Page 88 of Butcher & Blackbird
A sound of anguish bleeds into the line from Lark’s end of the call. Whatever glue holds my heart together enough to keep it beating softens with the sound of Lark’s distress on my behalf. Jagged points of pain lance me from the inside out, scoring muscle and bone.
“He couldn’t have… You can’t be serious…” Lark whispers.
“Dead serious, unfortunately,” I reply, putting the phone on speaker as I sit on the couch and pull Winston onto my lap. “I just booked a flight back to Raleigh. I want to get out of Boston right away. Can I stay at your place for a little bit until I figure out what the fuck to do with the tenants in my house?”
“Of course. Always. As long as you want. Text me your flight details and I’ll change my flight so we can leave together.” A string of swears and disbelief flows from Lark as I text her my flight number. When the details come through, she repeats the information before she heaves a long sigh. “Oh sweetie, there has to be some kind of mistake. That manlovesyou.”
My huffed laugh is bitter and sardonic. “That’s what I thought too. But he made it pretty clear that he doesn’t. I’m a‘fucking psycho’, apparently, and therefore can neither love nor be loved. I guess that’s not news. Turns out, I’m too psycho even for him.”
“That’s what he said to you? And you didn’t pluck his eyeballs out and flush them down the toilet?”
A faint smile passes over my lips and fades away just as quickly as it appears. “I probably should have.”
“What else did he say?”
“I dunno, some weird stuff,” I reply, trying to remember the recent details that already seem hazy beneath the pain. “He said I needed to go home, and at first I thought he meant here, to the apartment. But then he said ‘no, to Raleigh’. When I asked why, he wouldn't give me a reason at first, just that it wasn’t working between us and that the restaurants had to take priority.”
“But I thought itwasworking.”
“Me too.” I pick at Winston’s fur, replaying every word of our breakup, even though I’d give anything to forget them all. “I asked him to talk it through together. That was something he’d said at Fionn’s place, that we would talk about stuff like normal people do.”
“That sounds reasonable and pretty non-psycho to me.”
“Yeah. Same. Then he said something kind of strange.” My brow furrows as I open the search function on my home screen and type in the word ‘lobby’. It brings up a message from Rowan as one of the options, and I press on it to open his text. “He said that he ‘never wanted to be like everybody else’. He claimed specifically that he’d told me that on the way to the Best of Boston gala on April tenth.”
“Okay… what’s weird about that?”
“I don’t remember him saying that. Not ever. And the gala wasn’t on the tenth.”
Lark pauses. She’s probably thinking I’ve lost my shit, and she might be right. “Maybe he got the date wrong?”
“But the gala was two days before his birthday, on the twenty-seventh. Don’t you think that’s kind of strange that he wouldn’t remember that?”
“Sweetie, I dunno. If he’s in the midst of a breakup and obviously stressed about restaurant shit, he might have gotten the dates wrong.”
“I guess, but then he corrected himself and said the thirteenth. It’s thewayhe said it, the way he put it all together. It was just weirdly specific,” I reply, scrolling through messages he and I shared around those dates. “He said something else about our conversation in the car on the way to the event, that ‘the restaurant was the only thing that made sense in his life’. But I’m positive he never said that.”
“Hun, Sloane, I love you. I love you more than anyone, sweetie, but he might not fully remember all the details. I mean, he’s clearly fucked in the head if he’s going to give you up, so who knows what’s going on upstairs, you know?”
Lark keeps talking, explaining every reasonable theory for why he could have said what he said.
But I don’t hear a word as I push the cat from my lap and rise to my feet.
Because I’m staring at a text I’d sent him at the end of March, the same day he’d called and asked me to be his date for the awards.
Do you think this gala will have an ice cream buffet? If so, I should probably let them know that you only accept freshly-milked semen.
My blood turns to shards of ice in my veins.
I remember holding that white tub in my hands in Thorston’s kitchen as I read the homemade label to Rowan.
April tenth to thirteenth.
I know what he said on the way to the gala. I remember it as clearly as I remember the warmth of the kiss he’d pressed to my neck in the lobby, the tingle of electricity in my skin when he’d taken my hand across the leather seat during the drive.‘At least one thing is going right at3 In Coach’, he told me.‘Stuff inevitably goes wrong. It just… feels like a lot lately.’
Lark is still talking when I say, “I have to go,” then disconnect the call.
My fingers are cold and numb when I open the app for the camera I installed in the restaurant kitchen.
