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"I'm not touching it, dear. I couldn't if I wanted to."

The door bangs open behind me hard enough to crack against the wall.

Gage crosses the room in two strides. He doesn't ask what's happening. He gets one arm around my waist and pulls me back three feet, and he puts his body between me and the glass, and his skin is burning through his shirt.

"Where?"

"Right there. She's right..."

There's nothing outside.

Black yard. Frost. My dark house across the grass with its burned front door.

The window is open two inches.

Cold air pours through the gap over the sill and down my bare legs, and on the floorboards at my feet, folded neat, is my pillow.

Gage looks at it for a long moment.

"Don't touch that."

"I wasn't planning on it."

He goes down the hall and comes back with the fireplace tongs and the box of rock salt, and he carries my pillow out of his house at arm's length like something that might still be breathing.

I watch from the window. He drops it in the fire pit, salts a ring around it, and lights it.

The flame comes up blue.

He stands out there in the dark with his back to the house and his hands open at his sides, and he doesn't come in for a long time.

The last ward is the front step.

Gage tells me this at four in the morning, sitting on it, while I sit inside the open door with the quilt around my shoulders because he won't let me sit out there with him.

"Five of them closed," he says. "Not broken. Closed."

"What's the difference?"

"Breaking is loud and can be permanent. Closing is done by someone who can control the hinge."

I think about a latch turning under my hands.

"Gage."

"Yeah?"

"When she said the lines are mine." I pull the quilt tighter. "Was she right?"

He doesn't answer fast, and I hate him a little for being honest with the timing when he still won't be honest with the words.

"Sleep," he says. "I've got the step."

He has the step until dawn. I know because I don't sleep either.

I wake up at nine with only four hours sleep. And, head for the bathroom.

It's the size of a coat closet. There's a shower, a sink, and a stack of towels folded into perfect squares, which tells me more about Gage Corbett than six months of watching him split firewood ever did.