54. Sage
FIFTY-FOUR
SAGE
My stomach drops through the floor as I look between them.
How do Amy and Eli know each other?
“Oh. Hey, Amy.” His voice is warm and easy, but his eyes are locked on mine.
Amy’s face cycles through about ten expressions in the space of one inhale. “Oh my God,” she says, turning to me. “How do you know Mr. Ward?”
Mr. Ward. I file that away and try to rearrange my face into something other than a five-alarm panic.
“He’s, um—”
“Friend of a friend,” Eli says smoothly, stepping inside and shutting the door behind him. “Small town.”
Amy nods like this makes perfect sense. “Eli and I teach at the same school,” she tells me. “Hunter Elementary.” Her smile softens when she looks at him. “How are you enjoying your summer so far?”
“It’s fine. You?”
Amy shrugs. “Making the most of it. Hey, are you planning on doing the butterfly garden again next year?”
“I am. Planted the milkweed for it last week.” Eli smiles, and it’s such a genuine, uncomplicated smile that I almost forget he’s capable of murder.
And stomping on still-beating hearts.
“I love that,” Amy says.
My eyes ping-pong between Eli and Amy, both acting like this is totally normal, which I guess for them it is. For me? It’s like watching two actors on different shows suddenly cross over into the same episode.
They don’t belong.
Eli catches my eye over Amy’s head.
“You’re a teacher?” The words fall out before I can stop them. “I didn’t know that. What grade?”
“Kindergarten.”
My brain stalls out. Kindergarten teacher. Butterfly garden. Mr. Ward. The man who ordered a body off a beach and wrapped me in his jacket is also planting milkweed with children.
“Kindergarten?” I repeat.
“Kindergarten,” he confirms, and there’s the faintest edge of amusement in his voice, like he knows exactly what’s short-circuiting in my brain.
“Not just kindergarten,” Amy says. “He teaches GED prep at the adult learning center too. He’s good at it. Annoyingly good, actually.”
She’s beaming like a proud parent. And I’m just staring at Eli, realizing Amy knows an entire version of him I’ve never touched.
The corner of his mouth lifts.
Amy’s eyes dart between us. Then she glances down the hallway where Knox disappeared and turns slightly away from Eli to hiss at me.
“Wait? Him too?”
“It’s complicated,” I mutter into my wine glass.
Amy lets out a breath that’s half laugh, half disbelief. But she doesn’t look horrified. She looks . . . impressed? Skeptical? Some hybrid emotion that only exists when your roommate turns out to be running a harem out of your shared apartment.
“Okay, well.” She sets her glass in the sink and pushes off the counter, her smile flicking once toward the hallway where Tyler disappeared before it comes back to me.
“I’ll leave you to your . . . men.” She says the word like she’s trying it on for size.
Then she squeezes my arm as she passes. “We’re talking about this later. In detail. So much freaking detail.”
She disappears down the hallway. Her bedroom door clicks shut.
Eli and I stand in the kitchen, separated by three feet of linoleum and about a thousand things neither of us knows how to say.
From down the hall, I hear muffled voices. Then my bedroom door opens and Milo appears, Knox and Micah behind him. Milo reads the room in half a second—me gripping my wine glass like a lifeline, Eli standing rigid across from me—and claps his hands together.
“Right. I think Mommy and Daddy need a min—”
Amy’s bedroom door slams open hard enough to rattle the frame.
Tyler comes out fast, jaw set, jacket half on, Amy two steps behind him with a hand out like she can physically catch the fight before it leaves the hallway. “Ty—Tyler, wait—”
He stops dead when he clocks the living room. Me against the counter. Four men between me and the door. His eyes drag from Micah to Milo to Knox and land, finally, on Eli standing closest to me.
Something ugly twists his mouth. “Another fucking one?” A short, mean laugh. “Christ. No wonder Brock left town after—”
“Say one more word,” Eli says, quiet and flat, “and I’ll put my fist so far down your throat you’ll be chewing my knuckles for a week.”
The room goes still. Knox shifts his weight and the math finishes behind Tyler’s eyes. Four of them. One of him. Whatever he sees in Eli’s face, it’s enough.
“Whatever,” he mutters, and yanks the front door open.
Amy catches my eye on her way after him, and hers are wet and wrecked and mortified. “Fuck. I’m so sorry, Sage. I’ll—” She doesn’t finish. The door bangs shut.
For half a second, she stands there like she might stay. Like she might choose the room full of dangerous men over the one waiting on the other side.
Then she opens the door and chases after him. Both Tyler’s and Amy’s voices trail down the stairwell and fade.
A beat of silence.
Milo exhales. “Anyway.” He claps his hands again, gentler this time, and starts steering the others toward the door. “As I was saying, Mommy and Daddy need a minute. Boys.”
Knox is already moving. Micah catches my eye on the way out, and I nod to the question I see there—I’m okay. He nods back.
Milo pauses in the doorway and points at Eli. “Be nice to her.” Then at me. “Be nice to him. Bowling starts tomorrow at two. We need him on the team.” Then he’s gone, pulling the door shut behind him with exaggerated care.
Silence descends.
Eli hasn’t moved. His arms are crossed, jaw tight, and he’s looking at a point somewhere past my left shoulder like making direct eye contact might detonate something he’s been holding together with wire and prayer.
I set my glass down. “A kindergarten teacher? Seriously?”
“Don’t.” His voice is quiet. Strained.
“Don’t what? Ask you questions? You’re obviously hiding things from me. My roommate seems to know more about you than I do.”
He flinches. Barely.
“And Brock,” I say, the other question finally clawing its way out. “How the fuck did Brock leave his parents a voicemail?”
I watch his face and get nothing—that flat, careful nothing he does when he’s deciding how much to give me.
“Brock’s dead. I put a knife in him. So whose voice was on that message, Eli?”
A long beat.
“Ours.” No flinch. No apology. “Milo cloned his phone the night of the beach. The texts, the trail—the voice was the last piece. Enough for his parents to stop pushing. Enough to keep the whole thing off Holden’s desk before it became a real case.”
“You made his voice.” The words come out thin. “You made him call his mother.”
“We closed a missing-persons case and kept you out of an interview room.” He finally looks at me, and there’s not an ounce of give in it. “It was the right call.”
“Okay. Sure. But why am I always the last person to know?”
“Because you’re not a hangman, Sage. You might be mixed up in this. But operationally, you’re not one of us.”
My hands remember the weight of Hank’s knife. The seam giving under the blade. Milo’s grin when I said next one.
Eli has no idea how far behind he already is.
The words are out before I can soften them. Before I can pretend they’re only anger.
“Maybe I should be.”
He looks at me, his eyes dark and raw and furious—but underneath the fury is something worse. Fear. Plain, ugly fear.
“No, little savage. That is never going to happen.”
It feels like a slap.
“You don’t get to tell me what to do.”
He goes silent for a moment, his brow knitting like he’s trying to force something out of his head. When he finally speaks, there’s an edge to it.
“We’re done.”
I pull my head back. “What?”
“This”—he points between us—“needs to stop. Whatever the fuck it is. Was.” He drags a hand down his face, and my stomach twists into a knot.
“Eli—”
“No, Sage. This. All of this. We’re too fucking close. It needs to stop for all our sakes.”
“I don’t need you to protect me, Eli.”
“I’m protecting me too! Your roommate—my colleague—just watched four men walk into your apartment. She knows my name, where I work, what I—” He stops. Breathes. “Do you understand what that means?”
“She’s not going to—”
“She doesn’t have to do anything. She just has to mention it.
One comment in the staff room. ‘Oh, I saw Eli over the summer. He was with a bunch of guys and my roommate.’ That’s all it takes.
Then it’s parents. Administration. Safeguarding questions.
Why is Mr. Ward hanging around a colleague’s roommate with four other men?
Why was he in her apartment? Why is her boyfriend saying things got ugly?
” He’s pacing now, short, tight laps between the kitchen and the living room.
“I teach kindergarten, Sage. Five-year-olds. Their parents trust me with—” His voice cracks.
He stops pacing. “Do you have any idea what something like this would look like?”
The anger in his voice hits me like a slap, and my own rises to meet it. “Something like what, exactly?”
“This. All of it.” He gestures between us, down the hallway, at the front door where the others just left. “The arrangement. The sharing. Whatever you’re calling it.”
“We’re not calling it anything. We’re just . . . figuring it out.” My voice wobbles on the last word, which I hate. “If you don’t want to be a part of it, say so. No one’s forcing you.”
That lands. I watch it hit him—watch the flinch he tries to hide and the way his hands curl into fists at his sides. Desperate. Like he’s fighting to hold onto something that keeps trying to slip through his fingers.
“You think I don’t want to?” His voice drops, rough and low.
“You think I stand back because I don’t feel it?
Every time I watch you. Every time I see you with them.
Every time Milo sends some bullshit text about how you laughed or what you said—” He exhales through his teeth.
“I want you, Sage. Fucked up as it is, I wanted you on that beach. I’ve wanted you every moment since. So much it’s making me sick.”
The words hang, and I don’t know when he got this close but he’s right there, close enough that I can see the pulse hammering in his throat, the fine tremor running through his shoulders.