He came up with a sound I'd never heard a person make, and his eyes opened, and this time somebody was home in them, and that was worse. He looked at the splintered door, the bent bar in my hands, the blood on his brother's mouth, and I watched it arrive in him piece by piece, and then this enormous man who'd lifted me off my feet to see over a fence curled in on himself and began to sob.
The line connected. Somewhere across the dark, Kazan said hello.
6
LORKIN
Kazan gotZarcal up off the floor, taking all his weight, talking low the whole time the way he used to in the holds.
Zarcal moved slow and dazed, letting Kazan steer him. The sobbing had worn out of him a while back, and the quiet that came after was worse. He didn't look at the split pantry door. He didn't look at Chloe. Whatever had come back to him in pieces, he was carrying it out of the house now and not setting it down.
"He'll stay at the orchard," Kazan said to me over Zarcal's bowed head. "However many nights it takes. I'll sit up with him."
Then, quieter, just for me: "Get her out of here tonight, Lorkin. Before he's well enough to come back and stand in his own kitchen and see what he did." He shifted Zarcal's weight. "Take care of Chloe. Maisie would kill me if something happened to her."
I nearly laughed, but it would have come out wrong.
Trusting me with her.
Iwas the reason she was standing in a torn-open kitchen with a bruise coming up dark on her arm. I'd looked at the best thing that had ever walked toward me and I'd handed it to myfriend to take. Holding it myself was the one thing I'd sworn I wouldn't do.
"I've got her," I said.
At the threshold, Zarcal stopped. He turned his head partway, no further, and got two words out in a voice scraped down to nothing.
"I'm sorry."
Not to me, of course. To Chloe. Then Kazan walked him out through the gap where the front door used to hang. I heard the truck door, then the engine. And then the night was just a night, the storm gone, the two of us alone in the wreck.
Chloe had her arms wrapped around herself, shaking, a fine steady tremor that had nothing to do with the cold.
I crossed the room slowly and stopped a little further from her than I wanted to. I made my voice as quiet as it goes, which is not very quiet. "Are you hurt?"
She shook her head. "Is he going to be all right? Out there. Kazan won't be hard on him?"
She was worried abouthim. After what he'd put her through tonight. Something in my chest lunged toward her, and I held it down. Behind it came the old fear, the one I'd carried since the morning I first caught her scent across that office and knew exactly what she was to me. That I'd given her two weeks with a good man, and she'd fallen for him, and I'd handed away the only thing I ever wanted to keep.
"Kazan won't be hard on him," I said. "Nobody's hard on a man for the war still going in his head."
She nodded, but her eyes had gone back to the broken door, and her hands wouldn't quit.
"He never did one cruel thing to me," she said, wrecked. "Not once, until tonight, and tonight wasn't him." She pressed her lips together. "He built me a bed, Lorkin." She said it like an accusation against herself. "And I still couldn't —"
Her jaw locked on the words.
The question stuck in my throat. I had no right to ask, and I asked anyway, low. "Couldn't what?"
"Feel it." Barely a sound. "Two weeks in his house and I never felt it. There's a room in him with the door shut, and I was never getting in, and I told myself that was fine. That people build a whole life on less than what we had."
"But how do you know you're missing something?" I asked. It came out rough. "How do you know what's supposed to be there?"
She looked up at me; the performance gone all the way off her face. "Just because I didn't feel it with him," she said, "doesn't mean I didn't feel it."
I had no answer to that.
She didn't love him.
A cramped, shameful part of me eased at that, here in the ruin of his kitchen, and I hated it. I held still and let the quiet be all I gave her. Everything else I had to give was wrong.
