Page 11 of Lady and the Butcher
I cried like I always do. Quietly. A leak, not a flood. It’s not my story, but my body notices, anyway. There’s that click again. The one that says something began here, and I witnessed it.
Lexie did her capable magic while we did ours—warm blankets, shocked laughter, the first latch that always makes my heart skip a beat. We whispered the same lies and truths we always do:You did itandIt was always youandHe’s so beautiful I could die.
An hour later, the tub was drained, the bed made, lights lower, baby pink and full-bellied and stubbornly awake because he did not come to sleep through life. Harry snored in the chair with the worst ergonomic design in Charleston. Talia stroked tiny hair with the look of someone who had found the edge of herself and came back with a trophy.
My body remembered tiredness all at once. The high faded to a soft hum. I stuffed extra snacks on Talia’s bedside table, told her she was a goddess, told Harry to drink a gallon of water when he woke, and drifted back toward the lobby, on-call bag shoulder-biting, hair doing that thing where it pretends to be a golden halo but is actually golden chaos.
Lexie caught me at the door, leaning a hip against the counter. “You look like the moon chewed you up and spit you out.”
“She did,” I said. “Right into a birth pool.”
She smiled with her eyes, which is the only way I accept smiles after 2 a.m. “Text me when you get home.”
“I will.”
Outside, the night had tipped toward morning. That pillow-blue hour when the birds gossip and the city tries to remember how to be quiet. The MUSC windows glowed like a constellation.
I leaned against my car and breathed the air like it might tell me who I was.
Doula. Sister. Shop owner. Head witch of the backyard bonfire. Woman who could locate a cervix with her eyes closed and could not, for the life of her, locate her own desire.
I laughed into the empty lot. It sounded a little hysterical, a little thrilled.
Because new life always tipped something in me. Not a baby fever—God, no, I didn’t want that for myself. Not anytime soon. But a reminder. Of what bodies are for. Of what pain can become when it’s invited. Of what surrender does when you stop narrating it.
I unlocked the car. Slid in. My phone lit the dash with three texts:
Mom:You up? Gardenias blooming like crazy. Bring clippers tomorrow.
Darla:Milo says tell you his mustache is not a phase.
Unknown:—S
My throat closed. Heat sprinted through every hallway of my body like a fire alarm tripped.
I tapped. Opened.
No new message. Just the last thing I’d sent—to Alpha Mail. The draft I’d written in the Notes app before I’d had the guts to paste it into an email.
I closed it fast, like it might burn my fingertips.
“Coward,” I told myself.
I drove home the long way. Past the harbor where the water made that hush-hush sound at the seawall. Past the quiet bars and the drunk girls eating pizza on the curb in sparkly heels that now wanted to be flats. Past the corner where a man in a neon vest hosed off the night.
I thought about the letter. About the way my body had responded to a man I hadn’t met yet like he’d already touched me. About how I’d spent hours in a room begging a womanI adore to let go—and how little I’d practiced that sermon on myself.
By the time I pulled into my driveway, the eastern sky had gone soft and gray, and the big live oak over my house looked like a ship’s sails in silhouette. My yard still wore the aftermath of the ceremony—the cushions, the smudged bowl, the empty jar of Moon Mist.
I went inside, dropped my bag, and poured a glass of water. My body hummed. My brain, traitor, clicked over to the list—restock nipple balm, email the cloth diaper vendor, update next week’s newborn care class, call Stephen about the party, remind Mom to stop micromanaging the twins.
I sank onto the sofa and set an alarm for two hours—sleep in installments, the doula way. My eyes closed. My phone buzzed one more time.
Unknown number:Lady.
Just that. One word. Capital L, like a title. Like a dare.
I sat up so fast I saw stars. The message stared back at me, simple as a match.
