Page 57 of She, Wolf, Him.

And it's there, held in the sweetest gift anyone has ever freely offered me, that I catch my own mind at its work. It has gone to the road. To a man who told me plainly he means to take it, and to what I'd answer if there were room on it for me. The cost I'm reckoning against isn't her.

Margot, an inch away with her eyes open, watches me do it.

I break the kiss. I pull back. That's mine as well.

Her hand stays where it is a moment more, and the staying is a question, and I don't answer it. Then it drops.

The morning I watched come up that field goes down again while I sit there, and I'm the weather that took it.

"I can't," I say.

Two words. They're true, and they do more harm than any lie I've ever told.

I could lay the reasons out for her. He's leaving. I'm already grieving him, and he hasn't gone. I don't yet know what I am, to him or to her, and handing Margot a half-decided woman would insult her worse than any refusal. The reasons stay down where I keep everything, and the two useless words stand out in the cold alone.

"I'm sorry," I say, which makes four.

"Don't." Margot has gone very still, the stillness she keeps for the worst things. "Don't be sorry. Be honest. Once, with me, only the once, be honest."

"Margot—"

"You want him. Or you want the wanting he's woken in you, and I don't believe you know which, and I don't believe you'll let yourself find out." Her voice doesn't rise at all. It's worse than any shouting she could do. "And me you'll go on loving the way you love your own breath. Without ever once looking at it."

"You love me," she says, when I've given her nothing. "I know you do. You love me the way you love the well, Agnès. It's there. It'll always be there. It doesn't occur to you that the well might want something back. I never asked you for more than the hay-store. Not once. I knew what the asking would cost, so I never asked, and that was my choice. Now I want it known it was a choice."

I don't answer that either. There's nothing in it to argue with.

I get up out of the hay. That's my answer, in the end, the only one I give her. I walk to the door, and I understand, somewhere on the way, that this is what I'll be sorriest for, longer than the kiss, longer than the breaking of it.

"Don't tell anyone," she says, behind me. And then, lower, with the first crack of the true hurt in it. "As if there's anyone. As if there's anyone in the world I could tell."

She doesn't move. She sits deep in the hay where I found her, her knees come back up to her chest, and she lets me go. The look she gives me while I go is worse than any anger she's ever shown me, so I take the whole of it with me out the door.

The lane is nearly dark, and the cold has it to itself. It gets in under my shawl and I let it, glad of it, the one simplicity the night has left.

I don't look back, not even at the lane's turning. If I look back I'll go back. What I'd do then I can't tell from here, finish what we started or break what's left of it.

There was a night near the start of all this when I sat at my own hearth and counted my wants like a rich woman, the freedom, the friend, the stranger, then called myself greedy as a child, with no room in one life to feed it. I thought then that the price of the greed would be mine to pay. Tonight I've learnt who such debts fall to. They fall to whoever loves the greedy one best.

Somewhere below me the village is lighting its lamps. Gaspard is in the widow's house with his leaving packed into him these three weeks and not yet gone. He says the road will hold till the first snow. He doesn't say what holds him, and I've not asked, because I think the answer is me, and I don't know what I'd do with it. No part of what tonight cost will reach him, at the far end of a kiss he wasn't in. I can't even say, walking down out of the dark with my mouth still remembering her, which of the two of them I was protecting when I pulled away. Honest, she asked me to be. This is as honest as I know how to get.

The last of it I do on the lane, because it can't come into the house with me and sit in the open all night. I take tonight, the dust, the grey stripes of light, the name that nearly got loose, and make myself carry it. Nothing I've put away has ever fought like this. I do it anyway, and if it takes till morning, well. There's no work in Saint-Élie I'm better at.

Behind me, in the dark, Margot is sitting alone in the hay with the truth we finally let out. There's no whistling a thing like that back into its pen. I carry my share of it up the lane pressed under both hands. It will not lie flat. Morning is a long way off.

30

THE FIGHT

AGNÈS

Let the woman learn in silence. For it is not permitted unto her to speak, but to be under obedience.

— SERMON FRAGMENT, DIOCESE OF MENDE, 1764

Margot draws her father's water at the day's end, whatever the season, so at the day's end I go to the well and wait for her.

Two days she's kept the length of the village between us. She isn't hiding. Margot couldn't hide in an empty field. She has simply arranged her hours so that none of them touch mine, and done it so well that I've begun to see how much of my life was built out of the hours she gave me.