Page 38

That is Delia Prine. She does not need me to say yes.

She only needs me to be cold again by four o'clock.

The confessional is at four.

Neve on the stool. Bear coming in close. My hands wrapped in cuffs that stopped being dry on Day One, and eleven pounds gone off a body that did not have eleven pounds to give, and a hollow behind my sternum that has stopped being hunger and started being a kind of tinnitus.

The card comes up.

What has your partner brought to this team?

There are eleven true answers to that.

He built a deck eleven inches off the ground so cold ground stopped being a thing that happens to me at four in the morning. He asked what my pebbles do instead of telling me they do nothing, and when I told him, he moved my vase out of the drip line. He gave me a fixed point to pull against in a bog. He cut a birdsmouth with a knife and a stick and it holds nine hundred pounds. He said forty-one thousand one hundred dollars into a lens because the number is the sentence.

And every one of those answers takes ninety seconds to say properly, and I am cold, and I am eight days in, and there is a shorter road right there with the gate open.

"He does the work and I talk," I say. "Without him I would have been dead by Day Two."

Seventeen words.

Bear holds it. Neve does not raise another card, which she always does, and she does not this time.

"That's it?" I say.

Neve puts the case on her knees and closes it, and looks at me for one second longer than she has ever looked at me, and goes down the hill.

Here is what I do with the rest of Day Eight.

I haul bark. There is no reason to haul bark. The roof is done, the weather side is battened, the courses are lapped by a third and Ghorlan finished them on Day Three. I go down the slope to the down cedar anyway and I pull sheets off it and carry them up, six trips, and my hands get cut in two places on the underbark and I keep going, because if my arms are full I cannot do the other thing.

The other thing is that the sentence keeps playing.

He does the work and I talk.

It plays on the way down the slope. It plays with a sheet of bark on my shoulder. It plays while I stack the bark I do not need in a place we will not use it.

And every time it plays, the part that comes up hardest is not the lie, because it is not a lie. That is the trick of it. He does do the work. I do talk. Every word of that sentence is true, and I chose those particular true words, in that particular order, out of eleven available answers, because they were the cheapest ones in the shop and because a woman in a warm cab told me this morning exactly which shelf they were on.

I did not do it for the money. That is the part I keep arriving back at. If she had offered me the number and I had taken it, there would be a transaction in it, and a transaction has edges, and edges are something you can hold.

I did it because I was cold and it was shorter.

Ghorlan comes back at six with three trout, which is the first protein either of us has had since the drop, and he is so pleased that the pleasure comes off him like heat off a stove, and he tells me about the pool under the second bend and the four failures that preceded it and he keeps talking, which he never does, and I sit there and eat the fish he caught and say all the right things at all the right times, because that is my skill, that is my documented skill, and I am extremely good at it.

Four times I get to the edge of telling him.

Four times I look at a man with a fish and eleven pounds gone off him and a house with buckets in the upstairs hall, and I put it back down.

The trestle-word happens at nine.

He goes first. He names his error, which is that he set the smoking rack too close to the fire and cooked the second trout to leather on one side.

"Your turn."

"I stacked bark we don't need," I say. "Six trips. Wasted about four hundred calories on a job that isn't a job."

"Why."