Something deadly.
I looked at each of my brothers in turn.
"If that's the case," I said, voice low and lethal, "we find this mystery woman. And we shut her up for good."
22
JOY
The first few things that happened were ordinary.
A customer called with a panic order. Britney spilled a bucket. A delivery came with two bruised peonies that made my eye twitch. The day moved the way days always moved—tiny demands, tiny fixes, tiny little proofs that life didn’t care if your insides were rearranged.
But my body did.
That was the part I couldn’t get used to yet—that I could stand behind the counter at McKinley Flowers with my apron tied the same way I always tied it, smile the same way I’d always smiled, and still feel like I’d crossed some invisible border I could never uncross.
I wasn’t who I’d been last week.
I wasn’t the woman who had never been touched like that. Who had never let a man see her undone. Who had thought intimacy was mostly a concept—romantic, distant, tucked into other people’s lives like a song you only heard in passing.
Now it lived under my skin.
Micah lived under my skin.
Even when he wasn’t here, I felt him in the way I moved—more aware of my hips, my mouth, the heat that could wake up in me with no warning. I felt him in my patience, too. In the way I didn’t flinch as easily anymore, like something in me had decided fear wasn’t the only option.
That should have made me feel powerful.
It did, but it also made me feel exposed.
By midday, my phone buzzed for the third time with a message from him.
Micah:You good?
I stared at it longer than necessary, thumb hovering.
He’d been protective before. Instinctively, quietly. But after Dominion Hall—after his father’s name became something real and breathing in the same city as us—his vigilance had sharpened. Like the world had moved from theoretical danger to confirmed.
And I had become a variable he couldn’t control.
That didn’t sit easily with a man like Micah.
It didn’t sit easily with me, either, if I was being honest.
I typed back.
Me:Busy. Fine. Don’t start.
A beat.
Micah:Not starting. Just checking.
My chest tightened in a way I didn’t fully understand. It wasn’t annoyance. It wasn’t swooning, either. It was that strange in-between feeling of being cared for and resenting how much you wanted it.
I pocketed my phone and forced my attention back to the eucalyptus I was bundling, the clean green scent clearing my head.
Wadmalaw was scheduled for tomorrow.
