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"Baby girl."

Sage looked up, still smiling.

"Do you love my boy?"

The kitchen went quiet.

Sage's face did something Mary Sue had only seen it do once before — in the diner booth, that second day, when the word mama had hit her in her chest. The brat and the armor and the sharp funny girl all fell away at once, and what was underneath was so young and so undefended that Mary Sue's throat closed.

Then Sage burst into tears.

Those deep tears, the ones that shook her whole body. She pressed both floury hands over her mouth and the sob came through anyway, and Mary Sue was already moving, already gathering her in, flour and dough and all.

"I'm so stupid," Sage managed. "I'm so — I don't know what's wrong with me — I just — "

"Nothing is wrong with you, honey." Mary Sue's hand moved to her hair. Steady. Certain. "Nothing at all."

"I l-love him so much." The words came out wrecked, barely words at all. "I love him and I'm eighteen and I come with — I come with so much — and he's so good, Mama, he's so good and he deserves someone who's whole, who doesn't have all this — " She made a gesture that encompassed everything Mary Sue understood to mean everything I am and everything that happened to me. "He could be with someone who'd actually make him happy and instead he'd be stuck with me and I love him so much I can't — I can't breathe sometimes when I look at him and he's never gonna — he doesn't feel — "

"Sweetheart." Mary Sue pulled back just enough to look at her face. Cupped it in both flour-dusted hands. "Cal loves you."

Sage stared at her.

"Yeah." The word came out hollow. Disbelieving. "Like — like a friend. Or maybe like a daughter. He doesn't — not the way I — "

"No." Mary Sue said it with the quiet authority of a woman who had known Cal Meridian since he was smaller than the grief he carried. "Not like a daughter. Not like a friend."

Sage opened her mouth.

"I've known that boy's voice since he was twelve years old," Mary Sue said. "I know every register of it. I know what he sounds like when he's angry and when he's in pain and when he's trying to hold himself together with both hands. I've heard him go silent for years." She smoothed the hair back from Sage's face. "And I'm going to tell you some things about him. So you understand that I know what I'm talking about."

She took Sage's hand and led her to the stool at the prep counter.

"Keep stirring," she said, setting the bowl in front of her. "Your hands need something to do."

Sage sniffled and nodded.

She told it the way she'd lived it — not a story, not a narrative, but a series of things that were true.

Cal at twelve, half-starving because everything they had left had gone to his dying mother. His father Thomas, died years before in an accident at the mill. Mary Sue's voice faltered there and she let it, and Sage noticed but didn't say anything.

She told her how Cal had shown up at the diner one afternoon with a sock full of pennies — embarrassed and guilty, trying to buy cookies. These same cookies they were making now. And how that day, Mary Sue had understood that it was her job to take care of him.

No matter what.

She told Sage how she'd fed him after his mother died, how he was too proud to ask for anything. How she made sure he got to school despite everything. How she would sit with him on the steps of the trailer and never go inside, giving him that dignity.

Cal at seventeen. What he'd done to the men who'd hurt Annie Townsend. What it had cost him — the blood, the town that turned its back, the choice between leaving and spending his life in a cell. She didn't soften it. Sage didn't need softness. She needed the truth.

The Navy. The SEAL teams. The Medal of Honor.

Sage's head came up so fast she nearly knocked the bowl off the counter.

"The Medal of — isn't that like a really big deal?"

"The President puts it around your neck," Mary Sue said. "I was in the back when it happened. I flew out to be there." Her voice dropped. "He just stood there baby…he just stood there... so empty."

Sage stared at her. "What happened?"