Page 34 of Property of Prophet

“It was not.”

We’ve reached the end of the cleared path. I stop and look back at the cabin, at what we’ve uncovered—the door, the porch, the woodpile, the narrow corridor through the snow that means we can move between the things that keep us alive. It looks like something reclaimed. Something that had to be earned back.

I start on the new section of path toward the creek and keep talking, because I’ve started, and the only thing worse than this would be leaving it half done. “Marcus was a thoracic surgeon,” I say. “We’d been together for two years and engaged for eight months. He was a good surgeon. Methodical in a way that other surgeons weren’t, the kind of mind that never stops running differential, even across a dinner table. I liked that about him. I thought it meant we were the same kind of person underneath. The kind who gives everything to the work.”

Prophet hasn’t said anything for a while. He’s working steadily beside me, but his attention has shifted. I can feel it, the way you can feel a change in air pressure before you can name the direction.

“He was involved,” I say. “Not at the level my father was, but enough. He knew what the foundation accounts were being used for, and when the investigation started, he made a choice.” I push the shovel in and lean on it for a second. “He cooperated with the investigators. Which is... that was his right. That was the rational choice, given his position. I understand that.”

“But?”

“He testified at my hearing,” I say, flat. I have said it flat in my head for five years, have kept it flat by not saying it to anyone at all.

“He used the same voice he used in surgery,” I say. “The one that means I have assessed this situation completely, and I am telling you what I found. I’ve heard that voice redirect a code at two in the morning. I’ve heard it close down a family’s last hope in a waiting room and then turn around and go straight back in and try the next thing. It is a voice that does not waver, and it doesn’t waver for good reason because wavering costs lives. I sat in that hearing room and listened to him use it to describe my involvement in the fraud, and I kept thinking—” I stop.

“What?” Prophet says, and his voice has changed.

“I kept thinking that somewhere in there, I would hear something different. Some human inconsistency that said this is costing him something. It didn’t have to be much. A fractional pause before my name... anything.” The shovel is still in my hands, and I’m not using it. “There wasn’t one. He went all the way to the end, and when it was over, he collected his papers and walked out. I sat there watching the door he’d gone through and understood that I had never known him at all. I’d known the version he decided I should know, and it was a very good version. It was designed by someone who understood exactly what I would respond to.” I start moving the shovel again.

The shovel bites into the snow. Again and again.

“The license was the outcome,” I say. “They suspended it pending investigation, and it never came back. I didn’t fight it. By that point, I was...” I look for the right word and don’t find one I’m willing to use. “I left. I drove north, then I drove farther north, and then I kept going until there wasn’t any farther, and I stopped here.” I stop talking.

We work in silence for a while, and I focus on the shovel’s physical reality, the snow, and the fact that my lower back is starting to complain.

“The worst part—” I say, and then stop, because I’ve said this sentence to myself so many times that I know exactly what comes next, and I’m not sure I can say it out loud without it sounding different than it does in my head at three in the morning. “The worst part wasn’t the license. I could have rebuilt it, I was good enough, somewhere else, with time, and I know that about myself even now. I’m not asking for reassurance on that point.”

The shovel handle is cold through my gloves. “The worst part was that I picked every one of them. My father, Marcus, the people I signed for without reading what I was signing. Every choice I ever made about who to trust with something real, I was wrong... every... single... time.” I hear the words land in the cold air, and they sound exactly as bad out loud as they do in my head. “So, when people say you’ll trust again, you’ll know better next time, what they don’t understand is that I thought I already knew. I was certain. I had evidence. And it turned out the evidence was also something they’d arranged.”

I hear him stop working.

When I make myself look over at him, he’s turned toward me. I’ve seen most of the expressions he’s shown me since he woke up in this cabin. This isn’t any of them.

He’s furious.

Not at me.

“What they did to you was a sin,” he says.

Not a metaphor, or the loose secular version of the word people use when they mean a shame or a waste. He says it the way he said harder room, with the authority of someone reporting a finding, not offering an opinion. Something about the absolute steadiness of it moves through me in a way I don’t fully understand.

“Not a small one,” he says. “Not the kind that fades.”

I almost laugh, because the alternative is something I’m not prepared to manage out here in the cold. “You sound very sure about that.”

“I am.”

“On what authority?”

He looks at me for a long moment, and then he looks down at his hands, at the gloves covering them, and something moves across his face. It’s private, old, and slightly rueful. “I’m still working that out.”

We stand in the cold with the creek path almost clear. Bear has planted himself on the snow between us, looking from one face to the other with the expression of a dog who understands more than he’s supposed to and has decided not to say anything about it.

“He was your fiancé,” Prophet says. Not a question.

“Yes.”

He doesn’t say anything else. No, I’m sorry. No, that’s awful—no attempt to make what happened smaller by putting words around it.