Chapter 26
Chapter Twenty-Six
SAUL
I keep counting the days.
Not in my notebook this time, in my head. A constant ticker running underneath everything else, reminding me how little time I have left.
Day two. Five days remaining.
Day three. Four days remaining.
Day four. Three days remaining.
I’ve never counted down before. In eight years of relocations, I’ve counted forward, days since placement, weeks since last check-in, months until a witness is considered stable. Forward is progress. Forward means the job is working.
Counting backward means something else entirely.
It means I don’t want to leave.
Day two, we set up the bakery.
Stevie moves through the kitchen like she’s remembering a language she used to speak. Her hands know where things should go even when her mind is somewhere else.
She organizes the dry storage by frequency of use, flour and sugar within arm’s reach, specialty items on higher shelves.
She tests the oven temperature with a thermometer she brought from her old life. One I picked for her. One of the few things she packed that isn’t tied to one of them.
I carry boxes. Unpack equipment.
Do the heavy lifting because it’s something I can do, something useful, something that doesn’t require me to watch her face and wonder what she’s thinking.
She’s thinking about them. I know she is.
It’s there in the way she pauses sometimes, hand hovering over a mixing bowl, eyes going distant.
The way she opens a drawer and stares at it like she’s expecting to find something that isn’t there.
The way she hasn’t touched the peanut butter I bought at the grocery store, hasn’t even moved it from the bag to the pantry.
I don’t mention it.
Some grief needs space more than words.
By afternoon, the kitchen is taking shape. Clean counters, organized shelves, equipment tested and ready. Stevie stands in the middle of it, hands on her hips, surveying her domain.
“It’s real,” she says quietly. “It’s actually real.”
“It’s yours.”
She looks at me. Her eyes hold too many things at once, pain, gratitude, and something that looks a little like faith.
“Thank you,” she says. “For making this happen. For fighting for it.”
“I just made some calls.”
“You made a lot of calls. And probably argued with people. And definitely pulled strings you weren’t supposed to pull.” She tilts her head, studying me. “You do that a lot. The extra stuff. The things that aren’t in the job description.”
I shrug. Try to deflect. “The job description is flexible.”
“The job description is keeping me alive. This.” She gestures at the kitchen, the bakery, all of it. “This is something else.”
She’s right, and we both know it, and saying it out loud makes it something we’d have to deal with.
So I don’t say anything.
And then she crosses the kitchen and wraps her arms around me.
It’s not a long hug. Not at first. Just a quick embrace, the kind of thank-you hug that people give each other all the time.
But she doesn’t let go. And I don’t either.
My arms come up around her, settling against her back, and she’s warm and solid and real against my chest. I can feel her breathing. Can smell her shampoo, something new, something Colorado, not the generic stuff from before.
She fits.
That’s the thought that undoes me. She fits against me like she was designed to be there. Like all the empty spaces I’ve been carrying around for years were just waiting for her to fill them.
I should step back. Should maintain some kind of professional distance. Should remember that I’m leaving in five days and getting attached is the worst thing I could do to either of us.
But she’s holding on like I’m the only solid thing in her world. And I can’t make myself let go.
We stand there for a long time. Long enough that it stops being a thank-you hug and becomes something else.
When she finally pulls back, her eyes are wet but she’s almost smiling.
“Sorry,” she says. “I just needed to hug someone who smells like competence and didn’t leave me emotionally devastated via baked goods. You were nearby.”
“I know.” My voice comes out rough. “I know.”
She wipes her eyes. Takes a breath. Squares her shoulders like she’s preparing for battle.
“Okay,” she says. “Let’s finish setting up.”
We go back to work. But something has shifted.
And I spend the rest of the day hyperaware of every time she passes close to me, every accidental brush of shoulders, every moment when our eyes meet and hold a beat too long.
Five days.
I’m not going to survive five days.
Day three, she laughs.
Not the broken laugh from before, the one that sounded like it hurt coming out. This one is real. Surprised out of her by something stupid I said about the ancient cash register, how it looks like it belongs in a museum exhibit about the Before Times.
The sound fills the bakery like sunlight.
I stand there, receipt paper in my hands, completely frozen.
“Your face,” she says, still laughing. “You look like you’ve never heard someone laugh before.”
“Not like that.” The words come out before I can stop them. “Not from you. Not in a while.”
Her laughter fades but the smile stays. Softer now. Something tender around the edges.
“I’m trying,” she says. “To be okay. To let myself be okay.”
“I know you are.”
“It’s hard. I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop. For something to go wrong.” She looks around the bakery, her bakery, walls painted a warm cream, display cases gleaming, the blue door bright in the afternoon light. “This is too good. It doesn’t feel like it’s allowed to be mine.”
“It’s allowed.”
“Is it?” She meets my eyes. “Is happiness allowed when people you love don’t know where you are?
When you left them without saying goodbye?
When you’re standing in a bakery a U.S. Marshal built you while wearing a dead woman’s name and pretending you don’t want to make cookies that’ll make you cry into the mixer? ”
I set down the receipt paper. Cross to where she’s standing behind the counter.
“Stevie.” I wait until she’s looking at me fully. “You didn’t choose to leave. You did what you had to do to stay alive. And being happy now, letting yourself build something good, that’s not a betrayal. That’s survival.”
“What if I can’t tell the difference anymore?”
“Then you keep going anyway. And you let people help you figure it out.”
She’s quiet for a moment. Processing. “People,” she repeats. “Or you specifically?”
“Me specifically. If you’ll let me.”
The words hang in the air between us. Heavy and honest.
She doesn’t look away. “Okay,” she whispers. “Okay.”
That afternoon, she makes her first test batch.
Not peanut butter chocolate chip. Not amaretti. Sugar cookies, simple, uncomplicated, tied to no one but herself.
I sit on a stool at the counter and watch her work.
There’s something almost hypnotic about it. The way her hands move through the motions, muscle memory taking over, her body knowing what to do even when her mind is elsewhere.
She measures by feel more than sight, adjusting amounts based on some internal calculation I couldn’t begin to understand.
“You’re staring,” she says without looking up.
“I’m observing.”
“That’s a fancy word for staring.”
“I’m a federal marshal. We’re trained in observation.”
She glances at me, a smirk playing at her lips. “Is that what they call it? Because from where I’m standing, it looks like you’re watching me make cookies like it’s the most interesting thing you’ve ever seen.”
“Maybe it is.”
The smirk fades into something softer. “Careful,” she says quietly. “You’re supposed to leave in four days. Watching me like that is a bad idea.”
“I know.”
“So stop.”
“I can’t.”
It’s true and terrifying and completely out of my control.
She’s quiet for a beat. “You know what’s unfair?” she finally asks.
“What?”
“You get to look at me like that with your whole...” She waves a hand vaguely at my face. “Steady, decent human being situation. And I’m over here trying not to think about two different men’s hands while kneading dough. It’s very distracting. You’re very distracting.”
The flush on her neck deepens.
“Good,” I say.
She throws a dish towel at me She feels it too.
Whatever this is, she feels it too.
Day four, I kiss her.
I don’t mean to.
We’re in the kitchen, her kitchen, the bakery kitchen, the one that’s starting to smell like butter and sugar because she’s been testing recipes all morning.
She’s testing a recipe, muttering to herself as she adjusts measurements.
“Okay so if I’m Zoey Carter, small-town baker, I can’t just... no, that’s stupid, Zoey wouldn’t do ironic banana bread, she’d do... fuck, I don’t know what Zoey does. Does Zoey even like bananas? Who IS Zoey?”
She looks up, realizes I’m listening.
“Sorry. I’m having an identity crisis via produce. Very normal. Extremely stable.”
And there she is. Stevie, underneath all the grief, still talking to herself, still spiraling, still herself.
“Zoey likes what you like,” I say.
She blinks at me. Then smiles. Small but real. “Yeah. Okay. Zoey likes bananas.”
There’s flour on her cheek. Just a small smudge, white against her skin, and I reach out without thinking to brush it away. My thumb touches her cheekbone.
She goes still.
And then I’m kissing her.
I don’t decide to do it. My body just moves, closing the distance between us, my mouth finding hers like it’s something I’ve done a thousand times before instead of something I’ve been trying not to think about for months.
She makes a small sound, surprise, maybe, or relief, and then she’s kissing me back.
It’s soft. Slower than I expected. Not the desperate crash of two people giving in to something they’ve been fighting, but something gentler. It feels less like breaking a rule and more like finally doing what I should have done all along.
Her hands come up to my chest. Just resting there, feeling my heartbeat.
I cup her face in both hands. Tilt her head slightly. Kiss her deeper.
She tastes like sugar cookies and coffee and something that might be tears.