Page 67 of Sunny Undone

“Nothing there,” he says, “but I sent Wren a follow up and told them the extra connection to the dean and the university donation. Every little bit of extra information helps Wren enormously.”

He slips his phone into his back pocket and wraps both his arms tightly around me. “What’s going on, Indy? What’s the food web you just mentioned?”

I lift my chin to face him. “There’s a whole ecosystem that coexists here. The algae feed microscopic animals. Those feed insect larvae. The larvae feed frogs and small fish. They feed wading birds, snakes, otters, and alligators. Everything is interconnected.”

Gripping the sides of his T-shirt, I try to quell the feeling of panic that the damage has already been done. “Sunny, if they poison the bottom of the chain, everything above it starves. It doesn’t happen overnight. Sometimes it takes weeks or months. This has been going on for a few weeks.”

He rubs his hands up and down my back. “We’re not going to let that happen, Indy. Wren is going to look into the Velaro Coastal Group and see what they can find.”

“Who are these people you know?” I ask.

“Wren is an elite hacker and Catfish’s…I don’t know the right term, because Wren is non-binary. I’m not sure what he calls them. Partner sounds boring as fuck.”

“Why don’t you just ask Wren what they prefer to be called rather than deciding it’s boring on their behalf?”

He considers what I’m saying. “Fine. But if they say partner, I reserve the right to privately think it needs more pizazz. Like, if you’re going to break free of rules, might as well go all in.”

“What word would you use for your partner, Sunny?”

“Life accomplice. Old lady. Chaos companion. Ride or die.”

“Ride or die sounds fatefully tragic.”

Sunny kisses my forehead. “We’re bikers, Indy. We love fatefully tragic. Dying on the open road, the chaos, the struggle. We’re American dirt mixed with an Irish poet’s soul and whiskey.”

“That’s a good analogy.”

“What would you call your ride or die?”

“After what you said, I suppose they all sound boring. Partner, probably. At least it’s accurate.”

Sunny snorts. “Let me guess. You also believe in civil partnerships and government legislation designed to protect individual financial interests.”

I turn my head to look at him. “As opposed to what? You just throw all your money into one pot, hand out a couple of mutual credit cards, and hope for the best?”

“No.”

“No?”

He shakes his head. “I want my person to know I’ve got them.”

Something about the way he says it makes me stop smiling. He’s deadly serious.

“In every way,” he continues. “I want them to know I can take care of us, our family, if we have one. If they want to work, they work, and our family will appreciate the additional financial contribution. But if they want to quit and paint tiny ceramic frogs for the rest of their life, they can do that too.”

“Why frogs?”

He tucks a loose curl of my hair behind my ear. “Because painting tiny frogs sounds like something you could get into.”

It makes me feel gooey inside that he’s talking about partners and life and ride or dies as if I’m at the center of it. There’s a fire in his eyes, like he’s excited about this.

“I’d want to trust them with everything I have. Not my half and their half. Ours. Here’s everything I worked for, everything I have, everything I’ve built. Everything I’m gonna build. Like, you know me better than anyone, so help me use it to build the best fucking life we can have.”

I stare at him. He has more passion for life than any self-help book I ever read. “You make life sound so…”

“So what?”

I grasp for the right word. “Breathtaking,” I say, finally. “Profound. Like something as ordinary as sharing a bank account is actually this enormous declaration of faith in another human being. Like it can be the cornerstone of building a beautiful life.”