For just a moment, she thought his eyes held hers. She opened her mouth to scream into his soft ears that I know now and I’ll go with you and we can find but the words wouldn’t come. “Arbuckle,” she whispered instead. She brought her hand to his cheek and leaned in, kissing his lips over and over again as if it would revive him, as if she could give a piece of her own life to him. She pulled away and placed her hand upon his chest, felt the muscle and give of flesh underneath, wishing for the beat of his heart one, two, and then nothing but the trembling of her own hand. Everything went still—her breath, the rain, the drips that fell from the ceiling into pans. She heard nothing but a muted hush, a soundless quiet so deafening she threw her hands up to her own ears and pressed them hard. She still heard it, though, and she wretched, heaving the hot spit out of her mouth over and over until there was nothing but the taste of sick in her throat.

Thought I’d have time, Mama.

We always think that of what ain’t ours to hold, my girl.

He was gone—and she would’ve stayed forever by his side but for the Deputies outside her shack—and she unraveled the fabric that he had wound around the incision. She undid the coppery layers; his blood was sweeter than any she’d ever smelled. It was comforting, earthy and rich. Arbuckle’s blood, her mother’s blood—perhaps the way a person bled revealed their truest self; both Arbuckle’s and her mother’s had flowed quickly, and they were of the same mind. Forgiveness. Understanding. If it were true, that the blood was nothing but a reflection of what lay inside, then maybe Lady Mae’s would boil instead of flow, thicken instead of run. Maybe it was slow and stuck, trapped underneath open wounds.

So this is what the Deputies made them do—cut each other and themselves till there was nothing but a pile of flesh on the floor. She lifted her hand from Arbuckle’s chest and brought it to her mouth as she gagged again, a silent cry breaking through.

He’d been right all along; he’d seen who she was when she couldn’t see it herself. She’d thought she was just the dust, the children, the scaffold, the spurning, the loneliness, the leaded weight of her inheritance. He’d known what was invisible to herself, and a rueful grief barreled through her, and she remembered that day in the road when the stones flew at her. They’d taken everything from her but her own life, and she’d had enough.

She leaned over Arbuckle’s body and placed her lips against his one last time, pressing hard onto his cold skin. She held there, and murmured I love you and it was always you and what’ll come of me now. And when she pulled away, a panic took hold. There she was in the abyss, and try as she might she had no one to hold on to. She stumbled to her feet, pulled the blood-soaked fabric of her skirts off her knees and shins, and stepped backward, her hands twisting into themselves, until she was up against the door. There, leaning up against her mother’s cabinet, was her satchel. Beside it, her kit, opened. The cleaver still lay by Arbuckle’s hand; Lady Mae instead pulled from the kit the heading knife. It was long and heavy in her hand. It gleamed, for though it was a butcher’s tool, she did not use it often.