I lie there and let that be true. The warm weight of him at my back, his promise sitting in the dark with us like something I can hold.
For the first time since I walked out of that grocery store, I don't feel like prey.
I feel like a woman with a club at her back and a man in her bed who'd burn the world down if she asked.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Njal
Morning comes in gray and slow, and she's still here, which is the first good thing about the day.
Sophie's asleep on her stomach with one arm flung across my chest and her hair a wreck across the pillow.
I lie there a while, letting myself look at her and doing the math I do every morning now without meaning to.
Heart rate, even. Head, clear. No bright wire running under my thoughts trying to convince me I could fix the whole world before breakfast.
The pills are in the kitchen where they live, and I'll take them with eggs in an hour, same as always, and the steadiness holds.
She stirs before I do anything about it.
Comes up out of sleep slowly, the way she did yesterday, and I watch the exact moment everything comes back to her—a flinch crossing her face, her body going tight against mine.
"Hey." I get my hand into her hair before the memory can take her all the way under. "You're here. I'm here. The dog's snoring. Start there."
"Start there," she repeats, and breathes.
Then she rolls into me and kisses me, slow and deliberate, her leg sliding over mine, and I know what she's doing before she's fully decided to do it.
She's running.
Not from me. Into me. Using the heat of it to put a wall between herself and the parking lot, between herself and Patricia's lowered eyes.
I let her, because a woman who got eggs thrown at her yesterday gets to decide how she greets the morning.
I kiss her back. I let her climb on top of the day and ride it down to something she can stand.
But I clock it.
I don't make a speech out of it and I don't pull away, but I see it for what it is, and somewhere underneath the good of her mouth on mine, I make myself a small private promise to keep an eye on how often the reaching-for-me becomes her reaching for anything but the truth.
Not today, though. Today she can have it.
Today, she can have whatever gets her out of bed.
We end up at the original Beans and Babes by ten, because Meghan texted before either of us was decent, asking if Sophie was coming in. She wants to walk her through this location so Sophie's got something to work from when she designs the new one.
Sophie looked at the message a long time before she said yes.
"You don't have to," I tell her in the truck. "Nobody'd blame you for staying home for a week."
"I'd blame me." Her jaw sets, the way it does when she's scared and going anyway. "If I hide, they win twice. They took the school. They're not taking the one place that still wants me there."
So we go.
And here's what I didn't expect—Meghan doesn't treat her like glass.
She puts a notebook and a fan deck of paint chips in Sophie's hands and walks her slowly around the shop, the open one, the one that already works.
