Chapter 23
A week passed, though it didn’t feel like time had moved in a straight line. It felt bent, warped, like the light you see when you look at water through glass.
During the days, I was still Simone Rogers, doula and shop owner.
My phone buzzed with questions about Braxton Hicks and breast pumps.
I showed first-time mothers how to swaddle and reminded second-time mothers that they really did know what they were doing.
I stocked lanolin, arranged diapers in neat towers, and pretended my hands were as steady as they had always been.
But at night—at night I was something else. Atticus’s loft became my second orbit. The hum of the river, the glow of the skyline, his mouth on mine until every nerve in my body rewrote its alphabet.
I tried to keep the worlds separate. Tried to believe I could live under two suns without getting burned.
It didn’t work.
Because no matter how carefully I stacked bottles on shelves, the memory of Atticus’s hand around a man’s throat followed me.
It bled into my bones, into the way my skin prickled whenever the door chimed at the shop, like I half expected another warehouse man to come staggering in, coughing and red-faced.
And yet, when I crawled into Atticus’s bed, when he pulled me under him with that exact balance of control and care, my body didn’t protest. It begged.
I was a contradiction, and I knew it.
Stephen stopped by on Wednesday. He leaned against the counter like he had after every soccer game of my childhood, sweaty and casual, except this time his color was wrong. His cheeks looked hollow, his skin pale in a way that had nothing to do with work fatigue.
“You’re still not sleeping,” I said.
He shrugged, smiling with effort. “Who sleeps? You never did.”
I wanted to press, but he veered the conversation toward me instead, asking if business was good, if the new staff were working out, if I’d eaten breakfast. Brother questions that sounded caring but felt like cover. His laugh was thinner than it should have been.
When Atticus walked in ten minutes later, carrying a brown bag that smelled like fresh biscuits and eggs, Stephen’s eyes sharpened.
“You two are …” He didn’t finish the sentence. Didn’t need to. His gaze bounced between us, measuring, cataloging.
Atticus didn’t flinch. He set the bag on the counter like it was already his place to put it. “Eat,” he told me, then tipped his chin at Stephen. “You, too. You look like hell.”
Stephen bristled, the way brothers do when someone else notices what you’ve been trying to hide. But he took a biscuit, anyway.
I tried not to shake at how easily Atticus claimed space. My brother’s space. My space.
That night, at the loft, Atticus stripped me slow, every button deliberate, every piece of fabric tossed aside like it had no right to keep him from my skin.
“You’ve been walking around all day with this look,” he said, lips brushing my collarbone.
“What look?”
“Like you’re trying to convince yourself I’m not under your skin.” His teeth grazed. “But I am.”
I wanted to deny it, to hold some part of myself back. But then his fingers slid inside me, steady and patient, his eyes locked on mine while my body gave up every lie.
He ruined me again, pressed to the tall steel window of his river loft, the dark water below throwing our bodies back at us.
Barges hummed, a horn cut the night, and he held me with his mouth at my throat, voice rough, telling me to give it all.
I did. I gave him everything, again and again, until I couldn’t remember what it had felt like not to.
After, he carried me to the bed, laid me on my stomach, and traced lazy lines down my back with his knuckles.
“You’re quiet,” he said.
“I’m thinking.”
“About?”
I almost said Stephen. Almost said the way my brother’s skin had looked gray at the edges, the way his laugh had sounded borrowed. But I didn’t. Instead I said, “About how I keep wanting more when I told myself this was supposed to be one night.”
His chuckle was low, dangerous. “You think one night could have been enough?”
“I thought it had to be.”
“Then you thought wrong.”
I hadn’t been shopping for a man. I’d written a letter for a single night because that felt safe.
Clean edges. No birthdays to remember. No toothbrush left by a sink I would have to explain to myself.
I had wanted a door I could close in the morning and sweep behind.
I had not wanted a life that kept showing up with coffee and plans.
He wasn’t my type, anyway. My type wore soft flannels and apologized for taking the last cinnamon roll. My type attended barbecues, flirted with my friends in a way that made no one nervous, and texted photos of their dog wearing bandanas. Right?
Atticus walked into rooms and made gravity look like it worked for him. He didn’t apologize. He looked like a man who would never remember a bake sale in his life, and yet he had ordered a milk fridge for my shop and reminded me to drink water.
I tried to picture the two of us molded into something domestic.
Sunday mornings that didn’t smell like danger.
Thanksgiving with my mother and a pie he had somehow won at a church auction.
Him at a folding table at a neighborhood block party, pretending to care about cornhole while the streetlight hit the cleaver tattoo just right and sent three dads back to their grills.
I couldn’t see it. Not clearly.
He felt like tide and steel. I felt like porches and baby blankets and coffee in a thermos. We did not stack.
Still, I kept walking toward him. Not because I believed we fit, but because my body leaned the way a plant leans toward a window. It felt reckless. It felt holy. It felt like I was going to have to learn a new shape or break.
Friday bled into Saturday. The Nesting Place ran smoother than it ever had. Mei and Gianna made lists before I even thought of them. Reese covered a birth that would have pulled me across town. For the first time in years, I had hours that didn’t already belong to someone else.
Which meant those hours belonged to Atticus.
Saturday night, he showed me another side of his world.
We were in the loft, half dressed, my shirt hanging open, his hand spread low on my belly, when his phone buzzed sharp against the table. He glanced once, jaw tightening.
“Stay here,” he said, pulling on his jacket.
“No.”
His brows rose.
“If you’re going, I’m going.” The words came out steadier than I felt.
He studied me for a long beat. Then, with a slow nod: “Stay close.”
The car ride was different this time. No music. Just the hum of tires on wet pavement. His face carved in concentration, his hands steady on the wheel.
We pulled into a dockside yard. Shadows stretched long, broken by floodlights and stacks of containers. Men moved like ants, some carrying clipboards, others hauling crates.
I stayed close like I’d promised, my pulse in my throat.
A man in a leather jacket stepped forward. His eyes flicked to me, lingered, then back to Atticus.
Atticus’s hand closed over mine, tight, possessive. “Not yours to look at,” he said, quiet but lethal.
The man’s eyes dropped. Fast.
I shivered. Part fear. Part heat.
The deal that followed was short, clipped. Numbers spoken, a crate inspected, a signature scrawled. But underneath the efficiency, tension simmered.
One of the men muttered about “late shipments.”
Atticus moved before the words had settled. His hand landed on the man’s shoulder, heavy, the kind of weight that could be guidance or threat depending on how it was received. “Late isn’t an option. Not if you want to keep moving freight through this river.”
The man paled. His throat worked around a swallow that looked painful. He nodded once, jerky.
“Good,” Atticus said, voice low but carrying. “Then don’t make me repeat myself.”
The silence that followed wasn’t empty—it was charged, like the air just before lightning splits it open.
I could feel the other men in the room watching, their attention darting between the wiry man pinned by Atticus’s grip and the crates stacked like silent witnesses along the wall.
Forklifts idled. Clipboards froze in midair.
The entire warehouse seemed to hold its breath, waiting to see what happened next.
I should have been horrified. My brother’s voice in my ear warned that this wasn’t sunlight, that men like Atticus didn’t bend without breaking something. And maybe I should have listened. But standing there, my pulse hammering, I felt the ground tilt under me.
It wasn’t just that he held the man like that—it was the way the entire space recognized him in that moment. Watching him command that room was like watching gravity bend. Terrifying. Magnetic. The kind of force you didn’t argue with, because arguing meant you’d already lost.
The wiry man muttered something I couldn’t hear. Atticus’s hand didn’t move, but the shift in his jaw did. Slow. Controlled. His voice dropped lower, intimate enough that only the man and I—because I was standing close enough to catch every syllable—could hear.
“You think I don’t know what you tried to push through last week?” His tone was calm, lethal. “I know the count was short. I know you skimmed. And I know you thought no one would notice while I had my eyes on other fires. You were wrong.”
The man shook his head violently, denial spilling out in a frantic rush. “No, boss, I—I wouldn’t?—”
Atticus pressed harder, not enough to hurt but enough to remind him how fragile his position was. “You wouldn’t?” His words sliced quiet through the room. “Then why am I standing here wasting my time?”
The man broke. I saw it in the way his knees softened, the way sweat beaded at his temple. He looked like he might collapse right there on the oil-stained floor.
“Fix it,” Atticus said. No raised voice. No dramatics. Just a verdict. “You have until dawn.”
“Dawn?” the man croaked.
Atticus’s gaze didn’t flicker. “Not a minute later.”