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Not across from her — next to her, sliding into the booth looking like a woman who had earned the right to sit wherever she damn well pleased. Sage shifted over automatically, startled, and Mary Sue settled in beside her like she'd been sitting there her whole life.

The takeout bag landed on the table with a soft thud.

Cal looked at his mother. She looked back. The silent conversation was brief and complete — her eyes saying, I know what I'm doing and his saying, I know you do — and then she turned to Sage.

"Now," Mary Sue said, smoothing the front of her clean apron. "Let me get a look at you in proper lighting."

Sage went still.

Mary Sue looked. She took her time about it — the way she took her time with everything that mattered. Her eyes moved across Sage's face with a steady, unhurried attention that wasn't evaluating or judging but simply seeing. The piercings. The tattoo creeping past the collar. The cheekbones that were too sharp, the eyes that were too old. The defensive posture that would take time to heal.

“You’ve got good bones,” Mary Sue said. Not flattery — just fact. “You're running on empty, but we’ll fix that.” She said we'd like it was already settled. Like Sage’s next thirty meals had been quietly claimed without asking.

Sage opened her mouth. Closed it.

The smell hit her.

It rolled out of the takeout bag in a thick, sweet wave — warm butter, sugar, and something deep and chocolate-dark that cut straight through the diner’s greasy bacon haze and lit up every pleasure center she had. Her whole body turned toward it before she could stop herself, pulled like a magnet.

“Mary Sue…” Her voice came out stripped bare, no brat, no performance, just raw, naked want. “Please tell me that’s chocolate.”

Mary Sue looked at her, at the raw hunger written across Sage’s face. That old, familiar hunger every woman seemed to carry in her blood, the one battle women had been quietly losing ever since chocolate first sailed across the ocean. Like some secret, delicious betrayal the female heart had never quite gotten over. Yes, it whispered. This. This is what you’ve been starving for your whole life… and every woman before you knew it too.

"First of all," Mary Sue said, "call me Mama."

The word changed the air in the booth.

Sage’s face went perfectly blank. A stunned, wide-open kind that happens when something reaches down and touches bone.

Cal watched it all unfold. Watched the word take her — through her eyes, her shoulders, the sudden stillness of her hands on the table.

Mama.

Not Mary Sue. Not ma'am. Mama.

The word she hadn’t heard since Felicity. The word she’d screamed into Cal’s chest twenty hours ago while fever and nightmare dragged her under. The word that meant safe. Home. Someone who stays.

The word that had been stolen from her twice — once by death, once by a man who didn’t deserve to breathe — and now this iron-spined, steel-eyed, apron-wearing force of nature was handing it back to her like it was the simplest, most natural thing in the world.

Call me Mama.

The words felt like they’d already been true for years. Like they’d been true since she'd first stepped into the diner, when Mary Sue had pressed a hand over her own mouth and listened to a girl feverishly beg for help. All that was left now was for Sage to stop fighting it.

"Second of all," Mary Sue said, and opened the bag.

Thick, golden chocolate chip cookies sat inside, still warm, edges soft with melted dark chocolate. The smell rolled out — butter, brown sugar, something deep and comforting — and suddenly the whole booth smelled like every good memory wrapped in wax paper and handed over with no strings attached. Like kitchens and safety and love that didn’t ask questions.

Sage stared at the cookies. Then at Mary Sue. Then back at the cookies.

Her chin started to tremble.

"Oh no," she said. Her voice cracked on the second word. "No, no, no — I am not — I'm not going to⁠—"

She was already crying.

An ugly, full-body cry that hit without warning — the ones that scrunched her whole face, made her nose run, and turned her voice into something broken and small. She slapped her hands over her eyes, but it didn’t stop. Deep, shaking sobs rolled out of her, coming from somewhere old and lost.

Mary Sue didn’t hesitate. She slid her arm around Sage and drew her in — firm, warm, practiced. A hold that had comforted years of broken hearts and knew exactly how much pressure to give.