Page 112 of Deacon

Lila clearly didn’t believe her, but she let it go. “Dinner’s almost done.”

“Okay.” Jade bent over the workbook again, but the numbers might as well have been another language. Her heartbeat refused to settle, and the phone in her lap felt heavier than it should.

When it buzzed a third time, dread hit before she even looked. She checked the screen carefully and saw Cage’s name instead of another unknown number. Relief left her shaky enough to be embarrassing. She answered immediately. “Hey.”

The relief in Jade’s voice must have been obvious, because Lila glanced over immediately. “Who’s that?”

“Cage.” Jade gathered her phone and schoolbook, grateful for an excuse to leave the kitchen without making it obvious she needed to. “I’m gonna go finish in my room.”

Her mother’s mouth twitched. “You mean talk instead of doing geometry?”

Jade made a face, grateful for the ordinary teasing. “That too.”

Her mother let her escape with one last reminder. “Dinner in fifteen.”

“Okay.” She shut herself into her bedroom and sat cross-legged on the bed, the tightness in her chest finally easing enough to breathe through.

Cage’s dry voice came through the phone, familiar enough now to loosen something in her chest. “You alive?”

She smiled despite herself. “Barely. Geometry is trying to kill me.”

“Yeah, well, algebra tried that with me last year. I survived, but I’ve never been the same.”

The dry delivery pulled a laugh out of her before she could stop it. “How tragic,”

His tone turned solemn enough to make the joke even worse. “I’m very brave.”

“Clearly.” The knot in her stomach loosened a little more. That was the thing about Cage. He never pushed too hard. He showed up in that steady, dry way of his and somehow made everything feel less jagged without acting like he was trying.

They talked about school, the weirdness of being the new girl at Bay of Saints High, teachers who acted like teenagers had unlimited free time, and group projects designed to punish the competent. Cage told her about a guy from last year who had done absolutely nothing except announce, “I’m more of an ideas person,” whenever the teacher checked on them. The conversation drifted into music and the ridiculous expectation that sixteen-year-olds should already know what they wanted to do with their lives. Somewhere along the way, Jade almost stopped thinking about the unknown number.

Cage mentioned that one of the neighborhood kids had tried riding a bike down the apartment stairs earlier, nearly giving Ledger a heart attack. Jade laughed. “I’d have paid money to see that.”

“He did the whole disappointed dad stare mixed with angry biker glare.”

She could picture it far too easily. “That’s scarier than yelling.”

“Way scarier.” The laughter faded into something easier, the kind of conversation that didn’t need much work to keep moving.

Jade rolled onto her stomach and tucked a pillow under her chest. “Evan spent like fifteen minutes last night giving a dramatic speech about how my mom is doomed now that Deacon decided to become emotionally persistent.”

Cage laughed, quieter than hers but real. “He’s probably not wrong.”

Jade tipped her forehead into the pillow. “You sound way too calm saying that.”

“Deacon doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who quits something he cares about, and it is obvious he cares about you and your mom.”

That softened something in her before she could defend against it. “No,” she said, then admitted the rest. “He really definitely doesn’t seem like that kind of guy.” The silence that followed wasn’t awkward. It felt more like both of them had noticed the same truth and were leaving it alone.

The easy rhythm between them held until Cage’s voice softened. “You okay?”

Coming from him, the question landed differently. He would actually wait for the answer. “Yeah.” He did exactly that, leaving the quiet open instead of filling it for her, until pretending stopped feeling useful. “Mostly,” she admitted.

“My dad says that too,” Cage said after a beat. “Mostly. Usually when he means not really.”

A faint laugh escaped her. “That sounds like Ledger.”

“Yeah.” The humor thinned from his voice. “He’s been... off a lot lately.” The change in him was subtle, but Jade heard it clearly enough to go still.