Page 28 of Sawyer (The Maddox BRAVO Team #1)

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 labeled we’ll see and 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 launching a 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 word guard in 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 wraps up 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.

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 zip tie 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 mouths text me and 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.

The dots appear instantly. Sawyer: Most beautiful coffee I’ve ever seen.

I smile. The bruise on my hip aches and then, after a beat, doesn’t.

Tomorrow there will be hearings and statements and reporters who try to pry narrative out of me like a rock with a chisel.

There will be my father in a suit that doesn’t fit right because shame has its own tailor, and there will be children at a wall with paint under their nails showing me ten new ways to turn blue into breath.

There will be Nathan’s agents walking their quiet beats.

There will be my phone, buzzing at sane hours with photos of parking lots and paper receipts and Sawyer’s boots and a Texas sky.

And when I’m ready, there will be a door opening that doesn’t creak like a warning, and a man stepping over the threshold not because he’s paid to guard my life, but because I asked.

For now, I rinse my brushes, hang my apron, and leave the studio light on low.

It turns the white line on the new canvas into a moonlit river across blue, the zip tie hidden underneath like a fossil from a time when I didn’t know what I could survive.

I stand a minute and let the sight write itself on the inside of my eyes.

Color can’t cover blood.

But it can point the way home.