Page 56 of She, Wolf, Him.

"Your brother outruns answers," I say.

"He takes after his sister," she says, and it's nearly a joke, and neither of us laughs.

"You've got hay in your hem." She picks it off the way a stranger would. Careful. That tells me the size of it. "Sit by me. Properly. You've got that look, like you'll bolt."

"I don't bolt."

"You're bolting now," she says, "and we're not six words in."

Then neither of us says anything.

I know every silence Margot owns. The working one, with the hum under it. The listening one she keeps for my troubles, that has a lap you could put your head in. This one I've never met. It has edges. It runs on too long. Her fingers go on braiding. When a cart passes out on the lane, we both listen to it all the way by, as though it were worth hearing.

"I'm glad for you," she says at last. To her hands, not to me. "That's what I wanted to say first. I'm glad. You've got what you—" She stops. Starts again. "He's a good man, I suppose, under all the show. That is⁠—"

She stops again, and the strand of hair gets braided tight enough to hurt.

"I saw you at the feast," she says, to her hands. "Standing in the middle of it like you belonged to it. I never thought I'd see that. In this place, on you. I thought they'd have you grey before your time."

I wait. With Margot there was never any fishing to do. Her troubles have always dropped into my lap of their own weight, before I'd even asked. The light in the stripes across the hay goes dull while I wait, the afternoon sliding toward dusk without ceremony, as it does once the year has turned its back.

"I'm not jealous," she says.

The words come out flat, laid down one at a time, like she'd practised the laying. And now I understand the silence, because Margot has never lied to me in all the years I've known her. The truth is simply out of her before she's had time to consider another course. This is the first. Margot telling a lie is a fire trying to give no light. It can't be done, and the trying shows further than the flame would have.

"Then what are you?" I ask.

Her fingers stop.

"I've waited my whole life for you to see me."

She says it with her eyes up at last, straight into mine. Her voice holds level enough that I can see what the holding costs her.

"You see everyone, Agnès." Now it comes, and it comes the way her sentences have always come, tumbling, the ends chasing the beginnings. "You see what the dead need before their own kin can bear to look. You read a wrong morning off the sheep before the shepherds do. You've never in your life needed a thing spelled out for you. And me you look at the way you look at the well, or the church wall. Something that was there yesterday and will be there tomorrow." Her chin comes up. "So there it is. I'm done waiting for you to see it on your own. I'm telling you."

"Telling me what?" I say. It's a coward's question, and we both hear that it is.

"Tell me I'm wrong, then." She doesn't raise her voice. "Look at me, and tell me I've misread you all these years, and I'll carry my basket home and we'll call this a strange hour and forget it. You can't. You can't even find the words to refuse me with. Say it plain, one of us. For once in our lives. I've said it, and I'm still breathing. Yours can be anything. It can be no. But let it be yours, Agnès. Not theirs. Not what you think you owe me. Yours."

And I can't. I sit in the hay with her name in my mouth, the plain one, the daylight one, and the other name underneath it, the one I've carried since before I understood what the carrying meant.

"Margot." It's all I find. Her name, said low, with too much in it, and no refusal anywhere around it.

She hears everything I don't say. I watch it come up her face like morning coming up a field.

"There it is," she says, hardly above a breath. "There you are."

She unfolds her knees and comes across the little space between us, not touching yet, near enough that her warmth crosses first. Her hand comes up. It stops twice on the way, asking, the whole history of us in the asking. I don't move away, and I don't pretend not to understand.

Her palm comes to rest along my jaw. Warm, work-rough, steady as a held bowl. Laid there, light as it is, on the exact hinge I've kept shut my whole grown life.

The name comes up my throat then. It comes all the way to my lips, the word I've kept under my tongue for her since girlhood, and it wants out so badly I have to close my teeth on it. Because a word like that, said out loud between us, would be as good as banns read over the two of us, and there's no parish on God's earth where we could be wed. And I call the closing carefulness.

We come to the kiss together. I couldn't swear whose weight shifted first, only that mine shifted, that I chose the shifting, and that her mouth was already there, choosing back. Her breath is warm on my lips before her mouth is. The first touch of it is hardly anything, a brush, a question put so softly it barely asks.

I answer it. I press in, my own doing, my own weight. For a little while Margot and I are kissing in the hay-store with the last of the light going, and it isn't strange. That's the part that will keep me from sleep tonight, how unstrange it is. She tastes of the cold, and under it, nothing but herself. I couldn't have told you this morning what Margot tastes of. Now I'll know it the rest of my life.

Her hand stays warm along my jaw, sure of itself now.