Page 30 of Sawyer (The Maddox BRAVO Team #1)

She sits, tucks her legs under her, and takes the band out carefully like it might be thin glass.

She balances it on her finger without sliding it home.

“After the sentencing,” she says, voice warm and steady.

“After the mural. After we let the world stop screaming for at least three consecutive weeks. Then—yes. Put that on me.”

My grin is a stupid thing with teeth. “Then it’s a plan.”

We make love again because saying yes to a future makes you greedy for the present.

It’s slower this time, softer, a study in the way heat can be a kind of prayer and not just a flare.

We learn each other again with the silly, sweet joy of people who didn’t just survive the fire—they built a hearth out of what didn’t burn.

Sometime in the dark hours, the house creaks the way old houses do when the night settles deeper. She stiffens and then remembers where she is, who she’s with. I run my palm down her arm, count out my four by fours in her ear—breathe with me—and she melts again, sleep sneaking in like a kind thief.

Weeks turn like good pages. The sentencing lands with numbers that feel like justice measured instead of rage vented.

The kids finish the mural in a crush of color that makes old men cry on a corner where nobody used to stop.

Gregory shows up only when invited, listening more than talking, building a scholarship that doesn’t have his name on it.

HarborShield becomes part of the house, like Edgar and the wisteria and the way the afternoon light finds the stairwell and turns it gold for seven minutes each day.

I move in like a soldier unlearning how to live out of bags: one drawer, then two; a mug that she calls hideous and then uses; a kettlebell that Edgar threatens to dust. With Dean’s blessing I take fewer long-haul details and more local contracts that let me wake up with her hair on my ribs and the sun thinking about climbing over the ridge.

brAVO becomes a hummingbird in the background instead of the engine under every step. It’s weird. It’s good.

One evening in early fall when the city smells like fog and baked brick, Cam and I take the long way home along the Boardwalk.

She buys a paper cone of candied almonds and makes me hold it until my fingers stick.

When we reach the studio, she climbs the steps two at a time and stops under the skylight, breathless for no reason that has to be solved.

“Ready?” she asks, mischief and courage braided.

“For what?”

“For a door that doesn’t creak.” She takes the ring out of the pocket where she’s kept it like a talisman between then and now. The studio light finds the inlay and turns it into a thread of moon. She holds it to me.

I take it like ammunition and prayer. “Camille Kingsley,” I say, because full names make good vows, “you are color and oxygen and the bravest person I’ve ever met. Be my home, and I’ll be yours. Not as a wall you hide behind but as the roof we choose to build together where rain sounds like music.”

She laughs, chokes, nods. “That was… very Sawyer.”

“I do my best work unscripted,” I murmur, and slide the band onto her finger. It fits like it was made for her.

It definitely fucking was.

She kisses me there under the skylight, almond-sweet and salt-wet and yes.

Later we tell Vanessa, and she screams so loud HarborShield checks the cameras.

Later we tell Dean, and he says “about time” and sends a bottle of something old enough to vote.

Later we tell Gregory, and he cries like a man and not like a CEO.

We don’t plan a big thing. We plan a right one.

Friends, kids from the mural, a courthouse judge who owes Hartley a favor, and our hands blue with a bit of paint because she swore she wouldn’t scrub it all off for anybody’s photos.

I wear a suit that had to be talked into being a suit; she wears a dress that looks like someone painted the twilight on silk and draped it over bones and breath.

The ring catches the sun and throws a line across her palm, and for a second it does look like a door where there wasn’t one before.

That night, when the last of the laughter slides down the hall and the house settles around us like a big, content animal, she pulls me to the floor of the studio and we make a mess with intent—paint under nails, color on shoulders, my shirt sacrificed to art again.

We fall asleep on drop cloths, and I wake with her hair in my mouth and a smear of cobalt on my jaw and the kind of happiness that makes you feel a little dumb and very alive.

In the morning, coffee whistles. Edgar clatters.

The wisteria tries to worm its way in through the window like it wants to bless the chaos.

I’m barefoot, unarmed except for the knife I keep for bagels, and so stupidly at peace I almost don’t recognize myself.

Then she walks in wearing my T-shirt and the ring, hair wild, eyes steady.

“Morning, husband,” she says, sleep in her voice and a smile I’d kill for if killing were the thing needed.

“Morning, painter of my heart,” I say, because ridiculous is still my favorite genre.

We drink from the ugly mug and the pretty one, share the almond cone we didn’t finish, and watch the city blink itself awake.

Outside, the world does what it always does—aches, mends, tries again.

Inside, we do what we learned the hard way—hold, laugh, make it loud when loud is needed, make it quiet everywhere else.

And on the wall by the stairs, the white line glows thin and stubborn through blue, cutting a path like a promise that refuses to fade. It doesn’t cover anything. It doesn’t need to.

It shows the way home.