52. Micah
FIFTY-TWO
MICAH
Atext wakes me late Saturday morning. I pick up my phone and swipe it open, staring at the screen through bleary eyes.
MILO:
Meet us here and bring a change of clothes.
No context or explanation. Just a pin to an address I don’t recognize and the implication that whatever I’m walking into is going to ruin what I’m wearing.
I should know better by now.
The GPS takes me to an industrial strip on the east side of town—the kind of place where every building looks designed by someone who hates windows. I pull into a gravel lot beside Milo’s truck and a refrigerated van with HANK’S QUALITY MEATS stenciled on the side in faded red.
Fitting.
The smell hits before I reach the door: cold metal, raw flesh, and that sweet edge that clings to the back of your throat. I’ve smelled worse—we all have—but not usually at this volume.
I push through a heavy steel door into a corridor lined with hooks. Empty ones, thankfully. The fluorescent lights overhead give everything that blue-white mortuary glow, and my sneakers squeak on tile that’s been scrubbed so many times the grout has given up and turned pink.
I hear Milo before I see him.
“No, no, no—you gotta commit to it. Don’t saw. One clean stroke. Like you’re unzipping a jacket.”
I round the corner into the main processing room and stop.
Milo is standing at a stainless-steel table the size of a twin mattress, wearing a white coat two sizes too big and safety goggles pushed up on his forehead like ski goggles on a frat boy.
He’s gesturing wildly with a boning knife, and there’s a smear of something across his chest that I’m choosing not to identify.
Sage is next to him. Also in a white coat.
Also in goggles—hers actually over her eyes, because she’s the only person in this building with any goddamn sense.
She’s got a knife of her own, and she’s leaning over what I now realize is a pig carcass, split clean down the middle and pinned open like a biology textbook.
Standing across from them both, arms folded, is a guy I’ve never met. He’s in his fifties, built like a retired linebacker, with a beard that could house a family of birds and forearms that suggest he’s been breaking down animals since before I was born.
“Micah!” Milo spots me and lifts the boning knife in greeting.
“Blade down,” the bearded man says without looking over.
Milo lowers it immediately. Sage still flinches. The bearded man doesn’t.
“What the fuck is this?” I ask, because someone has to.
“Knife skills workshop.” Milo beams. “Sage, tell him about the knife skills workshop.”
Sage looks up at me. There’s blood on her cheek, and her goggles are slightly fogged, and she looks like she’s having the time of her life.
“Milo’s friend Hank is teaching us how to break down a carcass.
Hank says professionals can do it in under fifteen minutes, and Milo has decided that means we’re aiming for it by lunch. ”
“Current record is eleven,” Hank says, voice like gravel. “But that’s with thirty years of practice. You two are looking at closer to forty-five.”
“We’ll get there,” Milo says with the confidence of a man who has never once accurately estimated how long something would take.
I look at the pig. I look at Sage. I look at Milo, who is now using his knife to point at different sections of the carcass like a weather forecaster mapping a cold front.
“And this is . . . training?” I ask.
“This is brilliant training.” Milo taps the blade against the table. “Sage wants to learn to use a knife properly, and I figured why start small?”
“Most people start with an onion,” I say.
“Most people are boring.” Milo winks at Sage. “She’s not boring.”
“Clearly,” I say, but it’s hard not to catch Sage’s enthusiasm. Her cheeks are flushed, her hair tied back in a messy bun, stray wisps stuck to her forehead with sweat. She’s gripping the knife like it’s an extension of her own hand.
“You want in, Micah?” Milo leans forward, grinning, his finger gliding through a pink marbling of fat along the spread ribs.
“There’s enough pig for everyone.” Hank gives me a quick chin up. “Plenty in the walk-in. If you’re not afraid of a little mess. Either way, shut the door. I’m not paying to cool the whole street.”
I shut the door.
Hank tosses me a white coat from a hook and a pair of goggles still in their plastic wrapper. I shrug into both while he turns back to the table and pulls the carcass toward him with the casual ease of someone straightening a tablecloth.
“All right. We left off at the shoulder.” He picks up a massive cleaver and points it at the joint where the front leg meets the body.
“This right here is your money cut. You separate this clean, you’ve got two pieces you can work with.
You hack at it, you’ve got a mess and bone fragments in your blade. ”
He demonstrates. One precise strike, then a twist of the wrist, and the shoulder separates with a sound like tearing wet cardboard. Sage inhales sharply. Milo leans in closer.
“See the joint?” Hank rotates the separated piece so we can see the exposed socket. “You’re not cutting through bone. You’re cutting around it. Finding the seam. Every joint has one—nature’s own dotted line. Your job is to find it.”
“Like anything,” Milo says. “Find the seam. Apply pressure. Watch it come apart.”
Hank gives him a look that says he knows exactly what Milo does with this knowledge and has decided it’s none of his business. “Your turn, sweetheart.” He nods at Sage. “Other shoulder. Same thing.”
Sage adjusts her grip on the knife, and I watch her face change. The amusement drains out and something else replaces it—focus, sharp and clean. She studies the joint for a beat, fingers pressing into the flesh to find the gap, and then she cuts.
It’s not clean. It takes her three strokes instead of one, and she has to use both hands to twist the joint free.
But she finds the seam. She follows it. When the shoulder comes away, she holds it up with an expression that’s half pride and half something I recognize from the beach, from the night we watched her carving into a hanging dead man.
She likes this.
Not the gore, exactly. The competence. The way her hands learn what to do with a blade when no one is dragging the choice out of her.
For a woman whose first experience with a knife was survival, control must feel like reclamation.
That should make me proud.
It does.
But I know what it is to be handed a blade and told it makes you safe. I know how good control feels, and what it costs when you start reaching for it before you reach for anything else.
She came to us already bleeding.
I don’t know whether we’re teaching her to defend the soft parts of herself or cut them out.
I don’t know which one she’s hoping for.
Milo whoops and slaps the table. “That’s our girl!”
The words hit too close to the thought I just had. Our girl. Our blade. Our problem, if we do this wrong.
“Messy,” Hank says, but he’s smiling. “Again. Other side.”
For the next hour, Hank walks us through the full breakdown. Shoulders, ribs, belly, hams. He shows us where a saw beats brute force, how tendons anchor and how to slip a blade beneath them, where the silver skin clings and how to peel it back clean.
Sage absorbs everything. She asks questions I wouldn’t have thought of—about the difference between cold and warm tissue, about how long after death the joints stiffen, about whether the process changes with size.
Hank answers each one without blinking, and I realize this is just a regular day for him.
People ask him things. He tells them. What they do with the information is between them and God.
Milo, to his credit, is actually focused. His usual chaos has channeled into precision, his hands moving with the same fine control he uses to forge handwriting and make dead men keep posting online.
This is why he picked this lesson, I realize. Milo understands small movements. Pressure. Angles. The kind of skill that looks like magic until you see the practice underneath.
I take my turn with the loin. The blade slides between the ribs and the spine, and Hank corrects my angle twice before the meat pulls away in one piece. It’s satisfying in a way I don’t want to examine too closely.
“Not bad,” Hank says. High praise, apparently.
“So how do you two know each other?” I ask, because Milo’s friend circle has always been a source of both fascination and concern.
“Hank used to date my mom,” Milo says, like that explains anything.
Hank sighs. “I took his mother to dinner twice in 2019. He’s been calling me his stepdad ever since.”
“You made her laugh,” Milo says. “That’s basically a proposal in my family.”
Sage catches my eye across the table and bites back a grin. There’s blood on her gloves and her goggles are crooked and she’s beautiful like this—capable and present and not afraid of the mess. I meet her eyes for a beat, and she doesn’t look away.
Hank strips off his gloves. “I’m taking a smoke break. When I come back, I want to see that belly separated from the ribs. Without puncturing the organs.” He eyes Milo specifically. “I mean it.”
“One time,” Milo mutters as Hank disappears through the back door. “I nick one intestine—”
“Was that really his only concern with you being here?” I ask.
“Hank doesn’t ask questions. It’s his best quality.” Milo peels off a glove and scratches his nose with his wrist. “I told him I had some friends who wanted to learn butchery, he said bring beer and don’t fuck up his equipment. That’s it. That’s the whole arrangement.”
“And he’s not curious about why a hardware store employee and a waitress need to break down a carcass in under fifteen minutes?”
“People like to help my mom with no reason at all.” Milo grins. “She’s where I get my charisma from.”
Sage laughs. It’s a real one—open and unguarded—and the sound of it fills the cold room and makes it feel almost warm.
She sets her knife down and stretches, rolling her shoulders, and I notice the way she moves now.
Less guarded. Less coiled. She’s carrying herself differently since that night I held her, since things changed between all of us, and it’s the kind of change you only notice because you’ve been watching from the start.
“This was a good idea,” she says, looking at Milo first, then me. “Weird as shit, but good.”
Milo grins. “All my best ideas are weird as shit. It’s called being a visionary.”
I glance between them, at the table, at the blood drying on Sage’s glove.
“Why are we really here?”
“Knife skills,” Milo says, twirling the knife in one hand.
“Milo.”
He sets his knife down. Picks it up. Sets it down again. “She asked to come in. On Hudson.”
I frown. “And?”
“I told her no. Not Hudson. Too late. Too tight.”
“And?”
Sage interrupts. “I asked about the next one.”
Fuck.
There’s blood on her cheek. But she looks happier than I’ve ever seen her, which is the part that fucks me up.
“Does Eli know?”
“No.”
“Does Knox?”
They both shake their heads.
“Holden?”
Sage grins and shakes her head. “Just us.”
The grin worries me more than the secret. Not because she’s wrong to want this, but because for the first time since I’ve known her, she looks excited to keep something from us.
Or maybe not from us.
For herself.
Fuck.
“So we’re doing this?” I gesture at the pig, but I mean bringing in Sage.
“I’m doing this,” Milo says. “You’re either with me or you’re not. I need someone she trusts and who isn’t going to immediately call Eli.”
And when Eli finds out—because he will, he always does—he’s going to be pissed I stood in this room and said nothing.
I look at the pig. At the blood drying on Sage’s cheek. At the fact that I’m already complicit.
If she is going to learn, she deserves to learn with someone watching her hands, someone who knows what a blade can give and what it can take.
Keeping her ignorant would just be another way of choosing for her.
Fuck it.
We’re going to pay for this. All of us.
I look at Sage again. She smiles brightly.
Fuckity fuck.
I pick up my knife again. “Let’s get the belly done before Hank comes back and judges us.”
Sage pulls her goggles down and leans over the table. Her shoulder brushes mine as she reaches for the rib cage, and she meets my eyes.
“Thank you.”
I nudge my body against hers. “Don’t thank me yet. We haven’t even gotten close to the offal.”
She huffs a laugh, then turns back to the carcass and sets the blade where Hank showed her.
Find the seam.
Apply pressure.
Watch it come apart.