I wish all Black girls a clear shot at this world. I wish all Black girls a full belly. I wish all Black girls a respite from their many troubles. I wish all Black girls nothing but grace, prosperity, and ease. Black girls I am hoping for your continued safety and success every single day.
That was what Stack would think later — not the men, not the route she'd taken, not any of the hundred small decisions that had compounded into catastrophe. The wisteria. Because if Annie didn't love those ridiculous purple flowers the way she did, she wouldn't have made the detour she made every Tuesday, and if she hadn't made the detour, none of the rest of it would have happened.
But Annie loved her wisteria, and there was nothing to be done about that.
She had discovered the vine three springs ago, growing wild along the fence line of an abandoned lot on the far end of Decatur Street — a great sprawling tangle of it, untended, extravagant, spilling purple down the rotted wood like it had decided to be beautiful despite everything. She had stopped dead in the middle of the sidewalk and stared at it for a full minute. Stack had been with her that day, and he had watched her stare, and even then he'd known it was over.
She had gone back every Tuesday since.
Sometimes she brought cuttings home for her workroom. Sometimes she just stood there for a while, among the smell of it. Sometimes she brought a small cloth and wiped the blooms down — which was, Stack maintained, the most Annie thing that had ever happened in the history of Annie things.
"You cleaning flowers," he'd said once, watching her from the gate.
"They dusty," she'd said, without turning around.
"They outside, mama. They supposed to be dusty. They don't know the difference."
"I know the difference."
He had laughed until his ribs hurt. Had told Smoke that evening, and they'd both laughed again. And the next Tuesday she'd gone back, and the Tuesday after, and it had simply become part of the architecture of their week.
Tuesday was Annie's wisteria day.
That particular Tuesday morning, she'd been in good spirits.
Stack remembered that too — the specific quality of her mood, light and anticipatory, the way she'd hummed while she dressed and come to find him in the warm tangle of the bed where he was still trying to talk himself into consciousness.
She'd perched on the edge of the mattress and put her hand on his arm. "I'm heading out. Market first, then Decatur."
"Mm." He'd found her hand without opening his eyes. "Your flowers."
"My wisteria," she corrected, with the primness of a woman defending something she knew was ridiculous and had decided not to care. "They were coming in beautiful last week. I want to take some cuttings before the heat gets to em’."
"You and them flowers, I swear." He'd cracked one eye open to look at her. She was already done up — hair pinned, a pale yellow dress, looking like the kind of morning a man would want to wake up into. "Normal women collect dishes. Spoons. You out here unnaturally attached to a weed."
"Wisteria ain’t a weed."
"It's growing on an abandoned fence, in the middle of—"
"It is not a weed," she said, with great dignity, and he'd laughed and pulled her down and kissed her temple and her cheek and the corner of her mouth until she was trying not to smile and failing completely.
"You a crazy woman," he'd murmured into her hair. Fond. Helplessly fond.
"You in love with this crazy woman," she'd said back, soft and certain, and pressed her lips to his jaw before she stood and smoothed her dress and went.
He'd listened to her footsteps move through the house. The quiet of the front door.
Then he'd turned his face back into the pillow and gone back to sleep, easy and untroubled, because it was Tuesday and Annie was going to the market and then to her flowers and then home.
That was how Tuesday worked.
The juke was quiet in the late afternoon — the interim hour between the day men leaving and the night crowd arriving, when the place belonged mostly to the staff and the sound of chairs being set right.
Stack was going over the week's receipts at the back table when Deacon Hollis wandered in, which was not unusual. Deacon was seventy-something and had been drinking at this particular establishment through three different owners and two of his own wives. He came in most afternoons for one glass of something and whatever conversation was available.
He settled at the bar and said to the boy wiping down the counter, "Busy on Decatur Street today. Had to go all the way around."
Stack didn't look up.
The bar boy made a sound of mild interest.
"Some kind of commotion," Deacon continued, with the relish of a man who had no urgent business anywhere and could therefore linger on details. "Couple hours back, maybe more. Police come through, asked some questions. Seemed like somebody saw something they shouldn't have, or something got moved that shouldn't be."
Stack turned a page.
"Right near that empty lot," Deacon added. "The one with all them purple flowers on the fence."
Stack's hand stilled on the page.
Just his hand. Nothing else visible changed — not his expression, not his posture, nothing that the room would have clocked as meaningful. But his hand stopped moving, and in the space behind his eyes something very cold and very focused began assembling itself.
The lot with the purple flowers.
Annie's lot. Annie's Tuesday. Annie who had left that morning with a cloth in her bag for wiping down the blooms and had said I want to take some cuttings before the heat gets to them and whom he had not heard from since.
He set the receipts down.
"Deacon," he said, and his voice came out even. Measured. "What time you say that was?"
Deacon turned on his stool, pleased to have an audience. "Oh, two o'clock maybe? Half past? The officers was already gone by the time I come through, but old Ruth from the dress shop was still standing outside talking about it. Said she'd seen a woman—"
Stack was already standing.
Deacon blinked. "You alright, son?"
But Stack was already moving through the back, already pulling the curtain aside that separated the main room from the office where Smoke was doing what Smoke was always doing — sitting with numbers and a cigarette and that particular quality of stillness that could mean anything or nothing.
Smoke looked up.
He took one look at his brother's face and put the cigarette down.
"Talk," he said.
Stack talked. Smoke listened with the unnerving focus he brought to all things that required it, and when Stack finished, Smoke didn't say anything for a moment. Just looked at the middle distance. Doing the same arithmetic Stack had already done and arriving at the same unbearable sum.
Then he stood, picked up his coat, and said, "Let's go find out."
They found out.
A man named Lenny Briggs, one of their runners, who had heard something he hadn't known what to do with and had been working up the courage to come to the juke when Stack found him first on the corner of Fifth and Marsh. Lenny had the look of a man who would have preferred not to be found.
He told them what he knew.
Slim’s men — a rival outfit who had been circling the east side numbers territory for the better part of a year, looking for a pressure point, looking for the particular lever that would bring the Moore brothers to a table they hadn't chosen. They had found their lever. They had taken her off the street somewhere between the market and the lot — right around the wisteria, which Stack would think about for a long time after — and they had her at the old Beaumont property on the south road.
Lenny gave the address with the energy of a man trying to make a down payment on his own continued wellbeing. Stack received the information without expression, said "Thank you" in a voice that was quiet and even and somehow worse than shouting, and turned south.
Smoke fell into step beside him and put one hand briefly on his brother's arm. The old signal. Wordless. Be smart. We get her first. Everything else after.
Stack's jaw was granite. He nodded once.
They were smart. They were fast.
There were two men outside and three within.
Smoke handled the outside — efficient, practiced, the kind of violence that begins and ends cleanly because it has a purpose and knows what that purpose is. Then he pushed through the door.
Stack was still in the room with the last one.
The man was on the floor. Had been on the floor for a while, by the look of it. Stack was crouched over him, one knee on the ground, and he was not finished. The man had stopped being a threat some time ago and Stack had continued anyway, methodical and terrifyingly quiet — no rage in his face, which was somehow worse than rage. Just something hollow and absolute, like a door that had been opened onto nothing.
Smoke stood in the doorway for a moment and watched.
Then he said, "Stack."
Stack didn't stop.
"Stack." Harder this time. Not a shout — Smoke didn't shout — but weighted. The kind of voice that expected to be heard.
Stack's hand stilled.
He stayed crouched for a moment, breathing. The sound of it filled the room — ragged, too fast.
Smoke crossed to him and put one hand on the back of his neck. Firm and present. "She's in the back," he said, low. "She's okay. We got her. Come on back now."
A long beat.
Stack looked down at what was in front of him. Something shifted in his face — not quite recognition, not quite regret. More like a man surfacing from very deep water and finding the light strange.
He stood. Didn't say anything. Just turned and walked toward the back of the building, and Smoke followed, and neither of them looked back at the room.
The door came off its hinges.
Not broken — removed. Stack had simply decided it was in his way and dealt with it accordingly, and Smoke caught it without breaking stride and set it against the wall with the quiet efficiency of a man long accustomed to making the world cooperate, and stepped through the threshold behind his brother.
The room was dim. Smelled like damp wood and kerosene and something metallic that neither of them dwelled on.
And there, in the far corner —
There she was.
Their matriarch. Their woman. Their Annie.
Smoke exhaled. Just the one breath. One single moment of relief so complete it was almost physical, before he folded it away and put it somewhere safe.
Stack didn't bother with any of that.
He crossed the room in four long strides. Annie barely had time to register him before he pressed her back against the wall — not rough, not cruel, but absolute. Like he needed something solid behind her. Like he needed to know she couldn't be taken anywhere else.
"Stack—" Smoke started.
The younger twin didn't hear him. Or if he did, it didn't matter.
His hands came up to her face. Both of them. Palms bracketing her jaw, thumbs moving across her cheekbones, fingers pressing back into her hair. Frantic eyes cataloguing everything — the dried tear tracks, the slight swelling at her wrist, the small cut at the corner of her lip that made something behind his eyes go very briefly and very darkly wrong before he forced himself onward. Keep checking. Keep confirming.
Here. Alive. Breathing. Theirs. Home.
Annie had never felt more precious than in that moment. Not cherished — that was too soft a word for what was happening. Something rawer. Something that lived below language.
Once he had confirmed what he needed to confirm, he swept down and claimed what had always been his.
Blood still painted his face. She could smell the iron as he descended, and some distant sensible part of her registered that it should frighten her — the state of him, what it implied, the fact that none of that blood was his.
But she was not always a sensible woman when it came to these men.
She let him have it. Let him take the kiss like it was owed — because it was. Raw and primal and a little gruesome the way all true things are a little gruesome. His chest heaved against hers, and his hands were trembling — Stack's hands, which she had never once seen tremble — moving over her arms, her sides, her face. Touching. Feeling. Verifying.
She felt it all move through her like weather. His fear. His fury. His absolute, immovable devotion.
I know, she thought. I know, baby. I know.
She murmured it into his hair when he finally broke, forehead dropping to her shoulder, a shudder moving through him she felt with her whole body.
"I know. I'm here."
Smoke stood back and watched.
Because Stack needed this. Maybe Annie needed it too — to be held this completely, this desperately, after hours of not knowing when or whether. But Stack needed it most. So Smoke stayed where he was and gave the man the room.
Annie met the older twin's eyes over Stack's bowed head.
Nothing passed between them except everything. She saw the tightness at the corner of his jaw. The controlled version of the same thing Stack was barely containing. She held his gaze until she saw his shoulders drop a single fraction of an inch.
I see you. I'm alright. He's alright. We're alright.
Stack made a sound then — small and cracked and quiet, pressed into her shoulder. The kind a man makes only when he doesn't mean to. She felt it like something giving way.
She pulled him in tighter.
"It's okay," she murmured, hand pressing flat between his shoulder blades. "I'm here, baby. I ain't goin' nowhere."
He held on.
Annie had been the one taken.
But it was Stack who felt like he had lost his heart.
A long moment passed. Then, muffled against her shoulder, rough and still unsteady — somewhere between a reprimand and a man who had been terrified into raw honesty:
"And you ain't gon’ do no shit like that again."
Annie closed her eyes.
Her hand moved slow and steady through his hair.
"No," she said softly. "I ain't."
Smoke pulled the lamp low before he sat at the foot of the bed.
It was well past midnight. The house had gone completely quiet. Annie lay in the middle of the bed, Stack curved against her back with his face tucked into her hair, one arm thrown across her waist like a man holding on even in sleep.
Cleaned up now. Dressed down. The blood long gone — Annie had done it herself at the basin, quiet and methodical, and Stack had sat on the edge of the tub and let her. Had not said a word while she washed his hands and his face and his split knuckles, which told their own particular story that she had received without comment and without flinching.
She was awake. Smoke had known she would be.
"He out?" Smoke asked, low.
"Mm. Fought it some." Her hand moved slowly through Stack's curls. "But he's out."
A beat of quiet between them. The lamp flame held steady.
"You alright?" he asked.
"I'm whole," she said. Her particular answer — the one that meant something more than fine and less than undamaged and asked him to understand the distance between those things.
He accepted it. He would look at her properly in the morning.
"Elijah." Soft but weighted.
"I'm listening."
She was quiet a moment, eyes on the ceiling.
"I ain’t never seen him like that," she finally said.
Smoke was quiet too, for a long stretch of seconds.
He had been there. He had witnessed what Annie had not fully seen — what had happened in those rooms before they reached her. He knew the shape of what his brother had done, and he knew that Stack, of all people, of all the men Smoke had stood beside in all the years of their lives — Stack was not supposed to be the one who went that far past the line.
"No," Smoke said. "Neither have I."
She absorbed that. Let it settle.
"Was it bad?" she said.
"Depended," Smoke said, "on which side of it you were on."
A breath that was almost a laugh. "That ain't an answer."
"It's the honest one." He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, looking at his brother's sleeping face. The furrow still between his brows, even now. "He went past what was needed. Kept going after it was done. I had to call him back." A pause. "Twice."
Annie's hand stilled in Stack's hair for just a moment. Then resumed.
"He was ahead of me the whole way there," Smoke continued, quieter now. "I known Stack all my life. Watched him in situations that would've laid other men down. He's always had something working up here even when he's pushed — he thinks. He's always been able to think." He paused. "Tonight he wasn't thinking."
"What was he doing?" she said.
"Feeling," Smoke said simply.
Annie closed her eyes.
Stack shifted against her in his sleep, brow tightening, and she made a soft sound and his face smoothed again, like he could hear her even under everything.
"He knew something was wrong before anyone told him," she said. Not quite a question.
"Yes."
"How?"
Smoke was quiet for a beat. "Your flowers."
Annie stilled.
"Deacon came in talking about a commotion on Decatur. Near the lot." Smoke glanced at her. "Stack was across the room. He heard the words purple flowers and that was all it took."
Something moved across Annie's face. Too complicated to name.
"All those Tuesdays," she said softly.
"He knows your Tuesdays, Annie." Smoke's voice was matter of fact, the way he said things that were simply true and required no decoration. "He knows how long the market takes and which way you walk and what time you're usually back. He noticed before any message came. Before anyone came to us at all. He put it together himself."
She was very quiet for a moment.
"Lord," she breathed.
Outside, the wind moved through the pecan trees, that soft sound of a summer night settling into itself.
"You need to say something to him when he wakes," Smoke said. "Not about what happened in that room — he doesn't need to explain himself and you don't need the details. But he needs to hear that you see him the same." He looked at her steadily. "That tonight ain’t change your eyes when you look at him."
"It didn't," she said. And then, smaller: "It just — added to what's already there."
Smoke held her gaze for a moment. Then nodded once, slowly.
"And me," she said, after a breath.
"And you," he confirmed.
"Tomorrow."
"Tomorrow," he agreed. "When he's with us and you've both rested. But Annie." His voice dropped a register, quiet and absolute. "What you love doing, where you go — none of that changes. But how you move through the world when we not with you?" He held her gaze. "That's the conversation we're gon’ to have."
Annie's chin lifted slightly. She didn't argue it. But she held his gaze long enough to communicate that it would be a conversation and not a sentencing, and Smoke acknowledged that with the smallest dip of his head.
Good enough for tonight.
He rose and came around to his side — the familiar geography of their life, every night for years — and settled in.
The bed held all three of them, as it always had.
Annie lay in the dark and looked at the ceiling and listened to the two men breathing, one deep in sleep, one slipping toward it.
She thought about that morning. The yellow dress. The cloth she'd tucked into her bag for the blooms. Stack's voice still rough with sleep, laughing at her — you and those flowers, I swear — and pulling her down and kissing her like she was something ridiculous and wonderful and entirely his.
Crazy woman.
Your crazy woman.
She pressed her lips to his temple in the dark. Soft as a secret.
His arm tightened across her waist even in sleep.
Love should be calm, she thought. Peaceful. The kind of thing you can sleep inside of and wake up still held by.
But she thought about the words purple flowers landing across a quiet room. About the hand going still on the receipts. About Smoke’s thirty-some years of knowing someone so well that the wrong silence sounded like a scream.
The act of love, she thought, was something else entirely.
She exhaled.
She was home.
They were home.
Outside, somewhere, her wisteria grew on its rotting fence — untended, extravagant, stubbornly beautiful — and knew nothing about any of it.
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A/N If you could find it in your hearts to forgive me? 🥺 Don't know what to say that would explain this absence so I'm not going to say anything. Feels like all I give ya'll is excuses for real. I am okay. Doing well. Life is just lifeing, interviewing for a new job (pray I get it!) I'll be in Chicago next week actually. So I'll def do some writing there :) Hope you're all well. Hope you enjoy this bite sized piece of our lovely trio. Love you <3
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This work of art is part of "The Moore Kind" universe. Where Smoke, Annie, and Stack exist as a Trio. If you'd like to learn more about them, check out My Masterlist 😘
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