Page 66 of Sawyer
Between court and sleep, we finish something we started months ago: the downtown mural with the kids. Hartley posts two officers on the corner; the new day-to-day security company—HarborShield, local, discreet—sends two agents in polos that look like lifeguards to watch the crosswalk. Riggs elbows Sawyer,teasing that he and Rae are going to miss their celebrity detail; Rae flicks a paint dot on his sleeve like a salute. The kids arrive in a flurry of backpacks and squeals. They want to know how I escaped a “movie van.” I tell them: knees and noise and never forgetting your name. Sawyer leans against a lamppost, arms folded, eyes on everything. When a third-grader named Addie asks him to hold her palette because her arms are tired, he does, solemnly, like she’s entrusted him with the nuclear codes. I fall in love with him all over again from six feet away and then remember I asked for space. The ache and the heat share a bench in my chest.
Gregory shows up to the mural mid-afternoon with his tie off for the first time since I was eight. He stops at the tape line Sawyer quietly sets with his body. He doesn’t cross it. “May I watch?” he asks, voice careful.
“It’s a public wall,” I say, dipping cobalt into sunlight.
“Your mother would have loved this,” he says after a while, not quite to me. “She was the one who taught me how to look past the renderings and see the people in the building.”
“I know,” I say, because this is true and doesn’t cancel anything else.
He doesn’t press. Later, he sends word through Hartley that he’ll be stepping aside officially, not just for the roadshow. Interim CEO. Voluntary testimony. Therapy. It’s a nice string of words. I tuck them in a box labeledwe’ll seeand close the lid for now.
The night before BRAVO breaks down their command trailer, we have a handover meeting at the dining table with the HarborShield lead—a man named Nathan with steady eyes and a binder full of practical. Edgar sits in, proud as if we’re launchinga new ship. Sawyer talks him through the protocols he designed: the QR code guest system, the blind spots we found and fixed, the way sound travels badly in the east hall but too well in the conservatory. He hands over a thumb drive of SOPs that could run a small nation. Nathan’s pen scribbles like a hummingbird.
“Two agents on site at all times?” he confirms.
“Three, until the hearing,” Sawyer says.
Nathan nods. “We’re not Maddox, but we care about our clients.”
“I know,” I say, and see Sawyer’s jaw notch.
When the meeting ends, Riggs and Rae disappear on errands that are excuses to give us a minute. The trailer’s door is open to the garden, and the night draws a shadowy breath.
Sawyer rests his hands on the back of a chair, fingers flexing on the carved wood. “Tomorrow we pull our hardware and let Nathan’s team stand the line.”
“Right.” The word is a smooth stone, and I turn it in my mouth. “Thank you.”
He shakes his head once. “Don’t thank me for doing the thing I promised.”
I shift my weight. The floorboard squeaks—a stupid human noise in a house that’s held too much not-human lately. “You don’t want to leave.”
“No.” He doesn’t paint it pretty.
“And I’m not ready for you to stay. Not the way it was.” That hurts to say. It’s the only honest thing. “I keep seeing doorways when I close my eyes.”
“I know,” he whispers, and I believe him.
“I want…” My throat tightens around the truth. “I want the next thing we build not to be on top of a crater. I want a kitchen table stained on purpose. I want to invite you in without the wordguardin the air.”
He is very still. “Tell me what you need.”
“Time,” I say. “And… proof. Not from you—” I shake my head quickly when something in his face flickers. “From the world. That it can go a week without trying to eat us.”
“It can try,” he says, mouth curving. “We’ve gotten very good at making it fail.”
I laugh once, a tiny, cracked thing. “Stay in the city awhile? Not in this house, not in that hallway. Be reachable. Drink coffee like a civilian. Text me photos of boring things. Let me miss you in a way that isn’t breathing through duct tape.”
His eyes go soft at the corners. “I can do that.”
“Good.” I reach out—briefly, brave—and brush my fingers over his knuckles where they grip the chair. A current arcs. He could trap my hand, but he doesn’t. “Tell me when the hearing dates are. I want to stand at the back of the room.”
“You won’t have to stand alone.”
“I know.” I look up at him, and then down at our nearly-not-touching hands. “Don’t go too far.”
“Never,” he says, that private vow tone that bends something inside me into a shape that fits my ribs again.
The next day is all cables and cases and the sound of things unlatching. The BRAVO trailer folds its silver mouth; Rae wrapsup cords with the satisfaction of a job done mercilessly well. Riggs hugs Vanessa—who pretends she doesn’t like it and then doesn’t let go for ten seconds too long. He clasps Edgar like they’re old friends headed back to the same war. Andersson scratches the K-9 he’s borrowed one last time under the collar. Our house, which had learned the BRAVO heartbeat, quiets.
