Page 93 of Lady and the Butcher
“It already is,” I whispered back.
Atticus didn’t wait to be invited. “Add me,” he said to the nurse. “Atticus Carver.”
The nurse looked up, took in the tattoo, didn’t flinch. “Are you family?”
“Yes,” he said, and his face made it true.
Darla’s eyebrows did a gymnast routine, but she didn’t say a word.
We bled into vials lined up like small red soldiers. The nurse labeled and barcoded and beeped. It felt absurd that something as stupid and ordinary as blood could be the door between this and a different ending, but the world is full of small hinges.
While we waited for the first pass of typing, the room settled into a kind of vigil. Mom and Dad—divorced for years—stood shoulder to shoulder at the foot of the bed, trading small tasks and quiet looks like an old choreography theyhadn’t forgotten. Curiosity kept sliding back to Atticus: the twins sneaking glances, Darla measuring him the way she measures everyone who might matter. Alicia stayed closest to Stephen, fingers threaded with his. She looked a touch unsure at the edges because she was new, but she fit—protective, attentive, already reading our family’s rhythms and matching them beat for beat. Voices dropped. Movements slowed.
The room agreed, without saying it, to hold the line together.
At one point, Dad took a seat next to me and watched Atticus with the particular brand of masculine appraisal that isn’t about threat so much as capacity. “He’s steady,” Dad said quietly.
“He is,” I said, and it landed in the space between us where it needed to.
“He’s known Stephen a long time.”
“Yes”
Dad nodded once, absorbing it like a nail going home. “Then he’s ours, even if we didn’t see him coming.”
Atticus didn’t sit. He ran on a current I could feel when I stood too close, like a transformer humming behind a fence. He stepped out to make two phone calls in the kind of voice that flattens argument. When he came back, some line in him had shifted from reactive to resolved. He caught my eye and didn’t have to move his mouth for me to hear him.
Finally, a soft knock, then the door eased open. The transplant coordinator stepped in with a folder hugged to her chest and the kind of smile people practice for hard rooms. “I’ve got preliminary HLA typing,” she said. “We’ll still run the high-resolution testing, but I’m comfortable saying we likely have a match.”
We held our breath as if oxygen was the price of the next word.
31
“Atticus,” she said. “You’re a strong match.”
My knees didn’t go out. They went steady in a way that felt like new construction under an old house. Darla exhaled a laugh that broke and remade itself. Mom said “Oh,” the way she did when rain started just as she was getting the clothesline right. The twins fist-bumped like idiots. Dad looked at Atticus and did the nod again, that male offering that meansI see what you just put on the table and I won’t waste it.
Stephen turned his head on the pillow, slow, because everything was slower now. His eyes were glassy, not from tears—from chemo that had already begun to move through him. He found Atticus, and the corner of his mouth did its best.
“Always knew you were useful,” he rasped.
Atticus’s mouth tilted, the closest thing to a smile his face gave. He stepped in and wrapped his hand around Stephen’s, and I watched two pasts hoist a present up between them. “Took you long enough to admit it,” he said.
“What are the odds, man?” Stephen asked. “Who could have imagined this?”
“It will be my honor.”
We went through the speeches and signatures. The coordinator explained the process again, the days and factors and Neupogen if they chose peripheral instead of marrow harvest. Atticus listened like men listen when the plan is a weapon they’re allowed to wield. He asked two questions that made the coordinator pause long enough to adjust what she’d thought she needed to say. Then he said, “Whatever gets him what he needs the fastest without stealing pieces he can’t spare later,” and I loved him in a way that frightened me because it didn’t need sex or danger to stand up on its own.
In the tiny family kitchen on Stephen’s floor, I washed a cup for the sake of a fight I could win. Atticus came in and closed the door with his foot. The hum of the soda machine filled the corners.
“You didn’t have to,” I said to the wall first.
“Of course, I did,” he said.
I turned. He was close, but he didn’t touch me. The cleaver on his throat was half-hidden by hospital blue. “I don’t know what to say,” I admitted, the words skidding out before the part of me that likes to look like control could stop them. “You scare men with a sentence. And you’re about to bleed for my brother.”
“You asked for danger,” he said, not unkind. “I showed you the truth of me. Not the whole. The part you thought you wanted.”
