Chapter Twenty-Four
TATE
It’s Saturday, and being inside feels wrong. Sophia is at the island with her laptop, not caring that it is the weekend, and the decision is made before I’ve fully thought it through.
“Get dressed.”
She looks up from her screen. “Excuse me?”
“We’re going out.”
She looks at me for a moment, that assessing look she has, the one that decides things before she says anything out loud. “Where?” she asks.
“You’ll see.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only one you’re getting.” The corner of my mouth pulls up.
She studies me for another second, trying to read me the way she always does, with that focused blue gaze that is considerably more successful than I like to admit.
Then, her chin lifts slightly, and her eyes get that brightness in them, the one that means she’s decided something is worth her attention.
“Do I need anything specific?”
“Jeans. Boots. A jacket.”
She holds my gaze for one more moment. Then she closes the laptop without another word and slides off the stool.
“Give me twenty minutes,” she says, already heading down the hallway.
She is back in fifteen, wearing dark jeans, ankle boots, a white shirt, a jacket thrown over one arm, and her hair is pulled back neatly.
She stops in the kitchen doorway, and my eyes move over her slowly, from the neat line of her hair to the white shirt to the bare feet still on the kitchen floor, and something that has absolutely no right to happen happens anyway.
Magnificent, I think. Entirely and completely magnificent.
The keys come up. “Ready?”
“I still don’t know where we’re going.”
“I know.”
She makes a sound low in her throat, not quite exasperation, not quite a laugh, and follows toward the garage.
Memphis watches from his spot by the sliding door. His ears drop the moment he understands he isn’t coming, that slow flattening that means he knows exactly what is happening and has decided to make sure everyone else knows that he knows.
Sophia points at him. “Don’t give me that face.”
He gives her that face.
“We’ll be back tonight,” she tells him seriously.
He sighs.
She stands there a second longer than necessary, her hand briefly touches the top of his head, and turns away before whatever is happening has time to become something worth examining.
She stops when she sees the bike.
Watching it happen, the moment she comes through the garage door, registers what is waiting, and understands what the jeans, boots, and ‘You’ll see’ actually mean.
She goes still.
Not surprised exactly. More like arrived as if some part of her had already known.
Crossing over to the bike, she picks up the helmet from the seat and holds it out toward her without a word.
She looks at it. Then at me. Then back at the helmet.
Then she takes it.
“Should I be getting on the back of your bike?” she asks quietly.
Not accusatory, not coy, just honest, the way she always is when something matters.
Giving her a look without answering, the corner of her mouth moves slightly as she reads whatever is on my face. Her fingers tighten briefly around the helmet. Then she puts it on, adjusts the strap with steady hands, and stands there waiting.
Swinging a leg over the bike and settling into the seat, the familiar weight of it settles underneath. She swings up behind a moment later with the ease of someone who has done this before. That weight settles over me, the guilt of a man doing something that once belonged to his brother.
How can something feel so right and so wrong at the same time?
Neither of us says a word.
Starting the engine, the bike comes alive, and her hands press in just slightly as the vibration moves through us, just for a second. Then she settles, her palms flat against my sides, and we pull out of the garage and into the Nevada morning.
The road to the canyon runs long and straight through open desert, the sky enormous above it, the mountains patient and distant, and the landscape stretching in every direction without apology.
Her hands stay at my waist for the whole ride, warm through the fabric. I don’t look down at them, keeping my eyes on the road, horizon, the desert opening up ahead, and feeling every mile of her warmth through the fabric regardless.
The Grand Canyon arrives without warning, just suddenly, where there had been nothing, the earth opening up and dropping away into something so vast that the first few seconds are just the brain catching up.
Pulling the bike over at the viewing point, I cut the engine.
Sophia gets off and removes the helmet.
And looks.
Through most of it, I’m watching Sophia rather than the canyon. It’s easier and more honest. Her face in the light is completely open in a way it rarely is during the day, the careful composure she carries everywhere gone, replaced by something younger and entirely unguarded.
Her expression moves through surprise, then awe at the scale of it, then something else entirely, something that opens slowly and fills with tears she doesn’t try to stop or wipe away. She stands there, her hands loose at her sides, and her throat moves once.
Getting off the bike, I walk to the low wall at the edge of the viewing point and sit.
After a moment, she sits beside me. Close, arms almost touching. The canyon stretches out ahead, ancient, enormous, and completely indifferent to two people carrying things that feel very large until sitting here, they remember how small everything is.
Neither of us speaks for a long while.
The wind moves through the canyon below, low and constant, like the earth breathing.
“He would have loved this,” she says eventually.
Quietly. Not broken. Just true.
“Yeah, he would have.”
She looks out at it for another moment.
“He was always talking about places he wanted to take me,” she says. “Places he’d been or heard about or read about somewhere. He had this whole list.” A pause. “He never got to take me anywhere.”
“He took you to New York.”
She makes a sound that is almost a laugh. “That’s true.”
The wind moves, the canyon breathes. A hawk turns slow circles far below.
“I need to tell you something,” I say.
She doesn’t move, doesn’t turn to look. Just goes very still, her hands folded in her lap, her eyes on the canyon.
“Okay,” she says quietly.
“I’m going away. In a few days. I don’t know exactly when yet, but soon.” A pause. “I’ll be gone for a while.”
A beat of silence.
“Where?” she asks.
“Mexico.”
Her hands tighten in her lap. Watching it happen, her fingers press together, then release deliberately, the conscious effort of a woman managing a reaction she hadn’t been prepared for.
“Mexico?” The word comes out as a question, as if she’s hoping she heard wrong.
“Yes.”
A longer silence.
“Has it got something to do with the El Pasos?” she asks, looking out at the canyon walls.
“Please,” quietly. “Don’t ask me any more questions… I don’t want to have to lie to you.”
She turns then. Her eyes are direct and clear, carrying something that registers before the brain catches up with it.
“I don’t want to lose you,” she says. “I’ve already lost Ryan. I can’t…” her voice catches. “I can’t lose you, too, Tate.”
She leans forward, her arms come around me, and she holds on.
Without realizing it, my arms come around her.
Her face is pressed against my neck, and her hair is against my jaw.
The warmth of her, real, specific, and entirely hers, the canyon is ahead, and the wind is moving through everything.
She’s sitting there holding on and letting the thing that has not been examined for a month exist in this moment, without looking directly at it.
Then she pulls back and looks up, her face so close, her eyes clear and direct, and my gaze drops to her mouth for a moment before the thought arrives fully formed.
What are you doing, Tate? She’s not yours to kiss.
I look back out at the canyon before she can read it.
She breathes out one long, slow exhale, and when she looks at me again, her eyes are clear.
“I’m coming back, Soph.”
She looks at me for a moment. “Don’t promise me something you can’t keep,” she says quietly. “Just…” she pauses. “Just tell me you’ll do everything in your power to come back to me.”
I look at her. At the steadiness of a woman who has already learned the hard way that promises don’t protect anyone, asking instead for the only thing that is actually true.
“I’ll do everything in my power to come back to you.”
She holds my gaze. Then nods, once, small and certain, and looks back out at the canyon.
Neither of us says anything else.
The afternoon light moves slowly across the ancient walls, and sitting beside her, I let this much in and not one thing more.
***
The show is at nine.
Eating first, Sophia finds a restaurant off the Strip on her phone and orders with the confidence of a woman who knows exactly what she wants.
Whatever she chooses is considerably better than anything I would have picked, as demonstrated by finishing everything on my plate and then eating half of her dessert without being invited.
She pushes it across without looking up from her wine glass.
She talks about The Ember project over dinner, Victoria Chen, the signage brief she’d finally cracked that afternoon, the problem she’d been circling for days, and the moment it clicked.
Her hands move when she talks about it, gesturing slightly, and her eyes are alive in a way that is different from every other version of her. She’s lit up from somewhere genuine.
Leaning forward slightly without meaning to and asking questions I actually wanted, the weight of the canyon, Mexico, and everything still waiting, lifts, just for an hour, just for dinner, and it is good.
Simple and genuinely good, two people at a table with a bottle of wine between them, the evening doing what evenings do when you stop bracing against them.
Living in Vegas your whole life means you stop seeing it. The Strip is just the Strip, familiar, loud, and always there. But the moment the lights go down, and the first performer appears, the reason people pay what they pay for this becomes clear.