Page 192 of What We Bury

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.Withoutpuncturing the organs.” He eyes Milo specifically. “I mean it.”

“One time,” Milo mutters as Hank disappears through the back door. “I nickoneintestine?—”

“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.”