing how much subconscious tension he’d been holding in his body. He turned back around and noticed that the others were staring at him—Frenchie, Wee John and Pete openly, Jim out of the corner of their eye and pretending like they weren’t.
“What are you lot looking at,” Ed scowled.
In response he got several caught-out variations of “Nothing, boss” that made him roll his eyes.
“Back to work then,” Ed said, knowing full well his love life—as it were—was probably soon going to be half the island’s business. He groaned internally. Well. Nothing to be done about that now.
It took a couple more hours to finish setting everything up, the cove transformed into the exact sort of lavish tropical fairytale Annie had wanted. Ed dismissed the others with a, “Go have a piña colada or something,” which he did not have to tell them twice. After they’d gone, Ed stood at the top of the aisle behind all the chairs and imagined Annie walking down tomorrow in her flowy ankle-length white dress, imagined her standing hand-in-hand with James beneath the trellis all strung with jasmine blossoms and sea grapes. It was going to be beautiful and perfect and people would cry and then the two of them would go off and start a new life while Ed stayed here and tried to reconfigure his old one.
“This all looks absolutely lovely,” said a voice behind him, and it took all of Ed’s self-control not to jump.
Ed turned around, and there was Stede. Golden-haired Stede in his leather boat shoes, chino shorts, and pale pink linen button-up. Stede who was smiling at him with this affectionate look in his eyes that Ed didn’t want to try too hard to decipher.
“Can’t turn a corner without running into one of you today,” Ed grumbled.
“Ah, well,” Stede said, “I’ve been looking for you.”
“Shouldn’t have bothered,” Ed said, and breezed past him, making a beeline back up the beach.
“Oh,” Stede said, sounding surprised. Ed heard him following, half-jogging to keep up. “Where are you off to now?”
“Got a lot of shit to do today,” Ed grit out. “Places to be.”
“I’ll go with you then,” Stede said.
Ed clenched his jaw. He had done the walk-and-talk with Izzy because it was familiar ground; there were safe things to talk about with Izzy, old habits to fall back on. But with Stede, what was there to talk about besides the painful and the obvious and the painfully obvious?
“I don’t think so, mate,” Ed said. “It won’t be much fun.”
“Come now, I don’t believe that,” Stede protested. “As I recall, you have the remarkable ability to make anything fun.”
Some complicated emotion made Ed’s stomach jolt. They did use to have fun, lots of it. Stede had looked every bit like some CEO’s entitled stuck-up son when he arrived in Nassau, but underneath that well-kept exterior he was every bit as batshit as Ed, in his own way. Ed had heard of him before he’d met him, Izzy climbing back onto the boat one afternoon in a pissy mood after Ed had sent him into town to steal them the next week’s worth of booze, You wouldn’t believe the rich fucking prick I ran into in town, been here all of two days and trying to wrangle himself an invitation to our party , and Ed had asked, well, did you invite him? To which Izzy of course said no, obviously I didn’t fucking invite him, but then Stede had shown up anyway, acting like the whole drunken raging mess of it was old hat to him even though if it really was, he certainly would not have shown up wearing white.
He was this pastel-colored smiley enigma that had Ed more or less instantly enamored. He’d never met anyone like Stede, ever. He was down to do the usual illegal crazy things with Ed but he was also apt to bring Ed onto his brand-spanking-new boat that was too big for him and share with him his expensive liquor and his imported delicacies, let Ed steal his patterned velvet robe because what did it matter when he had half a dozen more? He was rich but he wasn’t stuck-up, he was handsome but he wasn’t arrogant, he was kind-hearted but he didn’t care about the blood and sweat and dirt on Ed’s hands. Found it attractive, even. Ed would pass hours and hours in Stede’s company and not even realize it until the sun began to sink into the ocean waters; he was an endless well of fascination and novelty and adventure.
Yeah. It used to be fun. Until, in one shattering moment, it wasn’t anymore.
“Things change,” Ed said, here and now. “And I’ve got enough on my plate without having to keep you entertained, Stede.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“Well I mean it,” Ed cut in. “I don’t want to talk right now.”
“But if you would just–”
Ed stopped in his tracks. He felt sand kick up across his ankles as Stede pulled up short too, an inch away from crashing into Ed’s back. Ed turned to face him.
“Stede,” he said. “You’re here because Annie wants you here. Okay, fine. You get a seat at the ceremony and a place at the reception. But if you were expecting anything else from me? Sorry to disappoint.”
Stede looked like he’d been kicked, eyes big and hurt. “Ed…”
Ed swallowed hard and spun back around. He couldn’t look at Stede’s face for too long, it made him too … too angry. That’s what it was, what it must be.
“See you tomorrow, Stede.” He continued making his way up the beach, even faster now; this time, Stede didn’t follow.