Page 114 of What We Burn

“Yeah, but you didn’t answer me either. You left me on read!”

“Shit. Sorry, I was at work. But hey, I got off early. Want to meet at the mall in thirty? Jamie and I are heading over.”

“Seriously? Yes. Yes! I’ll be at Nordstrom. Don’t you dare flake on me, Sage Adams.”

“I won’t.”

“If you flake, I’m showing up at your boyfriend’s house with a battering ram.”

“Understood. See you soon!”

I hang up. Jamie’s waiting by the back hallway, backpack on, keys dangling from one finger. “We good?”

“We’re good.”

He jerks his head toward the back door. “Let’s go.”

We sneak through the kitchen and past the cook. Through the service window I can see the street, the sedan, the outline of Eli’s profile bent over a worksheet. Still trusting that I’ll be here when he looks up.

The guilt hits fast—hot, sharp, right behind my ribs. He’s not my jailer. He’s a man who’s terrified of losing me, sitting in a car for hours doing something he didn’t sign up for because the alternative is too terrible to think about. They all are. Knox in his truck. Micah giving up shifts at the club. Milo glued to camera feeds. Holden running plates and checking faces. All of it love, and all of it a cage that gets smaller every week.

No one is dying today.

“Ready,” I say.

Jamie pushes the back door open. Sunlight and salt air and the greasy smell of the alley, and I’m already moving, already laughing, feet light on the cracked pavement. Jamie’s beside me, matching my pace, grinning as we cut through the side street toward his car.

“Walk faster,” I say, grabbing his arm.

“You’re giggling. I didn’t know you had that in you.”

“Shut up and hurry before I change my mind.”

“You’re not changing your mind.”

He’s right. I’m not.

We pile into his car—a beat-up Honda with empty coffee cups in the holders and an aux cord dangling from the dash—and he pulls out onto the side street, away from the front of the diner, away from the silver sedan, away from everything.

I roll the window down. Wind tangles my hair. Salt and exhaust and cut grass from someone’s yard. I close my eyes and feel my lungs fill completely, and for the first time in weeks, I feel like a person.

“Hold on tight!” Jamie turns up the radio and I lean back against the seat and we are gone.

THIRTY-ONE

ELI

“What the actual fuck?”

We’ve only been back at school for a week, and already I’m getting pushback from parents about homework—twenty students, fourteen logs handed in, and six of them are blank because apparently “reading at home” is a suggestion and not a directive.

I circle a smiley face on a sheet—she’s read four books this week, which is more than some of the adults I know—and make a note to send a sticker home with her on Monday.

I’m tucking it away when my phone screams.

The proximity alert Milo coded into the tracker’s software—the one buried in Sage’s cameo pendant. She doesn’t know about it. She’d kill us all in our sleep if she did.

I barely get my feet under me before the next alert comes—a triple-pulse, the code for an unapproved deviation. Milo’s system is slick: the color-coded map pins her as a pink dot, moving southeast at a steady pace, toward the coast road.