Page 33

“Comfortable?” I asked.

“Hm.”

“That isn’t a word.”

“It’s fine.”

The fire in the stove settled.

He lay with his arms crossed on his chest, looking at the wall. “Goodnight, Rain.”

“Goodnight.” I got as far as the hall before I turned around. “The offer stands. I won’t keep making it. But it stands.”

He was very good at not answering.

I lay awake a long while in a bed built for someone four times my size, listening to a male a few rooms away turn over on a slab of oak. I hoped he was thinking about how he’d lied to me twice in one evening.

Though I didn’t know exactly what the truth was anymore.

Goran Brack was the worst patient in the history of patients.

He wasn’t loud about it. Loud, I could have handled. I grew up over a shop that half the village used as a second parlor. I’d dealt with loud since I was nine.

His actions were worse than loud. He was helpful.

On the first morning I came out to find the bench empty, the quilt folded and draped over the back again. Goran stood at the stove, one-handed, tight-lipped, making breakfast.

“Sit down,” I grumbled from the doorway.

“Porridge won’t⁠—”

“If you say the porridge won’t make itself, I’ll make it myself every day for a week and force you to eat it. Sit. Down.”

He sat, though I could tell it cost him.

I sent Ginger to town with a written message for Asha, telling her to let the village know that the tea shop would be closed for the foreseeable future. I’d open it when I saw fit.

Within a short time, I realized it was a good thing I’d decided to remain home and supervise Goran. By noon he’d tried to mend a harness, replace the door hinges, and carry in wood. I’d taken all three away from him, which was like taking scissors from a toddler the size of a barn.

We arrived at a treaty. He would shell walnuts, direct me around the kitchen with his four-word instructions, and pat Ginger if she allowed. That was the entire treaty. Shell, direct, pat.

He was terrible at even this. Every time I lifted anything heavier than the kettle, a low sound started up across the room like a wagon braking. I’d turn around and point at him. He’d stop, and we’d both pretend it hadn’t happened. Fifteen times in one day. My arms had never been this supervised in my life.

He’s never been tended to, Ginger said, on the second evening, from her mound of quilts in front of the stove. She’d been subdued since the field, her commentary down to essentials. Look at how he holds his arms when you change the dressing. He doesn’t know where to put them. Nobody has ever put hands on him to help.

I looked the next time, and she was right. The realization went through me.

The dressing had to be changed twice a day, which meant twice a day, the most private male in the county sat on a kitchen chair that vanished under him, stripped to the waist in the faelight, and let me get close.

The first time, we both acted so formally, we could’ve been in church. He stared at the wall. I worked quickly and clinically, unwinding, cleaning, applying salve, rewinding. And if my hands noticed the acreage they were working across, his warm golden hide and the old white scars here and there, I kept my feelings to myself.

The kettle drew a hint of my feelings in the air with steam, and I smothered it with a lid.

By the third day we were talking our way through it, because I could not work in silence and he’d stopped expecting me to.

On the fourth night, I’d finished the wrap and was tying it off, my knuckles resting on his side, when he said, to the far wall, “There’s something you should know. Living here. About my nose.”

“Your nose.”