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He didn't answer immediately. The silence stretched long enough that I started to wonder whether I had asked too much, but eventually he looked down at the floor between his boots.

“Actually I… I have been living very close to it for some time now,” he said. “It feels like actively losing your mind," he said. "All the time. Every hour of every day. Sometimes it's quieter, and sometimes it gets so loud that you can't hear yourself think, but it never actually stops." He turned one bandaged hand over and stared at his palm. "But today, before you put your hand on me..."

His voice faded.

I waited.

"It felt like the human part of me was gone," he said at last. "And then you appeared and brought me back." His fingers curled slowly into his palm. "I didn't know how to thank you."

When he looked up, his eyes were wet. He didn't look away or pretend they weren't.

"You saved my life,” he added.

For a moment, I couldn't think of anything to say.

I let the blanket fall from my shoulders, slid off the end of the bed, and crossed the short distance between us on my knees. When I sat beside him against the wall, our shoulders touched.

Silas went completely still.

I didn't move away.

After a few seconds, he allowed some of his weight to rest against me. It wasn't much, only enough for me to understand that he was doing it deliberately and waiting to see whether I would object.

I stayed where I was.

We sat together in silence for a long time.

He had shown me the part of himself he was most afraid of and trusted me not to recoil from it. After that, telling him something of my own didn't feel especially brave. It simply felt fair.

So I told him about Daniel.

I told him about the doorway, the packed bag, and the way he'd said, You're a lot, Wren. I told him about the salad and the photographs in the Baths. Silas listened without interrupting me once, and when I finally finished, he didn't rush to reassure me or offer some easy comfort.

He simply turned his head and studied my face for a moment.

"They were all wrong," Silas said.

There was no hesitation in his voice and no effort to convince me. He wasn't asking me to agree with him. He was simply telling me what he believed.

Then he reached into his trouser pocket.

“I, uh...” For once, he looked uncertain. “I made something for you.”

He opened his hand, and a tiny wooden bird rested in his palm, no bigger than my thumb. It had a rounded body, a short tail tipped upward, and a small, alert head. Every feather had been worked into the wood with careful, precise strokes.

It was a wren.

I recognized the pale wood immediately. I had watched the shape slowly emerge beneath his knife during all those mornings in the Pit, though somehow I had never realized what he was making.

“It’s me,” I said.

“It’s supposed to be.”

I lifted the little bird from his palm. The wood was still warm from his pocket, and he had polished it so thoroughly that every curve felt smooth beneath my thumb.

“She’s very small.”

“She’s hard to frighten, though.”