Page 67 of Knot Your Sugar Rush (Starling Grove #2)

Chapter sixty-seven

Cam

B reakfast is followed by gear check. Dane lays everything out in neat columns on the floor: rope, a compact first-aid kit, a coil of fine wire, two small tarps, a battered tin of waterproof matches, a pouch of tea, a jar of honey, dried meat, a dented compass that’s older than me.

He’s quiet when he works, but he hands me things every few minutes and waits for my nod like I’m the one who knows best where they should go.

“Your pack,” he says, setting an empty rucksack in front of me. “We keep it light. You carry what matters.”

“What counts as ‘what matters’?”

He watches me for a beat. “What keeps you warm. What keeps you fed. What keeps you you.”

I place the journal of Zae’s notes on top of the tarp. It looks too small to carry the weight it does. I smooth a palm over the cover and feel my throat go tight.

Theo appears at my shoulder with a pencil and a small, folded sheet torn from the edge of his map. “Here,” he says softly. “For anything you want to add.”

My handwriting looks steadier than I feel when I jot a few lines near the back: sugar ratios to revisit; potential syrup base for the mystery flower; a sketch of the petal from the book.

Zae would have teased me for adding a second arrow to my outline that reads “maybe… just maybe.” I smile and then swallow it down, holding the book a little closer to the warmth of me.

Jamie’s physical therapy happens next, much to his dramatic suffering. Theo guides him through slow bends and extensions, counting in an even voice while Jamie runs a full commentary on the unfairness of gravity.

“Three,” Theo says.

“Three?” Jamie says. “That felt like seven.”

“You said you could count to ten.”

“I can. I just prefer to skip the boring ones.”

“Five,” Theo says, unbothered.

“Is it too late to trade brothers?” Jamie asks me.

“Yes,” I say. “No returns.”

Halfway through, he starts to flag. The banter fades, and the work shows in the tightness around his mouth. I slide a palm to his shoulder and squeeze once, grounding. He breathes out and finds the rhythm again. Theo doesn’t stop counting, but that small glance he gives me says more than thanks.

Dane, who’s been pretending to re-wind rope, sets it down and crouches in front of Jamie. “If you need a break, say it. This isn’t a test.”

Jamie blows out a breath and shakes his head. “I’ve got it.” He does five more and sags back with a victorious groan. “I am a marvel.”

“A hydrated marvel,” Dane says, handing him a canteen.

Jamie drinks and leans his head against the wall. “You’re all very bossy, and I’m telling everyone about it when we get back.”

“Tell them we made you stronger,” Theo says, deadpan.

“They’ll never believe it,” Jamie says. “I was already perfect.”

***

The day folds open in soft layers. We mend and pack and then stop to sip tea when the light turns brighter.

Theo shows me his notes, careful and spare: elevations, soil markers, a narrow creek that braids through a stand of cedar.

He’s penciled three possible sites in a tidy hand.

I watch the surety in his fingers and think how his certainty could hold the world together if it had to.

“Two days,” he says, tapping the middle point, “if weather holds and we keep a steady pace.”

“Two days there,” Dane adds, running a finger along the margin where he’s written down distances, “and two days back. We plan for five. Six if we’re cautious.”

I notice that the one day journey turned into two, giving Jamie more time to rest between hikes. I give Dane a grateful smile. Jamie lifts his head from the couch and offers him a thumbs up.

I drift to the tiny counter and pull down the honey jar again.

It’s a small thing, but it feels like temple magic to me now—sweetness you can hold in one hand.

I warm a spoonful over the kettle’s steam and drizzle it into a pan with a knob of butter until it turns to amber.

I toss in strips of the leftover bread, and the safehouse fills with the smell of toffee and toasted flour.

“Experiment?” Theo asks, appearing like he knows I’ve gone somewhere in my head I haven’t visited in a while.

“A test,” I say, flipping the bread.

I plate the pieces and we eat with our fingers, humming in unison as the crisp edges give way to soft, saturated centers.

“It’s very important you keep me alive,” Jamie says, licking honey from his thumb, “so I can keep eating this.”

“That’s the plan,” Dane says, not entirely joking.

We do a second round “purely for science,” and then Theo steals the pan from me before I can get ambitious and involve salt or citrus.

“Later,” Dane says gently. “Keep it simple for your first day of not doing everything. You’re still recovering, which is why we’re not leaving until tomorrow.”

“Bossy,” I tell him.

“Hydratingly bossy,” Jamie murmurs.

Theo shakes his head. “New rule: anyone who says ‘hydrate’ does ten push-ups.”

“Terrible rule,” Jamie says, appalled. “Strike it from the minutes.”

“What minutes?” I ask, laughing.

“The ones in my mind,” he says, tapping his temple. “Very official.”

***

Rain arrives after lunch, soft first, then steadier, then patient.

It turns the green outside luminous, dials the safehouse light down to amber.

We pull the cushions from the bunks and build a sprawl on the floor by the fireplace—blankets and pillows and the “very official minutes” notebook Jamie claims to own (it’s just a folded paper with a terrible sketch of Theo labeled “Sergeant Tea”).

We read. Or try to. Theo pretends not to watch when my eyes drift closed with a book facedown on my chest; he just tucks the blanket higher around my shoulders and returns to his map notes like he didn’t just give me another reason to trust him.

Dane sets up a small maintenance station for boots and quietly works balm into the leather, hands steady, eyes half-lidded with focus.

Jamie asks me for three increasingly ridiculous words and then spins the worst short story I’ve ever heard on purpose: “There once was a valiant pickle, a melancholy lighthouse, and a bear with a law degree—”

“You’re fired,” Theo says from the floor without looking up.

Dane’s mouth kicks at the corner. “Bear wins the case.”

“Obviously,” Jamie says. “Bear always wins.”

I think of Zae the way you think of someone in a room you left only minutes ago—their hand still warm in yours.

I flip open her notes again and run my finger down a margin where she scribbled “we’ll do this if we have to swim.

” I don’t realize I’m smiling until Dane glances up from his work and mirrors it back, small and solid, like a companion set on a windowsill.

“Tell me something about her,” Theo says into a lull, eyes on the ceiling, hands tucked behind his head.

“Zae?” I ask, even though I know.

“Mm.”

“She… refused to measure vanilla,” I say, laughing a little. “Said life was better when it tasted like ‘oops.’ And she could whistle through her teeth so loud the dog three doors down lost his mind.”

Jamie lights up. “You can’t make a promise like that and not deliver. Can you whistle like that?”

“No,” I admit. “But I can shake metal bowls together and make a noise that sends children into fits.”

“We’ll add that to the show,” Theo says, earnest. “When the shop opens. Demo days.”

The shop. The word lands gentle this time, not like a stone. “I want to hang a new bell over the door,” I say, half to myself. “Handmade. The kind that doesn’t ding so much as sing.”

“I’ll find one,” Dane says, and his voice makes it sound less like an offer and more like a certainty about the shape the future can take.

The rain slows. I don’t know when it happened; I just notice the quiet arriving like a bird that chooses your railing as a place to rest. The windows are silver with it. The world smells rinsed clean.

“Walk?” Jamie asks, eyebrow arched.

Theo and I look at his leg, then at each other, then at Dane.

“Short,” Dane says. “No rock-hopping. Path only.”

“I will stroll,” Jamie assures us. “I will meander. I will glide.”

“You will not glide,” Theo says, but he’s already pushing himself up to grab Jamie’s jacket.

We go two by two out into the damp afternoon—Dane in front, checking the ground like the earth might try to shift under us if he doesn’t stare it down, me beside him with my sleeves shoved to my elbows so I can feel the cool brush of air; Theo and Jamie behind, trading barbs in low tones that keep drifting forward and making me smile.

The trees drip, the path gives softly under our boots, the world smells like sap and wet bark and something green that feels like it has a name I’ve forgotten.

At the little rise beyond the safehouse, the view opens and the sea flashes through the trees: pewter and pearl and pinpricks of sun where the clouds have thinned. It feels like an answer to a question I didn’t know I was asking.

“Tomorrow,” Theo says quietly at my shoulder, as if he can hear the question anyway. “We’ll go.”

I nod. My chest tightens—but not with the bad kind of fear, not the one that says run. More like the breath you take when you step onto a stage and see the lights and know the song by heart even if you’re still afraid to sing.

We turn back when Jamie’s stride shifts; he doesn’t protest, and I love him a little bit more for pretending he would have continued, if not for the committee.

Inside, we peel off damp jackets and socks and pile them near the stove.

The cabin smells like wet wool and faint pine and us.

Dane builds the fire a touch higher. Theo ticks through a quiet evening checklist: fill canteens, top off the oil in the lantern, put the map where we can’t forget it.

Jamie writes “No ass over teakettle” in the margins of his fake minutes and then adds a noble stick-bear outside a courthouse.

Dinner is stew warmed slow, with shavings of the cured meat and potatoes that have turned buttery at the edges.

When the bowls are scraped clean and the fire has slid into its ember-sigh, we make a nest bigger than the one from last night—more blankets, a pillow fortress, the kind of sprawl you can only achieve with three alphas who all insist their preferred blanket is objectively superior.

Jamie claims the corner closest to the fire like a sun-drunk cat.

I end up between Theo and Dane without planning it, my calves tucked under a quilt, my shoulder against Theo’s arm, Dane a steady warmth at my back.

Someone (Theo) says we should get sleep.

Someone else (Jamie) says he’s already sleeping with his eyes open and can prove it.

Dane’s laugh is a soft thing I feel instead of hear.

I look at each of them and make myself memorize what this feels like—not because I think I’ll lose it, but because I want to keep choosing it when the road is long and the weather is ugly and the flower is still far away and I’m tired.

“Tomorrow,” Theo says again, barely above a whisper.

“Tomorrow,” Dane echoes.

Jamie reaches out without opening his eyes and squeezes my ankle through the quilt. “Tomorrow,” he murmurs, and it sounds like a promise and a dare and a prayer.

I tuck my cheek into the curve of my arm and breathe them in—pine and smoke and earth—and let the safehouse hold us while the night draws its soft curtain.

The future waits where it always does. For once, I don’t rush to meet it.

I fall asleep inside the answer I didn’t know I’d been writing this whole time: stay, together, and go, together.

Tomorrow.