"I'm not your responsibility. You need to get home to your family.”
She presses the tape back down, smooths it flat, and sits back on her heels to look at me properly. There are shadows under her eyes deep enough to hold rainwater. She's wearing a spare T-shirt and a pair of boxer shorts and a week of survival, and she still manages to look at me like I'm the one being unreasonable.
"You walked into a fortress for me," she says. "You got shot getting me out of it. You've been my responsibility since the vineyard, and I don't recall asking your opinion on the matter then either."
"That was a contract."
"That was a Tuesday, probably. I've lost track." She pushes to her feet. "I’ll help you to the bathroom and I’ll make us something to eat. You're going to eat whatever I conjure up, and you're going to hate how weak you are while you do it, and I'm going to pretend not to notice. That's the arrangement."
She's gone before I can refuse, and I sit there listening to her move around the kitchen, the scrape of the pan, the clink of a spoon, a stream of commentary directed at the camping stove that seems to have a personality now, and possibly a name. I've stayed in this house four times over the years. It has never once made noise.
She comes back with two bowls, hands me one, and drops into the chair with the other, hooking one leg over the arm in a sprawl that has no business being that comfortable in a wooden chair.
The rice is plain and slightly overdone. I eat all of it. My body is a machine that has run out of fuel, and the machine doesn't care about seasoning. She watches me eat with open satisfaction, like every spoonful is a point scored.
"Ma would be horrified," she says. "Plain rice for an invalid. She'd have had broth going by now. Real broth, bones and all, the kind that takes two days and the whole kitchen smells like it." She stirs her own bowl without eating from it. "She does this thing when anyone's sick. Doesn't matter who. Brother, wife, baby, the man who fixes the gate. She feeds you and she puts a blanket on you even if it's summer, and she sits with you exactly long enough that you know you've been sat with, and then she leaves before you can feel watched. It's a science. I've studied it my whole life and I still can't tell how she figures out the timing."
"You learned it," I say.
She looks up.
"The water was within reach of my hand," I say. "The cloth was wrung out. You packed away the old dressings where I wouldn't see them from the cot. You sat long enough to be here when I woke and you'd have left the room the moment I was steady, if I hadn't caught you sleeping first."
She stares at me for a second too long, and surprise moves behind her face, or something adjacent to it, there and covered in the time it takes her to smile.
"Well," she says. "Somebody's observant."
"It's my job."
"Watching people?"
"Knowing them faster than they know me."
"And what do you know?" She says it lightly, but she's stopped stirring the rice.
That you sang to a dying stranger in the middle of the night because it was the only medicine left in the box.
That you said you’d keep me, and I want to know what that really means.
"That you should eat the rice instead of stirring it," I say.
She laughs, caught out, and eats the rice.
She talks while we eat. I've come to understand this is her natural state, the way silence is mine, and somewhere in the last day and a bit I've stopped bracing against it. She tells me about the kitchen. Not the house, the kitchen, because as far as I can tell the Orlov estate is a kitchen with some architecture attached. She tells me about her brother Aidan, who once waited three weeks to deal with a boy who bullied her at school and never admitted it was him. About Killian trying to set his own shoulder with a doorframe, a story I gather I've heard a piece of already, on a hillside, with a bullet in me. About a baby named Mila who is learning how to eat solid foods by mashing them up with herhands and smearing them all over herself. A sister-in-law who was in hospital giving birth when Iris was taken, and a mother who is currently, Iris is certain, terrorizing five grown men into eating breakfast.
I listen. That's the strange part. I’m usually the one extracting information from human speech, sorting signal from noise, discarding the noise. There's no signal here. Nothing operational. Nothing I can use. It's noise all the way down, warm and specific and completely useless, but I keep listening anyway, and when she trails off to eat, I catch myself waiting for it to start again.
"There are five of them," she says at one point, "they’re all married now, and the babies are arriving in shifts, and the whole thing just, orbits. Everyone circling everyone." She shrugs with one shoulder, a gesture too small for her. "And then there's me."
"You're the one they orbit," I say.
"Ha." No humor in it. She looks into her bowl. "I'm the one who keeps them from colliding. It's not the same thing."
I make a note of it, the way she sees herself in the universe of her life, place it right next to a photograph of a woman at a dinner table with an entire family leaning toward her like she's the sun, and I don't push. I know what it looks like when someone sets something down next to the truth instead of on top of it. I also know she'd have followed the thought further if she weren't swaying.
Because she is. Swaying. Minutely, in the chair, the bowl tilting in her hands, a week of captivity and two nights of no sleep finally presenting their invoice all at once.
"Iris."
