Page 59 of She, Wolf, Him.

"You think I owe you." My voice doesn't climb. It drops, low, to a place I've never used with her before. "For what? A promise I never made you? You built a whole life on a door I never opened, and now you want to charge me rent on it."

Margot flinches. All of her takes it, one step back she doesn't choose, the bucket knocking her knee, water going over into the frost.

In twenty years I've never made Margot flinch. Her father has. The village has, more times than it will ever be brought to answer for. I was where the flinching stopped. I see the words reach her and set. Her face hasn't even finished changing.

Only her breath, white in the air between us, and the small dry tick of leaves coming down at the wood's edge.

"Two nights ago you finally looked at me," she says, and it's quiet, quiet all the way through, no anger left anywhere in it, which is how I know how deep it went. "First time since we were girls, you looked at me straight on, the way I've looked at you since before I knew there was a name for what I was doing. I got to be seen. One evening's worth. And then I got to watch you decide, with my hand still on your jaw, and it wasn't me you were seeing even then. It was him you were reckoning the cost against."

"That's not fair⁠—"

"None of this is fair. That's the point." Flat, a fact past arguing. "You're the only one here still waiting for it to be."

The blue drains out of the dusk while the fight wears down to the same few stones, thrown back and forth with less and less arm behind them. She says my goodness is the dearest lie I keep. I say she's not had to stand where I stand, torn between two lives and worthy of neither, and that going hungry for one person all your years is its own kind of coward's ease. None of it is true enough to say. None of it is false enough to take back. By then we're only proving we can yet draw blood.

By the end we're standing a long way apart for two women within arm's reach, her arms crossed, my face shut.

"I can't keep doing this." Margot's voice is quiet now, worn through, nothing in it fighting any more. "Being half of a life you refuse to choose. Half was more than anybody else ever offered me. I told myself half of you was worth more than any life I'd make without you. I can't tell myself that any more. I'd rather have my own empty hands than keep mistaking scraps for a life."

"That isn't⁠—"

The rest won't come. She watches me not finish, and nods once, taking the unfinished sentence for the honest answer she's been asking me for all along.

"Go back to him." No heat in it. She bends and takes up the bucket, going home to the supper she'll cook and the brothers she'll feed, because that's what the world will ask of her within the hour, and Margot answers what's asked. She always has. "You chose. Live with it."

She walks. Down through the frost-stiffened grass, past the hay-store without a glance to spare for it, onto the lane. I stand at the treeline and follow her with my eyes all the way down, waiting for the one backward look that has ended every quarrel we've ever had. It doesn't come. The lane takes her round the bend by the chicken-runs. Then the lane is only a lane, and that's all.

I stay at the treeline while the light fails.

The fury comes up the moment she's out of sight. It has manners, my anger. It's been taught, same as the rest of me, to wait until the company's gone. I stand in the cold and let it come, expecting it to rise and pass the way weather passes. Every fury I've ever swallowed went down and stayed down.

This one doesn't. My fingers stop answering for the cold, and the fury holds where it is, keeping every cruel word of the hour bright, hers and mine both. I've nowhere to put it. A man would have somewhere. A man could shout in a tavern, break a gate, walk to another parish and come home a year later, forgiven. What I've got is a shut cellar of a feeling with no door to it, and a house at the bottom of the lane where I'll sit with it in silence till it consents to sleep.

I start down while there's a rim of grey left to walk by. I've decided not to live with it.

Tomorrow. She feeds the hens behind her father's house in the first light, before her brothers are up, the one hour of her day that's hers alone. I'll go to her there and say it properly. I'm sorry. No reasons hitched to it, no shares of the blame passed round. I pick the words over as I walk and throw out the ones that ring false, which is most of them. She'll be angry through the morning and no further. Margot's grudges die young. They always have. By supper, or by Sunday at the worst, she'll have forgiven me more than I've earned. She doesn't know how to do it by halves.

There's time. Tonight's harm, tomorrow's mending, and between them nothing but a few hours of dark. Behind me the trees close the dark up, patient as ever.

31

WHAT THE WOLF TOOK

GASPARD

The Beast, which we had believed slain, has returned. God have mercy on us all.

— PARISH REGISTER FRAGMENT, CHANALEILLES, 1766

The bell gets into my sleep before its meaning does, and I lie one breath in the widow's cold back room reading it as I'd read a track. A bell rung for Mass swings full and even. A bell rung for a wedding gets away from the ringer and laughs. This one is being struck, single blows with a long wait between, by arms that don't want the work. Week upon week this parish has come up empty, and I'd taken to sleeping the night through. In this valley that's vanity.

I'm in my boots by the fourth stroke. Coat, shot-pouch, the rifle I keep loaded. The widow stands on the stair in her shawl with a candle. "What is it," she asks. "What's happened."

"I don't know yet," I tell her, and it's the last time this morning I get to say that.

The lane is filling, doors left standing open behind people who didn't stay to shut them. What they're saying reaches me in pieces. "The hay-store," somebody's saying, up the lane. "Fetch the hunter." "He's come himself," says another, seeing me. A boy pelts past me the wrong way, toward the church, sent to keep the bell going or to stop it. I never learn which.

At the well-corner a woman I know by sight and not by name takes hold of my arm with both hands, hard enough to turn me.