Page 86 of Lady and the Butcher
The door opened.
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The world narrowed to a man-shaped dark against the porch light. The silhouette filled the threshold without trying. He stepped inside as if the air had asked him to.
“Lady,” Atticus said, voice low enough to hold the house up.
My knees went out from under me. The knife clanged against the floor. I was moving before I knew it, crashing into him, stupid with relief, half-sobbing, half-scolding. He closed the door with his heel and caught me at the waist, lifting, one arm under my thighs, the other around my shoulders, like he’d done it a hundred times and this time counted more.
He put me on the counter and bracketed my hips with his hands and looked at my face. “Breathe,” he said, and I did because he told me to. His palm came up to my jaw, thumb sweeping my cheekbone. “Are you hurt?”
“No,” I said. “Just?—”
His head tipped like he could hear what I couldn’t say. A muscle jumped in his jaw. He turned his face toward the back of the house and his entire body changed orientation—not bigger, not louder. Just readier. The air around him thickened like a storm that had found its center.
“Two on the back,” he said, as if I hadn’t already given those ghosts a name. “Another in a car.”
“How did you?—”
“Your father’s porch light hits the glass just so,” he said. “I can see shadows.” He flicked his gaze to my hand where the knife had fallen. “Stay on the counter. Keep the phone in your hand. If I tell you to duck, you duck.”
I nodded, because my body had learned very quickly that listening to him made things easier.
He stepped into the hall like the house belonged to him. No gun in his hand this time. He didn’t need one to be terrifying. He moved with a controlled quiet that was somehow louder than shouting.
A figure blotted the back window again, then flinched like he’d seen something that didn’t fit his plan. The knob turned a second time, faster. There was a hissed whisper. Atticus reached the door and flipped the deadbolt. The man on the other side jiggled harder.
Atticus leaned close to the wood. When he spoke, his voice was soft enough the door should have eaten it. It didn’t.
“Wrong house,” he said. “Wrong woman. Wrong life.”
A beat. The handle went dead-still. Then the shuffle of retreat—the kind of retreat that sounded like men who had just realized the forest they were in had a larger predator.
Tires rolled out front, slow. Dad’s truck. My breath whooshed out in a sound I’ve never made. Atticus’s hand lifted before I could launch myself off the counter. “Let me,” he said, and crossed to the front door.
He opened it with his stance telegraphing calm you could lay a city on. Dad stopped two steps into the porch light. He took in Atticus, the set of Atticus’s shoulders, the way my hands shook on the phone, and nothing else. He didn’t reach for the hammer still in his belt loop. He didn’t puff or posture. He said, “You’rethe man,” and Atticus said, “Yes, sir. The quiet between them spoke volumes.
The deputy’s cruiser rolled up then, blue lights soft in the dusk. Dad met them at the walk. He told them someone had messed with the back door. He didn’t say why. He didn’t say who. He let them write it down and poke their heads around the house and promise patrols. He shook their hands like a man who knew that the world held both kindly neighbors with badges and other men with other codes.
Inside, Atticus stood with his hands open at his sides until the last of the blue light bled away. He looked at me the way he had at the party in Charleston—unblinking, unhurried—except now there was something in it I hadn’t seen before. Fright wasn’t the right word. He was not frightened. He was furious in a way that put a hand on my back and pushed me behind him.
“I didn’t tell you I left,” I said, useless and true.
“You didn’t have to,” he said. “You didn’t answer. Mei did.” A beat. “Your brother did.”
“Stephen,” I whispered, thinking of gray, of thumbs-up. “He’s sick.”
“I know,” Atticus said.
“How did you get here so fast?”
“I was already close,” he said, which was not an answer and also the only answer he was going to give me right now. He stepped between my knees where I still sat on the counter and put his hands at the sides of my neck, thumbs under my jaw, fingers in my hair. The hold wasn’t rough. It was declarative. “Look at me.”
I did. His eyes were dark enough to swallow a promise.
“I didn’t bring this to you,” he said. “They followed you because of me. That’s mine to fix. Not yours to fear.”
“I was afraid,” I said. “Not of them. Of what this makes me. What this makes us.”
