Page 67 of Sawyer
Nathan’s agents take their posts. Their polos look almost cheerful. They wave at me like neighbors. I wave back. The world shrinks to the normal size of a wealthy family with a bad month, and it feels almost obscene and exactly right.
Sawyer does one more perimeter walk at dusk, not because he needs to but because leaving without it would feel like leaving a door open. I join him halfway, under the wisteria that smelled like honey the night I let him into my bed for the first time. The scent tonight is sharper, as if the vine has learned a lesson about sweetness and edges.
We walk without touching, our arms almost brushing, his stride shortened to match mine without letting me pretend it’s not because of the deep bruise blooming over my hip.
At the south garden gate, we stop. The cut grass where the van idled looks like nothing, a patch that could be anywhere. My stomach rolls anyway.
“I hate this patch of earth,” I say.
“I know,” he murmurs. He looks at the gate the way he looks at blueprints—scanning, calculating. “Nathan’s team will shift the camera, add a beam here, refocus sightline. But we can give it a better story too.”
He crouches suddenly, frowning at the hedge. I catch a glint of metal where the dirt meets the stone: the broken tail of the ziptie Rae didn’t find because the wind pushed it under. He picks it up, holds it on his palm like a cursed wishbone.
“Want me to trash it?” he asks.
I shake my head. “No.” I take it, wrap it in a square of blue shop towel from his pocket, and slip it into my jeans. He raises a brow.
“Paint,” I say.
After dinner, I go to the studio. Sawyer watches from the doorway awhile, then leaves me to it. I staple fresh canvas, pull a cobalt line across the bottom just where the floor would be in the van, and then I glue the zip tie scrap into the paint, burying it in blue until it looks like it’s swimming up instead of dragging down. I add the white line last, thinner than breath, ghosting through, not covering anything, just insisting on a different path.
When it dries, I lift it off the easel and carry it out to the veranda. Night has dressed the garden in navy. The house lights pool warm at my bare feet. Sawyer is there, on the steps, forearms on his knees, profile cut from quiet.
I set the canvas beside him. He studies it a long time, not asking what it means, because he never asks when it’s written in paint.
“Name?” he asks finally.
“‘Never Cover,’” I say. “For the part of me that thought color could hide blood. It can’t. But it can make a map.”
He nods, then tips his head toward the thin white thread. “And that?”
“That’s the way through.”
We sit together in the hush that lives between thunder and the next storm. Down on the street, a paparazzi van idles and then gives up, moving on for lack of spectacle. A night bird claims the oak. Edgar laughs at something in the kitchen, and Nathan’s radio crackles low near the front door. The world keeps making small, normal noises. I let them in.
Finally, Sawyer stands. “We roll at oh-nine,” he says, almost apologetic. “Dean’s got a training block in Atlanta he’ll pretend I asked for.” He scrubs a hand over the back of his neck. “I’ll be twenty minutes away by plane. Forty-five by reckless driving. Two seconds by text.”
“Send pictures,” I say, chin up. “Of boring things.”
He smiles, the kind that breaks and mends me in one motion. “Copy.”
He bends—slow, accounting for how air works now—and presses a kiss to my hair. Not my mouth. Not yet. It lands like a promise placed on a shelf where I can see it and decide when to take it down.
“Goodnight, Cam,” he murmurs.
“Goodnight, Soldier Boy,” I answer, the words a little steadier every time I say them.
In the morning, the BRAVO convoy pulls away. Rae leans out the passenger window to wolf-whistle, and Riggs salutes two-fingered. Andersson honks exactly once because any more would make it a parade. Sawyer takes the driver’s seat of the last SUV. He doesn’t look back right away. He looks forward, checks his mirror, looks left, right, like always. Then he finds me on the steps, lifts two fingers from the wheel.You okay?the gesture says.
I lift my hand, hold his gaze.Go. I’m okay.
He mouthstext meand pulls through the gates. Nathan’s agents shift in to fill the space like they’ve practiced it their whole lives. The street swallows the taillights.
The house breathes. So do I.
I go to the studio and set a small canvas on the easel—just big enough for a postcard. I paint a coffee cup in black and white, a smudge where steam would be, and a crooked little slice of sky in blue. I snap a picture and send it to a number I didn’t know by heart two months ago and now could dial in the dark.
Me:Boring thing #1.
