She trailed off, not trusting herself to continue without crying again.
Something shifted in his face. Not quite a smile, but a loosening of the tension around his eyes.
“Good.” The word was gruff but genuine. “She needed warmth and rest. Both of you did.”
“Thank you.” She set down her spoon and met his gaze directly. “For everything. For letting us stay. For?—”
“Why did you leave?”
The question cut through her gratitude like a blade. Her mouth closed with an audible click.
“Your village,” he clarified, though his tone suggested he knew exactly what she’d understood. “You fled during a storm. With a sick child. Something drove you to that.”
Gerhard. Halwick. The bargain I never agreed to.
She looked down at her half-finished bowl. The grain had gone cold while she’d been cataloguing his loneliness, and suddenly she wasn’t hungry anymore.
“It’s… complicated.”
“Most things are.”
She glanced up. He was still watching her, those green eyes steady and patient. He was demanding an answer, exactly, but he was making it clear he wasn’t going to let the subject drop.
He deserves to know,she thought.He’s sheltering us. He has a right to understand what he’s gotten himself into.
“My uncle,” she began, then stopped. Took a breath. Started again. “My uncle Gerhard has been trying to control me for years, ever since our mother died. He didn’t care about us when she was alive. He didn’t want anything to do with me or Dani, but after…”
She pressed her lips together, fighting the old familiar bitterness.
“After she died, suddenly we were his… assets. Our cottage, my mother’s loom, my skills—he saw all of them as things he could use to improve his own position.”
He said nothing, just listened, his expression unchanging.
“I managed to keep him at arm’s length for a while. I made myself useful enough that he couldn’t push too hard without losing what I provided. But then Dani got sick, and…” Her throat tightened. “Medicine is expensive. The kind she needs comes from Port Cantor, and Gerhard made sure he controlled the supply.”
“Leverage.”
The word was flat. Understanding.
“Yes.” She forced herself to meet his eyes again. “A few weeks ago, he brought a trader to my cottage. A man named Halwick. He wanted—” She hesitated, trying to find the right words. “He wanted the sunvine cloth. That’s the reason I needed the vines. Gerhard had shown him a sample I’d made months ago and… exaggerated my ability to produce more.”
“Exaggerated how?”
“He told him it was readily available, even though I’d told him I’d never seen the plant before.” She gave a bitter laugh. “He made it sound easy for me to weave even though it’s delicate and time consuming to make even a small section.”
“And you couldn’t tell him that.”
“No. Not with Gerhard holding Dani’s medicine over my head. So I played along. I made another sample and gave it to Halwick. I took the pittance of medicine Gerhard was willing to share.” The words were coming faster now, tumbling out like water through a broken dam. “But it wasn’t enough. It’s never enough. And Halwick is coming back for more fabric, and Gerhard is demanding half of everything I make, and Dani needs proper treatment, not scraps, and I?—”
Her voice cracked.
“I couldn’t stay,” she finished quietly. “I couldn’t keep playing his game and watching my sister fade away while he got rich off my work. So we ran. I didn’t expect to run into the storm.”
Silence fell between them.
She stared at the table, feeling exposed in a way that had nothing to do with her bare legs.
He probably thinks I’m weak,she thought.Running away instead of fighting back.
