Page 79 of Lady and the Butcher
I sat on the edge of the sofa and pressed my palms to my eyes. What was I doing?
The Nesting Place ran smoother than it ever had. Mei at the desk. Gianna handling orders. Reese covering births when I couldn’t. But that wasn’t the point. It was my shop. My hands had built it. Late nights. Overdrafts. Prayers that the rent check would clear. And I had left it to run on autopilot because a man with money and a cleaver tattoo told me to.
I trusted him. Trust didn’t stop the gnawing truth. I was disappearing into his world.
Determined to breathe, I tugged the curtains back, and cracked the window. Fresh air spilled in. Honeysuckle and asphalt. The small and safe I had picked on purpose. I inhaled until my lungs ached.
I needed space.
Not from him, exactly, though part of me knew that was the truest truth. Space from the way my body answered his before my brain caught up. Space from the danger I had watched him wield like a tool and a weapon. Space from the knock at his door that ended with blood on his knuckles and my pulse caught in my throat.
The thought formed slow, then sharp. I had to leave Charleston. Just for a little while.
My mind went first to Mom, and my back prickled. Moving under her roof would turn me inside out. She would know too much without me saying a word.
Then to Stephen. He was barely keeping himself together. Whatever “bug” he had was carving hollows under his eyes. He didn’t need me underfoot while he fought whatever that was.
That left Dad.
Richard Rogers had left Charleston a few years ago, right after the twins graduated from high school. He and Mom had kept the marriage together for us. They’d made the holidays look whole. They’d showed up at football games and choir nights. They’d kept Sunday dinner like a sacrament. Then they’d looked up at the idea of an empty house and faced it, honest. There hadn’t been enough left in common to hold them in the same place.
It wasn’t ugly. No slammed doors. No scorched earth. Two people who had given what they could and decided to step apart before resentment took root. They still came to birthdays. They still sat shoulder to shoulder at Thanksgiving. Divorce had untied them. It hadn’t unraveled us.
Dad had moved to St. Augustine to be near his parents. My grandparents were in their late seventies and slowing down. He bought a small cottage two blocks from the beach. He fixed gutters with his father. He fished at dawn. He came back to Charleston when he could, but his center of gravity shifted south.
I had always been close to him. He was steady. He taught me to drive a stick in the church parking lot and how to check a tire’s tread with a penny. He’s not dramatic. He loves the quiet way men like him love. By handing you a packed cooler and a flashlight before you know you’ll need both.
If I told him I needed a break, he would open the door. He wouldn’t ask for explanations I couldn’t give.
The thought landed in my chest like a stone and a buoy at once. Heavy, and it held me up.
I could go to St. Augustine for a week. Maybe two. Long enough to find myself again. Or, at least, remember what my own skin felt like when it wasn’t covered in Atticus’s fingerprints.
Fear arrived right behind the plan.
Atticus.
He wouldn’t like it. He’d hear running and not pausing. He would remind me of the money he’d poured into my shop. The net he’d tied so I wouldn’t drown. He had said it came without strings, but I wasn’t so sure that would hold true in practice. Not if I was choosing to walk away from it. From him.
I dropped my face into a pillow and groaned.
How do you tell a man like him that needing time is not rejection? How do you make space when his presence fills every corner of your life?
My phone buzzed on the nightstand. My stomach jumped. Not him.
Alana:You alive?
I stared. She had no idea how loaded the question was.
Barely,I typed, then erased it.Yeah. Home today. Just tired.
The dots appeared, then vanished. She let it sit.
I looked around. Laundry piles. Books stacked on the dresser. A basket with birth charts I hadn’t filed. My life looked like it was already paused. Like I had hit a button without noticing.
I’m not the woman who hits pause. I’m the woman who juggles. Who keeps the balls in the air. Who smiles through exhaustion because people need me.
Except lately, I hadn’t been.
