Chapter 7
SEVEN
SAGE
I get married at four o’clock in a room the size of my bedroom with a man I’ve hated on purpose for eight years, and I don’t cry once.
That’s the part I’m proudest of.
The Rimrock County courthouse doesn’t do romance.
Fluorescent lights, old pine planks worn smooth in a path to the judge’s bench, a flag in the corner that’s seen better decades.
Judge Alvarez has married half this valley twice over and looks about as moved by us as she’d be by a parking dispute.
Cruz stands by the door in a suit that fits too well for a man whose whole job is standing near doors, hands folded, watching me like he’s watched me my whole life, like he’d take a bullet for me and also like I have no idea what’s actually going on behind his eyes.
I don’t know which of those is true anymore. That’s the problem.
Dawson’s mom and dad sit in the second row like they’re at a board meeting that happens to involve their son.
Finn leans over to Tate and says, loud enough for the room, “This is basically the rehearsal for the expensive one,” and Kathleen turns her head exactly four degrees and ends him with a look that doesn’t require a single word.
Finn goes quiet with the speed only a Sullivan raised by that woman can manage.
My mom and dad sit across the aisle like there’s a wedding party divide even in a room with twelve chairs.
My mother’s hand finds mine once, brief, and she doesn’t say anything now, because she already said what mattered last night, alone in my old bedroom, quiet and fierce, and some things don’t survive being said twice.
Knox stands at the back with his arms crossed, jaw tight, watching Dawson like a man he’d already threatened once this week.
Holt just watches the room, every room, counting exits.
Dawson wears a charcoal suit like he wears everything, like it was built around him instead of the other way.
He doesn’t fidget. I do, a little, twisting the plain platinum band on my left hand around and around, still not used to the weight of it.
He picked it fast, told the jeweler nothing fussy, told me after that whatever I actually want, I can choose myself once this is real.
Nothing left to negotiate today. Just this.
We already signed the only paper that matters to either of us.
The judge says the words. I say the ones I’m supposed to say. Dawson says his like he means them, which is worse than if he’d rushed through them, because I’ve spent so long convincing myself that any tenderness out of this man is a business decision wearing a nicer shirt.
Then it’s done. Twelve minutes, maybe less. I’m Sage Sullivan on paper, and nothing in me agrees with the county clerk’s version of events.
Cruz drives like he does everything, competent and steady, both hands on the wheel, radio off. I give him three minutes of silence before I start working him, because that’s the job Gideon handed me two days ago whether I asked for it or not.
“Long day,” I say.
“Good day. Your family’s been waiting on this a long time.”
“Which family?”
He doesn’t answer that one directly. “Both, I’d guess. Peace looks good on everybody’s books.”
“You’ve worked security for us since I was six. You taught me to shoot before I could drive.”
“I remember.” His voice goes fond, unguarded for exactly a second, and I lean into the opening.
“Where were you three weeks ago? Tuesday, the east gate.”
His hands don’t move on the wheel. His shoulders don’t change. That’s the tell. Cruz has never once in all the years failed to have a ready answer for a question about his own whereabouts, and today he doesn’t have one at all.
“Working,” he says. “I work most Tuesdays.”
“Which gate?”
“Sage.” He says my name like a door closing, gentle, final. “You’ve got a lot on your mind today. Let’s not turn a drive into an interrogation.”
“I’m not interrogating you, Cruz. I’m making conversation.”
“You’re your father’s daughter making conversation, which is interrogation with better manners, and we both know it.” He glances at me once, and there’s nothing in his face I can use, no flicker, no tell, just the same steady calm he’s worn my entire life. “Ask me something easier.”
I don’t. I let the silence sit instead, watching the fence posts blur past. Not a name, not a flinch, not one thread I can bring back to Dawson. A lie would have given me a handhold. This gives me nothing at all, and somehow that’s worse. A locked door instead of a bad excuse.
The boundary house is empty when Cruz drops me at the porch, everyone else still finishing up in town, Dawson pulled aside by Declan for whatever conversation fathers have with sons on their wedding day that can’t wait until tomorrow.
I have the house to myself for at least thirty minutes and no plan for either.
The windows are open, the day fading to a cloudless sky, and I keep one ear on the road while I let myself do the thing I have absolutely no business doing.
I go looking through his room because I have thirty minutes and a marriage license and apparently no self-respect left to speak of, and that’s how I end up standing in front of his nightstand with the top drawer open and a paperback in my hand that I recognize before I’ve even read the cover.
The Solace of Open Spaces. Gretel Ehrlich. I underlined half of it the summer I was twenty, sprawled on the porch steps of this exact house, reading passages out loud to a boy who used to steal it out of my bag just to watch me chase him for it.
My handwriting is still in the margins. Twenty years old, looping and unguarded, before I learned to write like I write now, precise and armored, built for depositions.
This is exactly it, says the girl I used to be, next to a line about the land teaching you to endure.
Read this part to D. He’ll pretend he doesn’t get it and then not shut up about it for a week.
He kept it.
Colorado for his undergrad, then Illinois for his MBA at Northwestern.
Me in Ithaca, finishing Cornell. A war between our families the whole time.
A hundred women who would have thrown themselves at him for free.
And he kept a paperback with my twenty-year-old handwriting in a nightstand drawer, like it was worth protecting.
The rage comes first, fast and clean, simpler to hold than anything underneath it.
You don’t get to keep pieces of the girl you destroyed.
You don’t get to walk away from her like you did at twenty-four and then build a shrine to who she used to be, safe behind glass, effortless to love because she never has to actually stay in the room with you.
If he’d forgotten me, I could hate him without complication. This doesn’t come with an expiration date.
I flip to the page I know is there before I even find it, the one near the end about the storm rolling through the cornfield, everything ripening and dying in the same breath, and my own handwriting stares back at me, and underneath it, in different ink, added later, his:
She was right.
Three words. No date. I have no idea if he wrote them right after I left or last week, sitting alone in this house waiting for a woman he’d already lost.
I sit down on the edge of his bed with the book still open in my hands and I don’t cry, because I already used up my one allotment of dignity today refusing to cry in front of a judge, and I’m not spending a second round of it on my own book, on his handwriting in the margins of it.
I put it back exactly where I found it. Then I take it back out and read the storm passage twice more, because apparently my self-control checked out somewhere around the county courthouse and hasn’t come back yet.
Cricket finds me first. She noses the door open, hops onto the bed, and sits there watching me with her head cocked, the sincere judgment of a dog who knows something is wrong and has no idea what to do about it.
“Don’t look at me like that,” I tell her.
She doesn’t stop.
I don’t plan on touching myself thinking about him.
It happens like a held breath breaking, all at once and past the point where I could have stopped it if I’d wanted to.
I lie back on my own bed, door shut and tell myself I’m just lying down for ten minutes before everyone descends with boxes and opinions about counter space again.
Instead, I’m replaying the hallway at Nell’s, his mouth close enough to my ear that I could still feel the ghost of it there hours later, rough and warm, telling me he contains exactly one personality trait.
I’m replaying the boundary house kitchen, his forehead against mine, the inch neither of us closed.
I try to stop it. I get almost a full minute of successfully thinking about anything else, the Corridor easement, Cruz’s non-answer, the raw betrayal of a paperback with my own handwriting in it, and none of it works, because underneath all of it is the same low, insistent fact: I want him.
My hand moves before I give it permission.
My skin is already too warm, my breath already gone shallow and quick, and when my fingers finally slide lower I find myself slick and aching, wet enough that it startles a sound out of me I don’t recognize as my own voice.
I press the heel of my hand there and just breathe for a second, furious at how little it takes, how fast my body hands over everything my pride spent so many years trying to keep.
I think about his hand at my jaw. His knuckles dragging along the line of it. The gravel drop in his voice right before he steps back and makes himself the one who stops.
My hips lift off the bed. My back bows. I bite down on the inside of my own wrist to keep quiet in a house that’s supposed to be empty, and when it breaks over me it breaks hard, a full-body pulse that leaves my thighs trembling and my chest heaving and absolutely nothing about my heart settled.
Cricket tilts her head the other direction, ears up, deeply unimpressed, and lets out one soft, confused huff, like she’s reconsidering her whole assessment of me.
“Yeah,” I tell her, breathless, staring at the ceiling. “Me too.”
When it’s over, I lie there wrecked in a completely different way than before, because my mind has spent eight years building an airtight case that I got over him cleanly, and my body just testified against me in about ninety seconds flat, with a dog as my only witness.
If he’s going to live in my head rent-free while staying perfectly composed across the hall, he doesn’t get to do that alone.
I find my phone before I find my dignity.
One photo of you. Every night before bed. You go first. How about your abs?
I hit send before I can talk myself out of it, and I sit there staring at the three dots that appear almost instantly, disappear, appear again, like even Dawson Sullivan needs a second to decide how much of himself he’s willing to hand a woman who just spent the afternoon reading his handwriting in a book he never should have kept.
His reply comes in under ten seconds.
It isn’t a photograph of him.
It’s a screenshot from the security feed, grainy, night vision green, timestamped ninety seconds ago. The Corridor gate, the one that splits Sullivan land from Blackwater land, the one Robbie’s truck sat idling near with the engine running and no driver in the cab.
A man’s silhouette stands at the fence line, motionless, facing the house.
Camera went dark for eleven seconds before this. West can’t explain the gap. Stay inside. Lock the doors. I’m on my way.
I’m still holding the phone, still half undone from ten minutes ago, still furious about a paperback and a man who kept it, and none of that matters anymore, because ninety seconds ago a man was standing at our fence line in the dark, looking at exactly the house I’m standing in, and I have no way of knowing whether he still is.