Page 95 of Lady and the Butcher
Atticus came in and sat beside me like we’d agreed on it a long time ago. He didn’t look at the cross. He looked at me.
“Do you want me to stay tonight?” he asked. “In the chair by your brother’s bed.”
“Yes,” I said, and it wasn’t strategic. It was the answer to the question under the question.
“Okay,” he said, and that was that.
We walked back together. He didn’t reach for my hand. He didn’t need to. The space between our bodies behaved itself in a way that felt like respect and claim at once.
The last thing I heard before sleep elbowed me was Atticus’s voice in the corner where the chair lived. Low, sure, saying nothing to no one, and still somehow telling the night what it was allowed to do.
The doors would shut. The men who’d sniffed my edges would learn what it cost to step too close to anything with my name on it. My brother would have blood and bone he could borrow. And me—I would have to choose the truth I could live inside.
When I opened my eyes again the world was kinder than it had been. A nurse whispered, “Good morning,” like everything was going to be okay. Atticus unfolded himself from the chair with a wince he didn’t think anyone saw. I saw it. He caught me looking and let me.
“Pre-op at four tomorrow,” the coordinator said from the doorway, like she’d been waiting for her moment. “We’re moving quickly. It’s what he needs.”
“Good,” Atticus said.
It was good. Very, very good.
Until Stephen was healthy again, nothing else really mattered.
32
Guilt came in waves. Not the sharp kind that bites and is done. The low, dragging kind.
I had seen Stephen thinning out. I had heard the lie in his “I’m good.” My gut had tapped and tapped. I told myself not to hover. I told myself he was busy. I told myself I was busy, which was the prettier version of distracted. I let the heat and noise of Atticus fill every spare corner of my head. I pulled back from Atticus because his dangerousness set off alarms in my bones. While I was stepping away from the fire, my brother was slipping under water in the next room of my life.
The thought tried to split me. Then another rose under it, slower and steadier. Maybe it had all moved in the only order that could have saved us. If I had not written that reckless letter. If Atticus had not walked into my night like an answer. If I had not left him, scared and righteous. If I had not run to St. Augustine and felt the shadow of a man trailing me and called the one person who could make shadows back up. If he had not come. If he had not known Stephen from a freshman year that had turned boys into something else. If he had not said yes to pain like it was a bill he was built to pay.
Everyiflinked to the next. A chain across a river. A way over.
Behind me, I could hear the small sounds that make a family a family even in a hospital. Mom rustling a bag she had already organized. Alicia’s voice low and sure at Stephen’s ear. Dad’s chair scraping back because he cannot sit when waiting is the work. Atticus’s footfall at the door, that weight I had learned without meaning to.
I looked at his reflection in the glass instead of turning. Broad shoulders in hospital blue. Hands empty and dangerous, anyway. Eyes on me.
The world had called him butcher. I had called him danger. He was both. He was also the man who had put a tray of pear and almonds in front of me because he noticed hunger when I would not. The man who would lie awake in a vinyl chair to keep watch over my brother’s sleep. The man who had said, without flinch, that my name would never be leverage again.
I loved him.
The word arrived quiet and complete. Not a flare. A fact. It did not ask permission. It did not bargain. It just sat down in my chest and made a home.
I thought love would feel like falling. This felt like landing. Like a dock that holds when the tide swings. Like two feet on old wood and a hand finding yours without looking. It terrified me in the ways that matter. It steadied me in the ways that save.
I closed my eyes and let the guilt and the love sit beside each other. Both true. Both mine. I could hold more than one thing. I teach that to women in labor. You can be afraid and brave at the same time. You can hurt and still move. You can grieve what should never have been asked of your body and still push toward light. Now, I would teach it to myself.
I had been wrapped up in him. I had been scared of him. I had been wrong to ignore my hunch. And maybe the only reason my brother had a shot was because a dangerous man loved meenough to choose a different life and bleed for the one I loved first.
I turned then and went to him. Not to collapse. To stand with him. I put my hand on his chest where the shirt hid a portion of the cleaver. He looked down at me and didn’t ask for anything. His heart beat steady under my palm.
“I’m going to be better,” I said. Not penance. A promise. “With Stephen. With you. With the parts of me that make excuses.”
His jaw worked, once. “You don’t owe me better,” he said.
“I owe me,” I said. “And I want you.”
Something eased in his shoulders. Not a whole inch. Enough.
