Page 16 of Property of Prophet

Her shoulders drop about half an inch the second she thinks nobody is looking. Not when she stops moving because Lily barely stops moving, but in the in-between spots when she is crouched at the stove with her back to the room or coiling rope by lamplight, any moment she’s decided doesn’t need guarding. I wouldn’t have caught it the first week. Now I’d catch it across a crowded bar, if such a thing existed within forty miles of here.

Every morning, before the stove, the coffee, or she’s said a word to me or to the day, she crosses to where Bear is sleeping and slowly runs a hand down each of his ears. Bear doesn’t need the settling. He sleeps like something with no debts. She’s the one who needs it every morning, and I don’t think she knows she’s doing it, and I’ve never once let her catch me watching.

And there’s the stillness. If I only got to keep one thing I’ve learned about her, I’d keep that. Ask her something that actually matters, not where, not how long, the kind of question that costs her something to answer, and she goes quiet in a way that’s got nothing to do with calm. It’s a woman deciding on how much of herself she can afford to hand over. I’ve learned to wait her out. Mostly. I’m not great at waiting. It might be the truest thing I know about whatever I used to be.

It hits me at the woodpile.

I’m stacking the morning’s split rounds the way she showed me, without ever sitting me down to show me, bark-side up, rows angled into the wind so the snow sheds instead of piling, and I’ve got my hands full of the rhythm of it, lift, set, lift, set, when something underneath the rhythm gives way.

I’m in a room.

Not this room.

Not anywhere I’ve stood since I fell.

Low light, old wood, the smell of leather, woodsmoke, and something else, something that means safe. Not big or fancy. A long table, scarred down the middle where hands have rested on it for years. Men sitting around it. Not many, maybe a dozen, and I’m one of them.

I know that room.

I know my chair.

Nobody has to tell me where to sit.

This isn’t a meeting. I know that the same way I know cold, fast, total, no explaining required. A meeting is something you attend. This is something you are. There’s a silence that falls when I talk, and it’s not fear. It’s closer to men who’ve already decided to trust you before you’ve finished earning it.

One word comes up out of nowhere, the first real thing the fall has handed back to me since it took everything else.

Brothers.

Not friends. Brothers, the kind of word that does actual work in a life instead of just decorating it. I had brothers. Wherever that table sat, whatever that room was for, I had a dozen men who’d have called me that and meant every word of it.

My breath is coming too fast for the work I’ve been doing. I’m standing at the woodpile with the cold working up through my boots and a brotherhood I can’t put a name to pressing against my ribs, trying to get out.

I want them back.

Whoever the fuck they are, I want them back.

Then it’s gone. All at once, the way a held breath finally lets go.

I’m at the woodpile. Lily is down checking the trapline. Nobody is around to see whatever my face is doing, and I’m grateful for that, at least.

I set the wood down and don’t split another round. I stand there a long while, thinking about a table I’ll probably never see again, and a word that’s told me more about myself in three seconds than five weeks of waking up in this body ever did.

We don’t make a habit of sitting around talking. The days take most of what we’ve got, and by the time the lamp is lit, there’s usually not much left but sleep. But I can’t carry this one alone any longer, and she’s close enough, mending a split seam in a glove, the lamp catching the loose hair at her temple and turning it the color of something on fire.

“I belong somewhere,” I say. “I can feel it.”

She doesn’t look up right away. The needle keeps its pace through the leather, slowly and evenly, and I’ve learned by now that the needle not stopping is its own kind of answer—she’s listening with the part of herself that doesn’t want to get caught listening.

When she does look up, she doesn’t ask what I mean, how I know, or whether I’m sure. She asks the only question that matters, the one I haven’t had the guts to ask myself.

“If you know where you’re supposed to be, why aren’t you trying to get back?”

Fair question. Probably the only question a woman with her history would think to ask, someone who’s spent five years figuring out exactly what a person owes to where they came from versus where they ended up. She earned a real answer.

“Because I don’t know the way back without knowing who I am first,” I say. “And I’m not sure—” I stop there. Didn’t plan to. The sentence had somewhere to go when I started it, and somewhere in the middle, the destination changed on me, and I’m left sitting with the unfinished half of it hanging in the warm air, surprised at myself for wanting to keep going and being too much of a coward to do so.

She waits. She doesn’t fill it in for me the easy way, the way most people would, to get past the discomfort. She waits, hands gone still on the glove, the same patience she gives everything else that hasn’t decided yet what it wants to be.