Chapter 25
Sage
There were so many wonderful things about the Holt family, but one of the best was that you didn’t have to ask them to show up when things got rough. You could count on them to be there.
I was still trying to process the day. Parts of it felt like they had happened to someone else.
The flowers, the person at the gas station, and Rhodes showing up were all events that were just fuzzy around the edges.
And the sex? Off the charts. It had been epic and had surpassed expectations.
Whatever was happening between the two of us, I was going to roll with it.
Sex had always been something I enjoyed. Hell, I was an adult. But this? I wasn’t sure how to even articulate how different that had been.
I felt like I was starting to see that Rhodes had layers.
We shared this incredibly tender and intimate moment, and then he switched to work mode, barking out orders at someone.
Afterward, he switched it all off and pulled me downstairs.
Then he kissed me senseless against the wall, hitching his thick thigh between mine until I was breathless, skimming his hand over my throat.
I had no notes and zero questions, but I wasn’t totally sure I was down for a full-time bossy take-charge boyfriend all the time.
By four-thirty, Castleton's front drive looked like a Holt family reunion that nobody had actually organized — all my siblings’ vehicles, and even Maggie’s SUV, which still had a bumper sticker from Wildwood Meadows Elementary.
Kipp claimed the Honor Student was for him, but we all knew he was a liar, liar, pants on fire.
Maggie had already taken over the kitchen with Chloe and Phiny to plan dinner, banishing everyone else after fussing over me unnecessarily. The rest of us had moved outside, with the men gossiping together and us girls gathering in the back with Opal.
I was sitting on the low stone wall at the edge of what would eventually be the garden, with Hattie and Lila.
Opal was out in the yard with us, making her fairy houses again, which she was now obsessed with (not that I blamed her).
She was concentrating on arranging her pile of sticks, pressing her tongue to the corner of her mouth while she eyed them critically.
“This one is going to be for Jessamina,” Opal announced, holding up a particularly dainty acorn cap with all the importance that was necessary when making all the important decisions.
We were all waiting to hear all about what role she was going to play in Opal’s fairy kingdom.
“She lives waaaaaayyyy over here. She has to ask for permission before doing anything.”
“Who does she have to ask?” Hattie asked, with complete seriousness.
“She’s supposed to ask the queen, but she left.” Her head tilted one way and then the other, the ribbons in her hair bouncing.
“What’s the queen’s name?” Lila asked, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees, her eyebrows pinched together, shooting us all looks.
Opal paused for a minute and then continued playing, assembling her little houses. “Queen Sneezy. She’s very busy.” Opal gave a little nod as if she’d made up her mind. “Jessamina doesn’t care. She didn’t like the queen anyway.”
We all nodded in affirmation as she returned to building the middle house with the focused efficiency of a child with a vision.
We briefly wondered whether we should ask more questions.
It was pretty clear who the queen was and who Jessamina was.
But Opal was playing happily, and it didn’t seem right to press her with more questions without knowing how I should proceed.
That was probably something I should ask Rhodes about.
She moved a bit farther and began gathering more supplies. Opal had quite a village going now. It was fun to see how she had already started to settle in here. If anyone needed a family to wrap around her, it was this little girl.
The grounds at this hour were golden in the particular way of Pacific Northwest spring evenings, the light slanting low through the oaks at the property's edge and catching on the greenhouse glass.
It glowed, and I thought, not for the first time, that whoever had built this place had understood something about beauty that had nothing to do with money and everything to do with patience.
“You want to talk about it?” Hattie asked. “You’re being kinda quiet.”
"I'm always quiet." It was hard not to grumble about the question when she poked at me, but Hattie and I had become really good friends since she moved here.
“You’re hilarious,” she and Lila both snorted, knowing perfectly well that was a lie.
Hattie had a particular way of looking sideways at people that communicated entire paragraphs, and the paragraph this one communicated was something along the lines of, “You’re thinking hard about something.”
Just a few months ago, Hattie experienced something truly horrific, and I knew that my little misadventure was insignificant compared to that. It was just a minor setback. No big deal.
"I'm okay," I said, which was both true and incomplete in the way that “okays” usually were. “It was scary, and then it was over, and then Rhodes was there."
“You know, I could call someone I know, and we could start working on figuring out who sent the flowers. Or maybe look at the surveillance footage,” Hattie offered.
“No,” the word came out too quickly. “Rhodes has people coming tonight that will do all that. You don’t need to call in favors.
Thanks, though.” She nodded, but I could see she was hesitating.
Mainly, I didn’t want them involved at all in whatever this was or whoever was targeting me.
That was all we needed. I knew she wasn’t doing that whole hacker-collective thing anymore, anyway.
She’d left her true-crime podcasting life behind.
Now, she helped Kipp manage the cabins and worked on her marketing jobs.
Lila was watching me closely. “It’s okay to be okay, but we’re here to talk about it too.” She heaved out a big breath. “Earlier, I was kind of freaking out about those flowers,” she confessed. “So, I’m glad that this is all out in the open now. We can all deal with it.”
I breathed in deeply a few times and tried to ignore all the other parts of the things I hadn’t talked to Wade and Rhodes about. Those feelings that sometimes told me someone was watching me. But maybe that was all in my head. I didn’t have any proof.
Opal had moved on to sourcing construction materials, padding across the lawn toward the stone wall with the purposeful stride of someone on a supply run.
Through the tall kitchen windows, I could see Maggie and my sisters moving with the efficiency of people used to cooking together. The house had giant glass windows, and you could see right into the kitchen, where Maggie moved at the stove, as if she were chattering up a storm the whole time.
“Maggie asked where he kept the good pot," Lila said, following my gaze. She chuckled a little before she laughed even harder. “The expression on his face.”
"What did he say?" It was hard to imagine Rhodes having more than one set of pots and pans. He was newly divorced, and so far I hadn’t gotten the impression from anyone that his marriage had been happy. I wasn’t even sure he knew how to cook.
"He showed her another option, and then she reorganized the cabinet, complaining that men didn’t know how to organize.”
"He let her," Hattie said, like this was the significant part. "He just stepped back and watched and said 'yes, ma'am' when she asked him to move."
Maggie was her own force of nature, but she could be a little bossy. The last thing I needed was for Lila and Hattie to think that Maggie reorganizing Rhodes’ cabinets, or him letting her do it, meant we were in some kind of relationship. Because… we weren’t. Or…?
From this angle, I could see the edge of the porch.
The shapes of the men there—four of them standing and sitting with the collective gravity of people engaged in a serious conversation.
They all carried themselves with the same particular body language.
Their voices were low enough that their words didn’t carry, but they all seemed to be articulating the same things.
That they knew what they were locked into, whatever the problem was.
Fish was collapsed on the floor next to Kipp, already exhausted after Opal chased him across the lawn for an hour.
Rhodes was at the center of it, and I wasn’t sure if it was because I just noticed him more or because he was the only one who wasn’t my brother.
It just seemed like the others were orienting toward him the way a compass did, even Wade, who didn’t typically defer to anyone. It was interesting to watch.
He was in the same clothes he'd had on at the gas station, one hand around a beer bottle and the other flat on the porch rail. He was talking in a serious way that meant he was communicating information he’d already organized from earlier.
He’d sent the footage from the convenience store to Redhawk, and I knew he’d already gotten several calls from them.
“It’s interesting to watch them together,” Hattie said quietly. “You know Rhodes is the one who got Jane’s ex to confess.”
The spit dried up in my mouth as I swiveled fully towards her. “I had no idea that Rhodes was even involved in all that.”