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I don’t care that he took the apples, and I wouldn’t have cared if he’d eaten every last one of them. I care that he was near my roses. Those roses were planted by my mother and tended by her hands before they became mine. The thought of Boone wandering among them, touching them, perhaps plucking one without understanding what they are to me, fills me with an anger so immediate that my skin still feels hot from it.

But that isn’t what has me descending the stairs too quickly or what keeps replaying in my head despite every attempt to force it away. It’s his hand closing around my arm and the desperation in his voice when he begged me to let him stay with me because he didn’t want to be alone.

Alone.

That word follows me all the way downstairs.

Until Boone arrived, I never thought there was anything wrong with being alone. Solitude was simply the shape my existence had taken, something so familiar that eventually I stopped recognizing it as anything at all. There was no one waiting when I entered a room, no one interrupting the silence, no footsteps that belonged to anyone but me. I stopped expecting any of that to change years ago.

Then Boone touched me.

Not because I reached for him first or forced his hand onto me, but because he chose to cross the space between us and wrap his fingers around my arm as he begged to stay. The touch lasted only seconds, yet I can still remember the pressure of his fingers there. That disturbs me more than his tears, his defiance, or anything else he’s done since arriving.

I don’t understand why he would ask to remain with me when he spends so much of his time terrified of me, nor do I understand why hearing him ask affected me at all. I should have left him in the kitchen if that was what he wanted. I should have been indifferent to whether he followed me through these halls or disappeared into some distant corner of the castle. Instead, his words provoked something I couldn’t immediately understand, and anger was easier.

He doesn’t want to be alone.

Neither do I.

I stop halfway down the stairs, tightening my hand around the stone banister as I stare into the darkness below. I hate the realization immediately because until he arrived, I loved being alone, or at least I believed I did. Now the thought of these halls returning to what they were before him feels different than it should.

I imagine his room empty, his voice gone and his footsteps no longer moving overhead. The silence I spent years accepting suddenly feels unbearable. Perhaps I understand why he’s upstairs crying better than I care to admit.

I continue into the kitchen, but the thought follows me there while I light the stove and begin preparing dinner. I reach for the venison without thinking, cut it into pieces and drop them into the heavy iron pot. Vegetables and broth follow, my hands moving through a routine they’ve performed countless times while my mind returns again and again to the same few seconds in the kitchen.

Boone touched me.

I have touched him countless times since he arrived, but this was different. I hadn’t demanded it from him, hadn’t reached for him first or given him any reason to believe I wanted his hand on me. He simply crossed the space between us and grabbed my arm because, in that moment, being near me was preferable to being alone. I still don’t know what to do with that knowledge.

I stir the stew harder than necessary, the wooden spoon scraping against the bottom of the pot while his words repeat themselves in my head.

I don’t want to be alone.

He’s afraid of me. I know he is because I’ve watched that fear consume him often enough. I’ve seen him move away when I enter his room and prepare himself for whatever I might do when I come too close. Yet tonight, he asked to stay with me. The contradiction irritates me because I cannot make sense of it, and I’m accustomed to things making sense.

Perhaps he was only frightened of being locked away again. Perhaps his request had nothing to do with me at all, and anyone standing in that kitchen would have received the same desperate plea. I tell myself that several times while slicing bread, but I don’t believe it any more after the fourth repetition than I did after the first.

Then there was earlier tonight.

My hand stops over the loaf.

He touched me then too, guiding me instead of fighting, and when I listened, everything between us changed. I had wanted him to stop resisting me for weeks, yet when he finally did, when his hands rested on my shoulders and he buried his face against my neck instead of trying to escape me, I was the one who couldn’t tolerate it.

I abandoned him because of it.

Annoyed with myself, I bring the knife down too hard and leave an uneven slice of bread lying on the board. I stare at it before setting it on his tray beside a bowl of stew, then hesitate and add cheese and another piece of bread.

I almost add an apple. The thought lands of going into the greenhouse and grabbing one because I know now he prefers them.

The apples aren’t the problem.

The roses are.

I head into the greenhouse and pick one off the tree. Then I return to the kitchen and set it beside his bowl.

By the time I leave the kitchen, the castle has fallen silent again. The absence of Boone’s crying should be a relief. Instead I find myself listening for it as I climb the stairs. There’s nothing, not even movement from inside his room when I reach the door. I stand there with the tray balanced in one hand and the key in the other before finally unlocking it.

Boone is curled on his side on the bed with his back to me, still wearing the clothes he hastily pulled on earlier. He doesn’t turn around when I enter, though his shoulders tense enough to tell me he’s awake. I carry the tray to the table and set it down, remaining there until he finally rolls enough to look at what I brought him.