Chapter 26 #2
“I built a draft, and it’s already got a hole in it.
” I turn my glass by the stem, watching her instead of the wine.
“Tate ran her badge against every gate on the property this afternoon. Every access point routes through Erin’s own authorization, clean, no surprises.
Except one. A single county-level pull, the same week as the wedding, that never touched her login at all.
Somebody used her name without needing her permission to do it. ”
Sage goes very still. “That’s not a plant hiding behind Erin. That’s a plant hiding behind the plant.”
“That’s what it is. Which is the whole reason I’m not moving on her tonight. I want to know who’s standing behind the woman before I put my hand on her.”
She’s quiet a second, turning the wine glass by its stem, and when she looks back up there’s only honesty and that same look of determination.
“Add one thing,” she says. “Whatever we find, wrong or right, I hear it from you the same day. Not filtered. Not softened.”
“Same day. I promise.”
“You’ve said that before too.”
“I’ve kept it since the day I actually meant it.” I reach across the island and take her hand, thumb tracing the ring I picked out fast and plain and never once regretted. “I’m not the man who decides what you can carry anymore, Sage. I’m just slow learning how not to be him.”
“That’s not fear talking. That’s growth. Don’t undersell it.”
“Both.” I hold her hand tighter than I mean to. “I’m afraid, Sage. Not of Erin. Of whoever’s standing behind her patiently enough to spend eight years on this. I keep running the math on what happens if I miss the thing that matters because I was too busy being jealous of a woman on a trail run.”
She doesn’t say anything to that. She just turns her hand over under mine and laces our fingers together, and it says more than anything she could have handed me in words.
She lets go of my hand to get up and comes back from the office with a folder I know by its edges before she’s set it down. Green county tab. Fourteen months of my freight rates and her hearing transcripts, the whole war in one file.
“Your clause,” she says, sitting back down across the island from me. “The last one. The Corridor. By us, in this house, no fathers, no lawyers. I’m calling it.”
“Now?”
“You cooked. I’m feeling generous.” She opens the folder and squares it with the edge of the counter, Gideon’s rule, and something in me that’s been braced since the tack room finally stands down.
“Terms. Sullivan Transport gets the road back. Full access, both directions, every season, no permit renewals. In exchange, Blackwater cattle cross at the north gate on the rotation schedule, and your freight rates on our contracts go back to what they were the week before I opened my mouth in that hearing room.”
“That’s not a negotiation. That’s a surrender with a signature line.”
“It’s what’s fair.”
“It’s what wins.” I turn the folder around and read it, because she’d read mine. “You gave me everything I asked for fourteen months ago and kept nothing for your side. That’s not you. You bury roads.”
“I buried your road because it was the smartest move available to a woman who’d watched you walk past her at the county fair with Ashley on your arm.” She says it level, no heat in it, a fact entered into the record. “I don’t need to win this one, Dawson. I need it to be over.”
I go to my office and come back with my own draft, the one I wrote the night after the fence splice and never showed anyone. She reads it the same way I read hers. All the way through, twice.
“You gave me the road,” she says.
“I gave you the north half. The southern stretch stays Sullivan, the northern stretch deeds to you, and the easement dies because there’s nothing left to ease. You’d own the thing I spent fourteen months fighting you for.”
“That’s worse than mine.”
“It’s what’s fair.”
We look at each other across two drafts that each hand the other side more than either of us ever asked for, and she starts laughing first, helpless, one hand over her mouth.
“We’re terrible at this,” she says. “Both of us. Neither of us can stand to win it.”
“So we don’t sign either one.” I close her folder, then mine, and stack them. “Not tonight. I’ve signed a lot of paper across a lot of tables in my life and I want to sign this one exactly once, and I want it to mean something when I do.”
“That’s not a contract clause. That’s a feeling.”
“It’s both.”
She doesn’t argue that one. She just looks at the two folders for a moment, then at me, and I watch her put the whole war away somewhere she can find it later, when it’s time.
The bath is her idea, technically, though I’d already staged it before she asked, candles already lit along the ledge, and neither of us says anything about the fact that my body wash is sitting next to hers like it’s always been there.
She sinks in first, water rising to her collarbone, and I settle in behind her, keeping my stitches dry, her spine against my chest. I squeeze the body wash into my palm and work it over her shoulders, down her arms, careful over the bruises still marking her side, and she lets out a soft sound when I linger there instead of rushing past it.
“I used to think about this,” she says, quiet, eyes closed. “Not this exactly. Just being allowed to be tired around you. Not managed. Not handled. Just tired.”
“You can be tired around me every day for the rest of your life. I’ll consider it an honor. I’m working on being the best husband you’ve ever had. Your best friend too, if you’ll let me apply for the position.” A beat. “I know that’s corny. I don’t care.”
She laughs, her real, bright one, and the sound of it cracks my heart open.
We dry off, trading the towel back and forth, and by the time we make it out to the porch swing the sky’s gone that deep, midnight blue that shows up an hour before full dark, the mountains cut black and jagged against it, one star already burning hard and white over Broken Sky.
I bring the wine bottle instead of the glasses. She doesn’t complain.