The Hudson River didn’t look like danger. It looked like hammered glass under a pale New York sun, the kind of morning light that makes Manhattan seem civilized and safe. Then a small shape vanished beneath it, and the city’s heartbeat stumbled.

Sage Mitchell hit the water before she heard the second scream.

Cold swallowed her in one bite. The shock was a thousand needles under her skin and a fist around her lungs. She didn’t think about her soaked barista uniform or the ruined phone in her pocket or the fact that she couldn’t afford to miss another hour of work, let alone a day. She thought about the pair of small hands she’d seen clawing at the surface, and then she didn’t think at all. Her body took over. Arms cut, legs kicked, breath measured itself against the river’s pull the way it had when she was twelve and swam until the world went quiet.

He couldn’t be more than five. Dark hair slicked flat, lips bluing, a little body going heavy with cold. When her fingers closed around him, relief hit so hard it almost buckled her. “I’ve got you,” she whispered into one chilled ear, not sure if he heard, not sure if she did either, hauling him toward the concrete lip and the cluster of people shouting do something without moving an inch.

Sage heaved him onto the riverwalk and followed, knees scraping, lungs burning. Training from a lifeguard course that lived in a dusty file of her brain jolted awake. She tipped his head, sealed her mouth over his, pressed, counted, refused to hear the city’s noise. He coughed. A trickle turned to a flood and then to a sob. “Mama,” he whispered in a voice thready with cold.

“She’s coming,” Sage said, a lie as gentle as she could make it, tucking someone’s jacket around his shaking shoulders. “You’re safe now.” The siren that finally arrived was the best sound she had heard in a year.

What Sage didn’t know, kneeling on Lower Manhattan concrete with wet hair sticking to her neck and the Hudson in her shoes, was that she had just pulled the most protected child in New York City out of the river. She didn’t know that within the hour, every traffic camera within ten blocks would be scrubbed for a view of her face, or that men in polite suits would write down her name and recite it to a man other people only whispered about. She didn’t know the ripple she’d just started would hit Wall Street, Little Italy, and a quiet mansion past the dunes in the Hamptons.

“Miss, we need your information.” A uniformed officer with soft eyes and a pen like a metronome appeared at her shoulder while paramedics worked. Sage recited the facts—name, age, address, the coffee shop off Broad Street where she opened mornings—in the voice of someone who had learned not to ask for help unless someone was actually dying. The boy’s hand reached blindly for her. She squeezed his fingers. “What’s your name, sweetheart?”

“Marco,” he whispered. “Marco… Richi.” The name meant nothing to Sage, but the paramedic’s jaw set and three people in the crowd exchanged a look that wasn’t panic so much as protocol.

They took him. The ambulance doors closed soft, efficient. A cop thanked her, a woman pressed a scarf into her hands, and the crowd began to dissolve into its morning. Sage stood, shivering in her soaked shoes, and only then remembered the latte orders waiting under heat lamps and the owner who counted minutes like money. She started across the street.

That’s when she saw him.

The black SUV had a shine like a mirror, impossible to see into under the midday glare. The man beside it wasn’t trying to hide. Tall. Late thirties. Dark hair cut with the kind of restraint that costs more. A suit that fit like it had been argued about. He didn’t look at the river or the police tape or the tourists pointing cellphones at the skyline. He looked at Sage, and the world narrowed to the space between them.

It wasn’t a stranger’s stare. It felt like recognition from someone who had never met her. Electricity—not the crackle of danger yet, just the awareness that power had focused. His eyes held hers for a long, steady beat, then someone in another suit murmured in his ear. The man’s jaw tightened, his look changed by a degree only trained people notice. He glanced back at Sage once, unreadable, and slid into the SUV. When the car pulled into traffic, the license plate was black. Not just dark. Blank.

“Who was that?” Sage asked the nearest officer, but the SUV was already a shadow, then gone.

“Who was who?” the cop said, scribbling a badge number on a card. The city had already moved on.

Sage walked back to the coffee shop with water squelching in her shoes, the scarf around her shoulders, and the feeling—quiet, insistent—that something had just stepped out of the river with her.

Her alarm had screamed at 4:30 a.m. like it always did, a sound you grow to hate and then rely on. The studio apartment was the size of a generous walk-in closet in a SoHo listing and came with an elderly neighbor’s cat that believed Sage was its tenant. Two jobs, night classes, and four hours of sleep counted as balance. The coffee shop in the Financial District paid in steady checks and nods from people who never caught her name off her apron. She was three semesters from finishing a social work degree at CUNY; three semesters from a different kind of tired.

“Morning, Sage,” Marcus said at 5:45, waddling in with paper bags that smelled like butter and cinnamon. “You look wiped.”

“I’m fine.” It was muscle memory: fine for overdue bills, fine for ramen, fine for an eviction warning taped to a door the landlord swore wasn’t about her, fine because the truth doesn’t change anything.

At 8:15, the screaming on the river cut through the hiss of steam and the murmur of suits. By 9:45, Sage had wrung out her hair in the bathroom and texted her diner manager she’d be late tonight. At 10:15, a news truck idled outside long enough to make her nervous, then moved on.

“You’re famous,” Marcus announced at 11:00, waggling his eyebrows. “Channel 7 wanted your full name.”

“No,” Sage said, because attention costs more than rent.

“You jumped in the Hudson,” he said. “That’s a story.”

“It’s a river,” she said, and poured another latte.

The bell over the door chimed at noon. The man who stepped up to the counter wore an expensive suit wrong: without the need to prove it. Nice eyes. A smile that went all the way up. “Large coffee, black,” he said, then looked at the menu like it was a short story he wanted to finish. “And… whatever you recommend.”

“The lavender honey latte is popular,” Sage said, with the careful neutrality of someone who had been told not to take up too much space. “The house blend is solid.”

“I’ll trust you,” he said, with a sincerity that made her glance up. “Lavender latte it is. I’m David.”

“Sage,” she said, and immediately regretted trading names with a stranger.

“Beautiful,” he said—to the name or to her, she didn’t check. “You free for dinner Sunday? There’s a little place in Little Italy that I—”

The bell chimed again.

The room quieted without anyone meaning to. The air trimmed itself. You feel that kind of presence before you see it—like the hush when the first note of a song you love finally starts. He was the man from the river. Up close, the effect was worse. Better. More dangerous. The shape of his face was something magazines like to make a point about. His eyes were the kind that convince people to sign away parts of themselves and feel lucky about it. He moved like he’d studied a map of the room and decided where everything belonged.

“Espresso,” he said to Sage, his voice low enough to carry without volume. “Double.”

Her hands weren’t the trembling type. They’d packed boxes, carried trays, folded other people’s laundry at two in the morning. But the portafilter felt unfamiliar for a second, like a tool you borrow and don’t admit you’ve never used. He watched her with attention that didn’t bother to hide what it was.

“You’re the one who pulled him out,” he said. Not a question. Not awe. A fact laid on the counter between them.

“I did what anyone would do.”

“No,” he said, with the certainty of a man who doesn’t play with words. “You didn’t. Most people don’t. Thank you.”

She slid the tiny cup across the counter. Their fingers touched like an accident and then like a choice. He lifted the espresso and his mouth softened for a beat. “How is he?” she asked, her voice hitching for the first time that day. “Marco. Is he—”

“He’s fine,” the man said. The name tightened something under his eyes. “Because of you.”

“I’m glad,” she said. “He seemed… he seemed like a good kid.”

The man looked at her for a long moment, and she had the strange thought that he was translating something for himself and deciding whether to say it out loud. “You have no idea who I am,” he said finally.

“Should I?” Sage asked.

“Sorry,” David said, not quite apologetic, sliding back into the conversation like he owned a chair there. “Sage, you didn’t answer me about dinner.”

The temperature in the room dropped half a degree. People who pretend not to look began to look. The man with the espresso turned to the man with the latte as if someone had introduced them to a sport with rules they both understood.

“You’re asking her out,” he observed.

“Yes,” David said, and tried to hold the gaze of a man whose stare was made to be held. “Is that a problem?”

“That depends,” the man said, sipping, eyes on Sage over the rim, “on whether you can protect her.”

The words were quiet and they landed like a warning. Sage felt the flush rise in her face—the kind that is part anger, part humiliation, part the sudden urge to do something reckless to prove you’re not an object being set on a shelf between men. “I don’t need anyone’s protection,” she said, level. “And I don’t need permission to eat pasta.”

Something like approval flickered over the man’s mouth. He finished the espresso and laid exact change on the counter with a business card beside it. The card was simple, embossed, gold letters like a whisper with weight. “When you’re ready to understand what happened three days ago,” he said, “call me.”

“Meaning what?” Sage asked.

“Meaning be careful who you trust,” he said, turning, and the room made space for him like a tide.

When the door closed, sound returned in a rush. David was still standing there, politeness rearranged into confusion.

“Who the hell was that?” he asked.

Sage turned the card over. Antonio Richi. No title, no company, just a number. The name made the ceiling feel lower. “I don’t know,” she said, and in the small honest part of her brain a voice added, That’s not true.

She put the card into the pocket of her apron without meaning to. “So,” David said, valiantly trying to reassemble the moment, “about Sunday—”

“Can I think about it?” Sage asked, because normal was a door you walked through even when you felt a storm building.

“Of course,” he said. “You know where to find me.”

By nightfall, the card felt heavier than paper. Sage lasted exactly eighteen hours before she dialed the number. She’d tried to pour lattes, sit through a lecture on trauma-informed care, smile at a diner regular who told the same joke every Thursday. She’d tried to pretend the black SUV across from the coffee shop wasn’t the same one she’d seen near the river, or that the plate wasn’t still impossible to read. She’d tried to convince herself that the car parked two blocks down from her building wasn’t the same shape with a different driver. Pretending takes energy. She ran out.

He answered on the first ring. “I wondered when you would call.”

“There’s a car following me,” Sage said. “Black SUV.”

“I know,” Antonio said. “They’re mine.”

“Excuse me?”

“You saved my son’s life,” he said, in the same tone he’d used to order espresso. Simple. Irrefutable. “That makes you a target.”

The words were clean and they hit like a blow. “Your son,” Sage said slowly. “Marco is—”

“My son,” Antonio said. “There are people in this city who would hurt him to hurt me. You appeared on every camera holding him. You did the bravest thing I can imagine. They will see you as a handle.”

“I don’t understand why anyone would—he’s a child.”

“Because of who I am,” Antonio said, and let that hang.

“And who are you?”

There was a breath on the line that sounded like a man choosing not to lie. “Someone who makes enemies,” he said. “Someone whose son shouldn’t have been near the river without three adults. That won’t happen again.”

“Meaning you fired them,” Sage said, and the room seemed to tilt by a degree.

“Meaning they are no longer employed,” Antonio said. “Meet me tomorrow. Benedetto’s in Little Italy. Eight o’clock. I’ll explain.”

“I don’t think—” she started, and he said her name like a hand on a shoulder.

“Sage. You are already involved. The question is whether you want to know the rules.”

After he hung up, silence swelled in her apartment until you could hear the building breathe. She looked at the cat, who blinked, unimpressed. She told herself to pack a bag and get on a bus to anywhere cheaper. She thought about Marco saying angel in a voice full of relief. Then she ironed her only not-thrift-store dress with her flatiron and put Benedetto’s into her phone maps.

The restaurant was tieless old New York—white tablecloths, warm lights, a smell of garlic that could end arguments. The waiter who led her to the corner table looked like he recognized Antonio and had promised not to stare. Antonio stood when she arrived. Up close, the impression of control became oxygen.

“You came,” he said, pulling out her chair himself.

“I almost didn’t.”

“But you did.” He smiled slightly. “That tells me something about you.”

He ordered in Italian, fluent as a lullaby. The waiter’s hands trembled around the wine bottle. Heads turned. Eyes dropped. The room behaved like a restaurant full of adults who had remembered their table manners very quickly.

“You speak Italian,” Sage said, because the alternatives were questions too big for appetizers.

“My family is from Sicily,” he said. “Fourth generation in New York, but we keep our threads.”

“What kind of threads?” she said, though the outline was sketching itself whether she wanted it to or not.

“The kind that value loyalty over noise,” he said. “The kind that protect family at any cost.”

The wine arrived. He poured like someone who understood restraint.

“Tell me about you,” he said, pivoting cleanly. “What do you do when you’re not leaping into rivers?”

“I work,” Sage said, because there were versions of her story she did not hand to people with expensive shoes. “Two jobs. Night classes. I’m finishing a degree in social work.”

“Why social work?”

“Because I grew up wishing someone would show up and not leave,” she said, surprising herself with the truth. “Foster care. Aged out. I know what it feels like to be a case on a desk.”

“Family?”

“Not anymore,” Sage said. “Car accident when I was eight. After that, it was… the system.”

“That explains it,” he said.

“Explains what?”

“Why you didn’t wait for someone else,” he said. “You knew waiting is sometimes the thing that breaks you.”

The food was ridiculous in a way that felt almost rude. Sage ate as if it were a job she refused to fail at. He told her about Marco’s English and Italian braided into each sentence, about the way he lined his toy cars by color and scolded adults who stepped out of line, about a house by the water that the boy insisted looked exactly like the one in his favorite movie. He did not tell her what he did between breakfast and dinner. She did not ask him who called him at midnight.

“How did Marco end up at the river?” Sage asked.

“Someone was supposed to be watching him,” Antonio said, and his voice went cold without raising. “They are not anymore.”

The check arrived without arriving. When they stepped out into the night, Mulberry Street hummed like summer. The black SUV idled at the curb like a sentence waiting for its verb.

“This is the part where I tell you to stay away,” Antonio said. “Where I explain that knowing me will put lines on your life you didn’t draw.”

“But,” Sage prompted.

“But I can’t do that,” he said, and there was no triumph in it. “Three days ago, you walked into the river for the most important person in my world. And when I look at you, I see a thing I don’t have a word for, and I am a man who has words.”

“What thing?” she said, because sometimes naming the dangerous thing leaves it outside your door.

“Someone worth protecting,” he said.

He stepped closer, not quite touching, and Sage felt her bones move to a place they recognized. “I’m going to ask you something,” he said. “Think first.”

“Okay,” she breathed.

“Would you like to meet Marco properly?”

The question slid between them and sat down. Meeting a man’s son is a small thing between civilians. It is a door between worlds when the man’s last name unlocks rooms in New York City you don’t want to be in without a map. Sage saw his house in a flash—white, windows, water—and the target painted on her apartment door in another flash she hadn’t seen yet. She thought about a little boy with river water on his lashes and a hand that had reached for hers like she was a fact in a world that had lost them.

“Yes,” she said. “I’d like that very much.”

The house in the Hamptons wasn’t the kind that made you feel small. It was big, yes, but sunlight poured through glass that faced a lawn full of toys and a strip of dune grass nodding toward the ocean. It was loud with small feet and the movement of people who had jobs they did so well you didn’t see the edges. “Marco chose it,” Antonio said, letting her walk in first. “Said it looked like the house in his movie.”

The front door flew open before she could ask which movie. “Papa!” A small missile threw himself at Antonio’s legs, babbling in Italian that rolled like water. The man who had stared down a room of men for sport became someone else entirely—softer, younger, eyes wrecked with love. “Do you remember the lady who helped you?” he asked, switching to English.

Marco turned his serious face toward her and studied her like a new toy he intended to keep forever. Then he broke into sunlight. “The angel lady,” he announced, and reached for her.

Sage forgot how to breathe for a second. “Hi, sweetheart. How are you feeling?”

“Better,” he said with the gravity of kings. “Papa says you saved my life.”

“You saved it too,” she said. “You were very brave.”

“I was scared,” he whispered. “Then you came. I was not scared.”

Over his head, she met Antonio’s gaze. There was a look there she didn’t know what to do with. Respect. Something like worship. The problem with dignity is it makes you want to be the person other people think you are.

“Come,” Marco commanded, small fingers claiming hers. “I want to show you my room.”

They played for an hour, time dissolving into Lego and dinosaur voices and the elastic logic of five-year-olds who build kingdoms under tables. The staff—no one said that word; these were people with names—watched Sage watch Marco and relaxed by degrees the kind of way that tells you they had been told to be careful with her heart.

“He likes you,” Antonio said, later, on the terrace, watching Marco conduct ants with a twig.

“He’s an amazing kid,” Sage said. “You should be proud.”

“I am,” he said, and the words sounded like prayer. “I’m also terrified every day that someone will teach me the cost of being proud.”

“What do you do, Antonio?” Sage asked, finally, because pretending not to know for too long becomes a lie in itself.

He was quiet long enough for the ocean to rearrange itself. “My family has been in New York four generations,” he said. “We built businesses—import, export, construction, real estate. We pay salaries, fund charities, underwrite projects that build neighborhoods. We also… resolve things when the courts move too slowly. We maintain order where chaos likes to practice.”

“You’re the head of a crime family,” Sage said, not accusing, not breathless. A diagnosis more than a label.

“I’m the head of a family,” he said. “People call things what they need to call them.”

Sage stood. The view blurred. “I should go.”

He reached for her wrist and didn’t squeeze. “Please don’t.”

“I’m not the kind of person who—” she started.

“What kind?” he said, so softly it felt like an invitation instead of a trap.

“The kind who belongs in this house. With these cars. With… this.”

“You are the kind of person who jumps into a river,” he said. “You work three jobs and still find a way to sit with a little boy until he falls asleep. You belong anywhere you decide to belong.”

“Papa!” Marco yelled from the lawn. “Play! Us!”

“Us?” Antonio said, one eyebrow up.

“Me and the angel lady,” Marco said, and the innocence of it cracked something open in her chest.

“One game,” she said—because bargains help you cross lines.

One game became dinner, which became a bedtime story, which became a small boy asleep with his hand wrapped around Sage’s fingers like they were power. She woke with a blanket over her and Antonio in a chair nearby, a look in his eyes that people should be careful about giving to other people; it can change your life without warning you first.

“What time is it?” she whispered.

“Late,” he said. “You missed your shift.”

Panic leaped. “I have to—”

“I called,” he said. “Told them you were sick. They said take the night.”

“You can’t just—people don’t—”

“I do,” he said simply. “When it comes to protecting the people I care about.”

The words hung between them like a bridge that might hold. “You can’t protect me,” she said. “You can’t control my life.”

“I’m not trying to control anything,” he said. “I’m trying to make sure it continues.”

“From what? I saved your son. End of story.”

“My enemies don’t see you that way,” he said. “They see leverage.”

“Do you?” she asked.

He set his glass down and closed the space to a foot that felt both vast and short. Up close, the exhaustion etched in his face was less elegant and more true. “Three days ago, I didn’t trust anyone outside the walls of this house,” he said. “Three days ago, I was a man with one rule: caring about someone is how you put a target on their back. Today I’m a man breaking his own rules.”

The phone on the counter buzzed. He glanced and the room changed shape around him.

“What?” Sage asked.

“We need to go,” he said, in a voice that moved people.

“Why?”

“Someone tried to break into your apartment,” he said. “They left a message.”

“What kind of message?”

“The kind that means this just became a fight,” he said, and his jaw set into something that looked like restraint with a fuse in it.

The ride back to Manhattan was a tunnel of lights. Marco slept in his car seat, an anchor in a rolling storm. “What did they do?” Sage asked.

“Spray paint,” he said. “A target on your door. A number beneath it.”

“Whose number?”

“Vincent Torino,” he said, and the SUV seemed to steady itself. “He’s been trying to move on my businesses for months. This is how he shows his calendar.”

“Because I saved Marco.”

“Because he thinks you matter to me,” Antonio said.

“Do I?” Sage asked, and the honest yes that followed changed the way the city looked through the glass.

Blue and red lit the block like a carnival as they pulled up. The crude circle on Sage’s door looked obscene. Neighbors peered from behind chains. Officers took statements with the professionalism of people who have seen too much and are still trying to do it right. The landlord shrugged apologies and policy in the same breath. “You can’t stay,” the officer said gently. “Not tonight.”

“Where will you go?” the officer added, sympathy braced with procedure.

“She’s staying with family,” Antonio said, and the word did what it always does when you say it out loud—it moved furniture.

They packed her life into two suitcases. It was humbling how fast everything you own can agree to travel. “Is the angel lady coming to live with us?” Marco asked, delight barely contained.

“For a while,” Antonio said carefully. “Would you like that?”

“Yes,” Marco said, with the confidence of a boy who understands how the world should work. “She can make pancakes.”

“I make excellent pancakes,” Sage said, and Marco nodded as if he had suspected as much.

The safe house was a Midtown penthouse with windows like walls and security that kept its own secrets. Beautiful, yes. Also a cage with silk bars. “Temporary,” Antonio said, showing her the guest room with sheets so crisp they made a sound. “Until we clear the board.”

“How do you clear a board with someone like Vincent Torino on it?” Sage asked.

“You let me worry about that,” he said, and meant it.

Days stretched into a rhythm that felt like trespassing into a life she had once wanted and then stopped letting herself want. Mornings were Marco and stories and pancakes executed with excellence, thank you very much. Afternoons were safety drills and exits and the kind of training you don’t admit you’re good at unless someone is in danger. Night fell, and the city threw its lights against their windows like confetti.

“You’re a natural,” Antonio said after she hit the center of the practice target five times in a row, breath even.

“I have good motivation,” she said, thinking of a boy’s laughter.

“Is that the only one?” he asked, soft enough not to scare an honest answer.

“No,” she said, and set the training pistol down.

They were alone in the private gym, the city sprawled glittering below like something someone had spilled by accident. He’d rolled up his sleeves, a line of ink winking at the edge of his cuff. He stepped close enough that she could smell the clean citrus of his cologne and the expensive soap trying to erase the scent of decision from his skin.

“What else?” he asked.

“You,” she said. “This… whatever this is. The way Marco looks at you like the moon reports to you. The way you look at me like I’m… not breakable.”

“You’re not,” he said. “You’re the strongest person who’s ever walked into my life.”

The phone interrupted again. His face went from man to leader in a blink. “What?”

“Vincent made a mistake,” he said, already moving. “He touched one of my legitimate businesses. People got hurt. That’s the line.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means this ends tonight.”

“Antonio—” She caught his sleeve. “Promise me something.”

“Anything.”

“If something happens, I’ll take care of Marco,” she said, the words tearing something on their way out. “He will know he was loved.”

“It won’t,” he said, because hope is a weapon too. “But promise me anyway.”

“I promise,” she said. “And I promise you’re coming back.”

He took her face in both hands and kissed her like a man who had found a thing he’d stopped looking for because looking had hurt too much. “I love you,” he said, and the words landed like a truth you recognize though you’ve never said it out loud. “It’s fast. It’s foolish. It’s true.”

“I love you too,” she said. “So come home.”

He did. Dawn found the lock turning and Sage running and the city exhaling quietly because resolution sometimes looks like a man coming through a door alive. “It’s over,” he said, arms around her on tile cold with morning. “He won’t be a problem again.”

“Are we safe?”

“As safe as people like us get,” he said, wonder making the words soft. “Now we figure out how to be a family.”

Two years can be an eternity or a blink. In the Hamptons kitchen, sunlight painted everything forgiving. Outside, a boy on a bicycle flung his laughter across the lawn and a man jogged behind him like pride was a sport you train for. Sage leaned on the windowsill with coffee that didn’t come from a machine fighting for its life and thought about the shape of luck.

She had walked across a stage that spring in a borrowed navy gown and a cap bobby-pinned into place, summa cum laude echoing in a gym that smelled like the past. Antonio and Marco had yelled like they were the only two people who had ever loved anyone. Now she worked with kids whose stories felt like chapters she’d had to rewrite for herself, handing them tools and time and the unglamorous faith that shows up when it says it will.

“Mama, look!” Marco shouted, pedaling without the wobble that used to scare him.

The word still made her heart flinch with joy. He’d started using it six months earlier without ceremony, as if he had always had it and had only been waiting to give it to the right person. Antonio had cried in private and badly.

“I see you,” Sage called, stepping out onto the stoop. “You’re incredible.”

“He gets it from his father,” Antonio said, coming up beside her, hair damp with effort, eyes doing that thing again where they made promises without language. “His father, who is madly in love with his mother.”

“His mother, who plans to say yes when his father finally asks,” Sage said, mouth curving.

His eyes widened, then narrowed. “How did you—”

“The ring box in your sock drawer is not the stealth move you think it is,” she said. “Also, Marco told me he helped pick ‘the sparkly one,’ which is exactly the level of subtlety I expect from our child.”

“Traitor,” Antonio muttered fondly, and she laughed, the sound catching on the edge of a kind of happiness that can make you believe you’re safe enough to be silly.

“Do you ever regret it?” he asked later, when the quiet hour between lunch and the beach settled like a blanket, and the ocean wrote its old poem at the end of their yard.

“Jumping in?” she said. “Never.”

“Even though it dragged you into—” He gestured at the house, the ocean, the history he’d been honest about in increments.

“Especially because,” she said. “You and Marco are my choice. Family isn’t what you’re born into. It’s who you show up for when the water is cold.”

He put his forehead on hers and breathed out like he was finally done holding something in. “Ti amo, mia,” he said, a language that had adopted her as surely as his last name would.

“I love you too,” she whispered, and meant the kind with edges and weight and mornings that smell like pancakes.

Marco abandoned the bicycle to chase butterflies. In a minute he’d burst back in, cheeks bright, pockets full of contraband, questions spilled like marbles. Tonight, they’d eat together, argue about whether cartoons count as art, and Antonio might try for the third time this week to propose in a way that surprised no one but still felt like a miracle. The future was a room with windows. Some of them were open.

Sage had learned that the most radical act in a city that can swallow you is to keep showing up. To answer the phone. To go to the dinner. To say yes to meeting a little boy who called you an angel because you did the obvious thing and the hard thing at the same time. To accept that sometimes the river takes and sometimes it gives, and sometimes it introduces you to a man who will stop the city to make sure you don’t break.