Chapter 7
W e turned. We breathed.
Somewhere, Mom whooped as the DJ, against his better judgment, slid into something with a beat.
A cluster of Stephen’s colleagues cheered.
Alicia’s laugh carried—bright, unbothered—then softened as she tugged Stephen into a slow spin.
He grimaced, pretended to hate it, then gave in, looking ten years happier.
“You’re good with your family,” Atticus said, voice low, meant for no one but me.
“I’m stubborn with my family,” I corrected.
“Same thing,” he said. “Stubborn is just love with armor.”
I stared up at him for a second longer than polite. “Who taught you to say things like that?”
He didn’t answer. He didn’t need to.
We swayed, breathed, hovered. The song changed, pealed out, the DJ finding his courage. The air shifted as more people flooded the dance floor. Atticus eased his hand from my waist like the break of a seal. The night rushed back in.
“You want another drink?” he asked.
“I should …” I glanced at my clutch like it might sprout a notification just to help me make my decision. The screen stayed blank. “Yes. Water. Please.”
He nodded once and moved toward the bar with that unhurried efficiency, like there was no scenario in which what he wanted was not eventually his. I stared at his back, the fine cut of the jacket, the way people moved around him without fully realizing they were giving him space.
“You look like a cat watching a window,” Alicia murmured, reappearing at my elbow.
I startled. “Do I?”
She followed my gaze. “He’s … something.”
“That’s one word.”
“How many would get me in trouble?”
“At least three.”
She laughed, then sobered, scanning my face. “All good?”
I nodded, then adjusted it to the truth. “I’m … wired.”
“Birthday parties will do that.” She nudged my shoulder. “And unknown quantities in good suits.”
“I like known quantities,” I lied.
“Do you?” She tipped her head. “Stephen says you like a challenge.”
“Stephen says a lot of things.”
“He does.” She smiled, not defensive, just fond. “For what it’s worth, I like you.”
I blinked. “Me?”
“You come in like you own your space. It makes other people find theirs.” She shrugged. “Also you saved me from a ‘so you’re the nanny’ question earlier by standing next to me and glaring at a man until he walked away.”
I snorted. “That was for me. I was bored.”
“Uh-huh.” Alicia squeezed my forearm, then her attention snagged on something across the yard. “Francine is conducting a conga line. Gotta go.”
“Do you, now?” I asked. My smile was real.
Atticus returned then, water in one hand, a fresh bourbon in the other. He passed me the bottle, and our fingers brushed on purpose.
“Thank you,” I said, lifting it to my lips.
Alicia took the hint with the grace of a woman who’d navigated more complicated rooms than this. “I’m going to go make sure your mother doesn’t accidentally crowd-surf,” she said lightly, and disappeared back into the fray.
Funny how Stephen hadn’t mentioned Alicia to me—not once—and yet she’d slipped into the family current like she’d always known our eddies and undertows.
Watching her fold my mother’s stubbornness into laughter and keep pace with the twins’ chaos, I felt something unclench.
Whatever else we were bracing for, I wanted my brother to have this: ease, love, a person who chose him on purpose.
“You’re good with her,” Atticus said.
“Alicia? I’m … reserving judgment.”
He watched me over the rim of his glass, pleased. “You’re honest.”
“Sometimes, I’m tired.”
“Tired and honest is still honest.”
We fell into another small silence, the comfortable kind that’s rare with strangers. Except he didn’t feel like a stranger, and I didn’t have the bandwidth to unpack that without lying down.
“You work with Stephen?” I asked. Innocent question. Fishing line.
“No.” His mouth curved. “You keep trying to put me in a box.”
“Occupational hazard. I label things for a living.”
“You label babies. Not me.”
“Babies don’t argue.”
“They do. Loudly.” His gaze didn’t waver. “You waiting on your phone, Lady?”
My chest squeezed. “Maybe.”
“You think you’ll miss him if you’re here.”
How would he know that … unless?—
It had to be him. Had to be. But how?
The world narrowed. I hated him for being right. I liked him more for saying it.
“I think …” I let my eyes close for a beat, forced a breath to steady. “I think I wrote something I can’t take back.”
He turned the bourbon in his hand, light catching the amber. “People always think that. That words lock them into something. They forget the other thing that’s true.”
“What’s that?”
“That sometimes you write exactly the thing that frees you.” His gaze slid to my mouth, then back to my eyes. “You’ll know the difference when it knocks.”
My heart hit the bars of my ribs hard enough to bruise. I looked at him and saw the danger I’d joked about. Yet, I looked at him and saw safety, anyway.
It made no sense. It made all the sense.
Behind us, a cheer went up—someone had brought out a huge cake.
Stephen shouted something into a microphone.
Alicia held his knee like she owned it. Mom clapped off-beat and cried a little.
Darla smiled with her eyes. The twins attempted harmonies.
The lights glowed warmer. The moss breathed. The city hummed.
Atticus set his empty glass on a high-top table without looking. “Walk with me,” he said, not a question.
I glanced toward the cake, then at my clutch, then at him. “Where?”
He tipped his head toward the darker edge of the lawn where the oaks crowded a little closer and the bricks gave way to packed earth. “Just there.”
I should have said no. I should have quoted safety statistics or made a joke about serial killers or told him I needed to watch my brother mangle a birthday wish.
Instead, I followed.
The music softened as we stepped under the densest arcs of moss. The party receded by degrees. Crickets took over the soundtrack. The air cooled an inch, and the scent of damp soil rose up, steady and old.
He stopped when the lights were mostly behind us. Not touching. Close enough that if I lifted my hand, my fingers would find the stubble at his jaw. His tattoo caught the edge of the glow, blade rendered in shadow and light.
“Tell me something true,” he said.
“I can’t whistle. Not even a little,” I blurted.
His mouth curved. “Try again.”
“I …” I looked at his throat instead of his eyes, which did not help. “I want—” The word snagged. I cleared it. “I want to stop thinking.”
“That,” he said softly, “is easy.”
“It doesn’t feel easy.”
“That’s because you think in defense.” His hand lifted, slow enough that I could flinch if I wanted to. I didn’t. He brushed a curl off my shoulder, let his fingers rest there like a question. “What happens if you think in hunger instead?”
I forgot English for a second. When it returned, it didn’t sound like my voice. “I’m at my brother’s party.”
“You are.” His thumb traced the barest arc against my skin. “And I’m not going to do a thing you don’t ask me to.”
“I’m not going to ask,” I said, which was a lie.
“Not tonight,” he said, like he’d just read the script for a future I couldn’t see yet.
A shout from the party broke across the grass—Max yelling for me to get in the photo, Mom insisting on “one with just the girls.” My life, bright and loud and mine.
I stepped back the distance of a breath. “I should?—”
“You should,” he agreed, not moving, not pressing.
I smoothed my dress with hands that did not need to be that shaky. “Thank you for the dance,” I said, because I was a woman who survived on good manners when desire threatened to eat me.
“Anytime, Lady,” he said.
The word slid over my skin again, found every place he hadn’t touched, and lit it, anyway.
“Simone!” Darla’s voice floated over the lawn, nearer now. “Mom says to get over here.”
I groaned. “Gotta go.”
Atticus’s mouth did that curve again. “Sounds like it.”
I started to step past him. He angled a fraction closer, just enough to force me to choose. I did. I brushed the edge of him, anyway, like testing a flame. Heat licked my ribs.
“Do you—” The question fell out before I could decide to be someone who didn’t ask. “Do you live here?”
“Sometimes,” he said. “Enough.”
“Vague,” I said, relieved and irritated at once.
“True,” he said.
I held his eyes another beat—sharp, ice-blue—then filed the feeling away for later, and backed off.
“Enjoy the cake,” I said.
“I don’t like cake,” he replied, as if that were a reasonable thing for a human to admit.
“What kind of monster?—”
“The kind who prefers something with bite.”
I choked on nothing. “Goodnight, Atticus.”
“Goodnight, Lady.”
I fled before my knees made any more choices without me, out of the shadowed edge and back into the gold of the party. The camera flash found me as I slipped in beside Mom. She kissed my temple.
“What was that?” she whispered.
“Nothing,” I lied.
“Mm.” She didn’t believe me and didn’t push. “Smile.”
I did. The shutter clicked. The world did its thing—spun, laughed, sang.
For the next hour I let it. I shouted the chorus to a song I hadn’t admitted I liked since college.
I watched Stephen blow out candles and pretend he hadn’t made the same wish three years running.
I let Alicia tuck a stray curl behind my ear and tell me my eyeliner was holding up against humidity like a champ.
I told the twins if they did a cartwheel near the cake table I would disown them publicly.
I let Mom sway with me beneath the oaks to a Sinatra track and remembered that my body could be held without also being asked to take care of everything.
And still—through all of it—I felt him at my back. Not close. Not hovering. Just … there. A point on a compass I kept circling toward, even as I dutifully did laps around the party.
When the night finally thinned and people peeled away—hugging, promising brunch, losing shoes in the grass—I found myself at the edge of the brick path that led toward the exit. The air had cooled enough to feel almost kind. I checked my phone one last time.
Nothing.
I wasn’t sure if that was relief or disappointment. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.
“Lady.”
My head turned before I told it to. He stood a few feet away, hands in his pockets, tie still nonexistent, the cleaver at his throat a dark suggestion under the last of the lights.
“You leaving?” he asked.
“I am,” I said. “I have a class in the morning. Newborn care for first-time dads.”
His mouth curved—there and gone. “Sounds entertaining.”
“It is. Last week a man asked if it was normal for babies to breathe like hamsters.”
“And?”
“It is. Sometimes.”
He stepped closer, nothing dramatic, just another inch that felt like a mile. “You going to be here tomorrow?”
“At the Cistern?” I huffed a laugh. “God, no.”
“In this city.”
“Yes.”
“Good.” He paused. The quiet wrapped around us. “Then, I’ll see you soon.”
“When?” It came out sharper than I meant, the word snagging on every nerve that had been humming since the full moon.
He didn’t answer. Of course, he didn’t. He just looked at me like a decision.
I lifted my chin. “You didn’t answer my earlier question either.”
“Which one?”
“What you are.”
He held my gaze, unblinking. The night seemed to lean in. “Atticus.”
It wasn’t the answer I asked for. It was, somehow, exactly the one I needed. The name slid into my bones like something that had been waiting for it.
He tipped his head—a nod that wasn’t quite permission and wasn’t quite a promise—and stepped back. “Goodnight, Simone.”
My name in his mouth did not come out like anyone else said it. It came out like mine.
“Goodnight,” I managed.
I turned and walked toward the gate before my face could confess anything else. I didn’t look back.
I didn’t have to.
I could feel him—heat, gravity, storm—lingering where the brick met the grass, waiting for a tomorrow he hadn’t defined and I wasn’t sure I could survive.
My phone stayed quiet in my hand all the way to the car, screen black as the space between the oaks. I slid into the driver’s seat, pressed my palms flat against the steering wheel, and let out a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding since the moment he’d said Lady .
“Okay,” I told the dark. “Okay.”
The engine turned over. The lights came on. I drove into the Charleston night, and tried not to wish for a knock on my door that would split my life into before and after.