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Sage nodded.

“Listen,” Mary Sue said, leaning in close the way her own mother had once leaned down to her in a kitchen not so different from this one. “We’re mountain folk out here. You understand what that means?”

Sage shook her head.

"It means, honey, the women from these parts have always been the ones who kept things standing. My grandmother was married at fifteen, had her first baby at sixteen, raised eleven children on a homestead in weather that would make this look like a spring afternoon. She loved my grandfather until the day she died. Fiercely. Completely. Without apology." She held Sage's gaze steady. "Cal will bring up the age. I guarantee it. But that's not the real reason he'll hesitate."

"Then what is?"

"He won't feel worthy of you, sweetheart. All that blood on his hands, all those years, all those things that don't have clean names — he's going to look at you and think you deserve someone who hasn't done what he's done." She shook her head slowly. "You're going to have to show him that he's wrong."

Sage was crying quietly again. "How? I don't think I'm that strong."

Mary Sue snorted. Laughed despite herself. Wiped her own eyes. "Oh, baby girl. You must have mountain folk blood in you somewhere, because you are very strong. You've already done so much."

She leaned in one last time and whispered it, the way the things that truly matter always get said.

"Keep doing what you're doing. You've already started breaking down those walls. Keep going. Don't take no for an answer." She pulled back and looked at her — really looked at her. "Trust me, baby. My boy loves you."

They held each other again. Sage's arms around her waist, Mary Sue's hand in her hair, the kitchen warm around them, the cookie dough still waiting on the counter like it had all the time in the world.

It was at that exact moment that the back door swung open.

"Mary Sue! Oh thank God — I have been on the jet with Michael sending me constant texts, and then in a chauffeured SUV for what felt like nine thousand years, and I need your famous cookies and a bath and I need to tell you something about Michael⁠— "

Isabelle Sanford stopped.

She took in the scene with the rapid, precise assessment of a very successful woman who processed information for a living — two people on the kitchen couch, red-eyed and flour-dusted, clearly in the aftermath of something enormous. Mary Sue watched her with a look that said tread carefully, and also hello darling. A girl with piercings and tattoos she'd never seen before, looking up at her with wide, wet blue eyes caught somewhere between bewildered, embarrassed, and defensive.

Isabelle was quiet for exactly two seconds.

Then she smiled — warm, radiant, certain, the smile of a woman who had just solved a puzzle she hadn't known she was working on — and crossed the kitchen and crouched down beside the couch.

"You," she said to Sage, with the easy tenderness of someone who had known her forever, "must be the reason I'm here."

Sage blinked and looked at Mary Sue. Back at Isabelle. "Okaaay… umm…who are you?"

"Apparently?" Isabelle settled back on her heels, entirely comfortable. "I'm your fairy godmother. But don't tell anyone."

Sage stared at her for one beat. Two.

Then she laughed — bright and genuine and slightly incredulous — and something in the room shifted, loosened, let the air back in.

"I can't tell you specifics," Isabelle said, standing and brushing off her knees with complete composure. "It wouldn't be fair to Bear. But trust me — " she glanced at Mary Sue, who gave her the smallest nod " — this is a very good thing."

Mary Sue helped Sage to her feet. Clapped her hands once — brisk, final — because she was a woman who understood that the best thing you could do after the important things had been said was give people's hands something useful to do.

"All right," she said. "Enough mushy stuff."

She pointed at the counter.

"We have cookies to finish. And while we finish them — " she looked between the two of them with the expression of a woman who had been waiting a long time to say exactly this — "Isabelle and I are going to give you some advice."

Sage smiled.

"Yes, Mama."

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