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“You are okay?”

“Yeah, just…never mind.”

Oscar doesn’t mind. He’s the easiest person in the world to be around and I grew up with Iggy Whitlock as my dad.

He doesn’t eat red meat.

Neither do I.

We both eat a lot of protein to manage our physical jobs. Eat from the land to nourish our bodies. He falls on the spinach and chard frittata I cook for him, with a potato salad my mum used to make every summer instead of taking us on holiday. Farm life forever.

“What is in this?” Oscar inspects his fork. “I can’t stop eating it.”

“Anchovies. Parsley. Olive oil.”

“Is French?”

“Maybe. Jekka’s always learning new ways to cook our produce from the exchange program we use for seasonal farm hands.”

“Your mother is a goddess.”

I laugh. “Say that to her face, she’ll love you forever.”

“I probably would have if I’d seen her after we drank all that gin together that summer night on her farm.”

That summer night. Somehow, it’s slipped my mind that beyond the time I spent with Oscar alone, he was on my parents’ farm a whole day beforehand. With Aras—the son he mentions in most conversations. Because he’s a good father, the best, even if he doesn’t think so himself.

We finish eating.

Oscar glances at his phone and reaches for the pouch he keeps in his pocket.

“Top up?”

“Adjustment. I get it wrong more often these days.”

Oscar carries competence in every cell of his warrior-shaped body. And he’s clever too. If his insulin management isn’t panning out as it should, I’d bet my tractor it was for reasons beyond his control.

I clean the dishes while he does what he needs to do. I don’t ask him to explain himself, but he does anyway, when I come to sit on the apple crate beside the one he’s folded his big body onto.

“I was very lucky for a long time. Everything was predictable. And if it wasn’t, I knew how to fix it. Since…Christmas, it is like I don’t know my own body anymore.”

“Because you got hurt?”

“I wasn’t that injured. Hypothermia just wrecked me. I was high before I went in the water—the storm hit before I could correct it. I was in DKA when they pulled me from the sea. My body hasn’t recovered from it yet, and it’s…annoying.”

I don’t know what DKA is.

He spells it out for me, but with his accent, I still don’t get it. In the end, he pulls out his phone and types it into the search bar.

I read the information and a shiver passes through me, literal and emotional. I already knew Oscar had nearly died, but I’d allowed myself to picture it as something halfway peaceful. This…this is something else. “I’m sorry you went through that.”

Oscar puts his phone away. “I am okay.”

“Are you?”

“I try to be—” He stops and shakes his head.

“What?”