Page 47 of Lady and the Butcher

I wanted to crawl into the seam of the bench and live there. I wanted to laugh like a crazy person. Instead, I pressed my fingers to the pulse in my throat and tried not to float away.

We turned down a larger street. The lamps threw broader circles. Voices carried from a block ahead, not private murmurs now, but the busy hum of people clustered at the seawall where the breeze was stronger. A tourist crowd. A few couples. A family with a stroller. A dog straining toward something he wanted to sniff.

“Breathe,” Atticus said softly.

“I’m trying.”

“Don’t try.” His hand came to rest on my knee. A simple weight. “Just be.”

Be what? Ruined? Free? A woman who had written a letter and then climbed into it? The answers rose and crashed like tide against stone.

We coasted nearer the cluster of bodies. The driver slowed to give the horse a breather, as if he sensed the shift in the street. Atticus’s hand slid higher again, not for mischief this time, just a reminder that I belonged to the moment and to him inside of it.

“Now,” he said, and there was a smile in his voice, “you can be furious.”

“Why.”

“Because we’re not alone anymore.”

“What—”

He tipped his chin toward the seawall, and my heart performed a long, sick drop that started in my chest and landed in my knees.

A woman in white stood near the end of the row of people, blonde hair sleek, posture clean, the faintest gold glinting at her throat.

Alicia.

Stephen’s Alicia.

She had a hand lifted in a half-finished gesture, mid-laugh at something a man had just said. The man turned his head. The streetlight caught his face.

Stephen.

I went still all the way through. There are kinds of stillness that are peace. This wasn’t one of them. This was the stillness of a fawn in tall grass when a shadow crosses the ground.

I was mortified.

The carriage rolled into the edge of light like a stage direction. Alicia’s eyes flicked toward the movement out of habit. Saw us. Paused. Recognition moved across her face, fast. Her smile thinned into surprise.

Stephen followed her gaze.

For a fraction of a second there was no sound in the world but the soft belly-deep exhale of the horse and the tiny tap my pulse made against the inside of my lip where I was biting it.

Atticus didn’t flinch. He didn’t look away. He didn’t bother to look sorry. He lifted his free hand and wiped his mouth with the back of his knuckles in a slow, unapologetic pass that left no doubt what we’d been doing in the dark.

Alicia’s eyes widened. Stephen’s mouth hardened.

The carriage kept moving, slow as judgment.

I forgot how to breathe. I remembered it too late.

And that’s where the night split.

16

For a beat the world went noise-less.

The carriage rocked once beneath us. Hooves clicked. Somewhere a gull heckled the tide. None of it landed.