Page 29 of Butcher & Blackbird

Yeah, sorry. Just been chaotic. Work is full-on. I’m in meetings all day but I’ll text you when I can.

I’m sorry, my week got a bit out of control.

And I’m sorry for just showing up to your restaurant and not contacting you first. That was weird of me.

Each one of the past ten days since I got back from Boston has passed in a haze, and every time my phone has chimed with a message, my heart has rioted with a burst of nerves. I’ve been working myself up to get to this moment, but as I press send on my most recent message and place my burner phone face down on my lap, I’m already wondering if I should try to recall the text before Rowan has a chance to read it. I’m still staring at my carpet, wading through the depths of indecision when the phone buzzes on my lap.

It wasn’t weird. I wish I’d known you were there. I wish you’d stayed.

I turn the phone off and set it on the coffee table, then drop my head into my palms and hope that they can absorb me into another world.

One where I don’t have to feel anything.

Because revenge is easy.

But everything else is hard.

9

CREANCE

ROWAN

Iwatch from behind the elm across the street as the kid I paid knocks on the yellow door of 154 Jasmine Street. The door opens a moment later and she’s there, confusion etched on her beautiful face as she looks down at the paper bag the kid thrusts in her direction. I can’t make out the question she asks him, but I catch his little shrug before I dart behind the tree to avoid Sloane’s gaze as she scans the neighborhood. My grin spreads as I listen intently for the sound of the door closing and the kid’s shuffling footsteps as he leaves the house to approach my hiding spot.

“All done, mister,” he says as he grabs his bike where he left it leaning against the tree.

“She ask who it was from?”

“Yup.”

“You tell her anything?”

“Nope.”

“Good lad.” I slip the kid fifty dollars and he stuffs the bills into the back pocket of his jeans. “Same time tomorrow. We’ll meet at the mailbox down the street, yeah?”

“Cool. See ya.”

With that, the kid takes off on his BMX, one hundred dollars richer to spend on candy or video games or whatever the hell twelve-year-olds buy these days. He’s going to make out like a little demon if he sticks to our arrangement.

Give her the bag. Stick to the script. Fifty for the delivery, fifty when it’s done.

I pull out my burner phone, bringing up my most recent text exchange with Sloane.

I wish you’d stayed, my last message said. And she didn’t reply.

That was over a week ago. It’s been almost three weeks since she was standing in3 In Coachwith a look of absolute mortification in her eyes, as though she’d dumped her heart out on the floor just to have it stomped on. It fucking burned through me in a way I never expected. I thought I might convince her to stay and talk, but the timing could not have been worse with our friends coming in for Lachlan’s birthday lunch. In typical Sloane fashion, her first instinct was to take off, a feather in a North wind.

I can’t let her pull away any further, or she’ll slip through my fingers and I’ll never get her back.

I’m peering around the tree trunk toward the house when the phone vibrates in my hand.

Orzo…?

I lean against the bark and grin down at my phone.

???