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“Phone. He says his name is Cross?”

She watched it happen.

The easy grin went first. Then the relaxed set of his shoulders. He didn’t drop the axe so much as he set it down with ceremonial care — the way a man lays something dangerous to rest when he knows he might need to become a different kind of dangerous in a minute.

“Cross,” he repeated. Quiet.

“He said you’d know.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I know.”

He looked at her for one long second, just long enough to make sure she was okay, because that was who he was now, then wiped his hands on his jeans and walked past her toward the house. Not fast. But not slow, either.

Brutus lifted his massive head from the snow and watched him go.

So did Sage.

Cal came back into the kitchen still shirtless, sap on his forearm, snow melting in his beard, and picked up the phone.

“Cap?”

Isabelle’s pen stopped moving.

Mary Sue’s wooden spoon paused mid-stir, just barely.

Sage pulled the back door shut and stood very still by the island, watching her husband’s face.

“Yes, sir.”

A long pause. He listened. His jaw worked once. His free hand flexed at his side, old scars shifting across his knuckles as they opened and closed.

“Yes, sir. I understand.”

Another pause. Longer.

His face changed.

It was such a small shift that a stranger wouldn’t have seen it. But Sage had spent months learning every micro-expression on this man the way some people learned scripture. She saw the corner of his mouth flatten, the way his eyes went somewhere far from this warm kitchen, the muscle in his jaw setting into a different shape. Not anger. The shape of work. The shape of a man who had just been handed something heavy and was already, in his head, figuring out how to carry it.

Mary Sue’s spoon had gone completely still.

Isabelle was holding her breath. Sage could feel it from across the island.

Cal said, very quietly: “I’ll take care of it.”

And then, after a beat — softer, with something almost gentle underneath, like he was reassuring an old friend. “Yeah. You did the right thing calling me. I’ll take care of it.”

He listened for another moment.

“Yeah. I’ll be in touch.”

He set the phone down.

The kitchen went so quiet Sage could hear the low simmer of Mary Sue’s beef stew, Brutus’s claws clinking faintly outside as he shifted in the snow, and Cal’s breathing — slow, measured, the way he breathed when he was carefully packing something dangerous into a place inside himself where it couldn’t get loose.

She walked across the kitchen to him.

He turned to her. His eyes were soft for her, always for her, but behind that softness was the man she had only seen in pieces, the one she had never seen all of. And she knew, with two months of being his wife in everything but paperwork, that she was about to meet more of him.