17. Sage
SEVENTEEN
SAGE
Milo drives me to the café even though I assured him I’d be fine alone.
That was just hopeful thinking on my part.
There’s no way he was going to let me go alone—none of them were—but Holden’s at the station, Knox is at the club, and Micah’s out on an errand he got cagey about.
Which left Milo, who insisted on driving and is now parallel-parking across the street from the café with the focus of a man docking a submarine.
“I’ll be right there.” He points across the street to a bench with a direct sight line to the café window. “Whole time. You won’t even know I’m there, except you will, because I’ll be the devastatingly handsome man pretending to read a newspaper.”
“You’re going to sit on a bench and watch me drink tea for an hour?”
“I’m going to sit on a bench and provide discreet overwatch while you drink tea. Completely different. One’s romantic, one’s tactical, and I’m doing both.” He hands me my phone. “Anything feels off, you text me one letter. Any letter. I’ll be across that street before you finish typing it.”
“Milo. It’s Amy and Jamie. The most dangerous thing in there is the fact their names rhyme.”
“That’s what they want you to think.” But he says it softer than the joke deserves, and his eyes do the thing they’ve done since the attack—that quick sweep of the street, cataloging exits, faces, the cars at the curb. He hasn’t stopped doing it. None of them have. “Humor me, kitten.”
I lean over and kiss his cheek. “Bench. Newspaper. Brooding. Go.”
I called Amy last night, like I said I would.
It was good. Better than good—an hour of her talking and me mostly listening, my voice still rationed, and somewhere in the middle the knot I’ve been carrying loosened half a turn just from the sound of her.
She wanted to see me. I wanted to see her.
She mentioned Jamie had been asking after me ever since the hospital, so it became the three of us.
There was just one thing I had to ask her for first.
“When you see Jamie,” I’d said, careful, “can you let him keep thinking it was—what my boss told him. An accident.”
She was silent for a moment. Because she knows what that means, and she knows what happened to me—she was there. She’s one of the few people who know for a fact I didn’t do this to myself.
“You want him to think you tried to—” She couldn’t say it either. Nobody can. That’s the whole point of the word accident. It’s the nice coat people button over the ugly thing so they don’t have to look at it. “Sage. Why would you let him think that?”
Because an accident is a closed door, I wanted to say. People hear it, they wince, they look at their shoes, they never ask again. It makes them so uncomfortable they leave it alone. The truth—someone tried to murder me—generates interest. Interest I don’t want.
“It raises fewer questions,” I said. “I’d rather have the kind of thing people are too awkward to bring up than the kind they can’t stop digging at. Please, Ames. Just—let him have the accident.”
She was quiet a second. Then she said, “Okay. Zipped. But for the record, I hate it. You shouldn’t have to wear that.”
I know. But I’d rather Jamie think I’m a woman who tried to die than know I’m a woman someone’s hunting. The first one makes him sad. The second one gets people killed.
The café is small. Six tables, a chalkboard menu, a barista with sleeve tattoos who looks like she bench-presses the espresso machine for fun.
Amy and Jamie are already at the window table, mid-laugh, and the sight of it loosens another knot.
They met once, weeks ago, and apparently that was enough—Amy’s got her chin in her hand and Jamie’s doing something animated with a sugar packet.
“There she is!” Jamie spots me and his whole face does the golden-retriever thing—full-body delight, like I’m the best thing to come through a door all year.
He half-stands, pulls out the chair beside Amy.
“Sit, sit. We got you the chamomile. Amy said you’ve sworn off caffeine, which is tragic, but I respect a woman with boundaries. ”
“I’ve had so much chamomile this month I’m starting to photosynthesize.”
Amy’s up and hugging me before I sit, careful the way everyone’s careful now, like I’m made of porcelain. “You look good,” she says into my hair.
“I look like a coat rack.”
“A cute coat rack.” She holds me at arm’s length, scans my face with the open worry she’s never once managed to hide. “How are you really?”
“Getting there.”
I sit. The chamomile’s in front of me, steaming. Jamie’s got both hands wrapped around a mug of something in an alarming shade of gray-purple.
“You didn’t,” I say, nodding at it.
“It’s a lavender latte. It’s avant-garde.”
“It’s a melted candle.”
“It tastes like someone dissolved a bath bomb in espresso and I am, regrettably, into it.” He sips, winces—which undercuts the whole thing—and Amy laughs, and for a second it’s easy. So easy I could cry.
Jamie does a quick, careful sweep—my face, the silk scarf at my neck, the bruises it doesn’t fully hide—and then his eyes move on, deliberately light, landing nowhere near my throat. He’s good at it. Kind about it. Doesn’t make me feel looked-at. I’m so grateful I nearly cry about that too.
The conversation wanders. Amy’s newly single life.
My guys—Jamie wants to know if they fight over me; I tell him they fight over the remote; he’s openly disappointed.
A date he went on so catastrophic he considered faking his own death to escape it.
I laugh until my throat catches and burns and I don’t care.
I steal his biscotti and dunk it in my tea so it’s soft enough to eat.
This is the most normal I’ve felt in weeks, and I’m hoarding it like contraband.
Then Jamie sets down his mug and his face goes soft and serious, and I feel it coming a half-second before he says it.
“Hey. I want to say one thing, and then I’ll never bring it up again.
” He looks at me—earnest, kind, unbearable.
“Whatever happened. Wherever your head was at. I’m just glad you’re still here.
And if it ever gets that dark again, you call me.
Three a.m., whenever. I’ll pick up.” He shrugs, a little embarrassed. “That’s the whole speech.”
It’s so gentle and so wrong that for a second I can’t breathe.
Beside me, Amy goes rigid. “Sage, I can’t keep—”
I put my hand over hers on the table and squeeze, and I catch her eyes, and I let her see me ask. Please. Let it go.
It takes a second. Maybe two. Jamie glances between us, mildly puzzled. I watch Amy fight herself—the truth right there behind her teeth, the need to defend me so strong her jaw’s tight with it—and then she swallows it. For me. Because I asked her to.
“—it wasn’t your fault, is what I meant,” she finishes, turning to Jamie, her voice gone flat and careful. “None of us saw it coming. That’s all.”
“No,” Jamie agrees softly. “I don’t think anyone could have.”
He has no idea what just happened. He pats the back of my hand, the one still covering Amy’s. “Anyway. Offer stands.” And he goes back to his melted candle like he didn’t just make me choose between the lie and my best friend’s loyalty.
I chose the lie. I’ll keep choosing it. But God, it costs.
A while later his gaze drifts past me to the window, to the street, and snags on something. I follow it.
Milo. On his bench. Pretending to read a newspaper he’s holding upside down.
“Is that one of yours?” Jamie asks. No edge to it. Just curious.
“That’s Milo.”
“He’s been there the whole time.”
“He has.”
Jamie nods slowly, and a quiet kind of understanding moves across his face.
“Good,” he says. “After everything, you should have someone watching out for you. I’d want that, if you were mine to worry about.
” He lifts the ruined latte toward the glass in a small salute.
Milo, two lanes of traffic away, does not salute back, because Milo believes he is invisible.
We stay another half hour. Amy loosens up again, the near-miss folded away, and by the end the three of us are laughing like nothing happened.
When we leave, Amy hugs me hard. “Call me. Not because you have to. Because I miss you.” And quieter, just for me: “I won’t slip again. Promise.”
“I know. Thank you, Ames.”
Jamie hugs me too—solid, warm, uncomplicated. “Anytime you need normal,” he says into my shoulder, “I’m your guy.”
I cross the street and Milo meets me back at the car. He opens the door for me and I slide into the passenger seat.
“A single letter,” he says once he’s in the driver’s seat. “You never sent me a single letter. I sat there ninety minutes fully prepared to commit a felony and you didn’t even need me.”
“Devastating. It’s as if I can go out in public and somehow be safe.”
“Lots of things happen in public, kitten. And I had a whole rescue plan.” He starts the engine and pulls out, and as we swing past the café I glance back through the window.
Jamie and Amy are saying goodbye on the sidewalk. Amy turns one way. Jamie turns the other.
“Good time with your friends?”
“Yeah,” I say, smiling. “I had a great time.”
“I love that for you, kitten.”
He takes my hand. Laces his fingers through mine. Doesn’t say anything else. Neither do I.
I just lean my head against the window and hold on to the normal. Stupid, beautiful normal.