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Rowan is sitting at the table, carving something small with a kitchen knife. He doesn’t look up. “I watched you make it.”

“Once. You watched me make it once.”

“I pay attention.”

I sit down and eat my perfect porridge, and I don’t know what to do with my face.

Here’s the thing about being alone that long. You get good at it. You fix the damn roof yourself, badly. You carry the crates yourself. You rub your back at night and tell yourself it’s fine. After enough years, you forget there’s any other way.

And then a giant wooden man shows up and fixes your boots without being asked, and you don’t even know how to say thank you, because you’re out of practice.

“Thank you,” I finally say. It comes out weird and stiff.

He looks up at me. Then he looks back down at whatever he’s carving.

“Eat your porridge, Hattie.”

So I eat my porridge.

* * *

It keeps happening.

He starts brushing my hair at night. I’m sitting by the fire undoing my braids, and he just takes the comb out of my hand without a word and does it himself. Slow and careful, working through every section, way more patient than I’ve ever been with it. I almost fall asleep sitting up.

It rains for two days straight, and the path out to the hives turns to mud, and he carries me out there both mornings. I tell him I can walk. He tells me my boots are clean now and he’s not doing them again. I tell him he’s ridiculous. He doesn’t put me down.

He carves me things. Little things. A honey dipper with a bee on the handle. A comb that fits my hand perfectly. A tiny wooden owl, which I make him take right back outside because I don’t trust that little shit, even though he swears it doesn’t move.

And he cooks. Badly at first. Then a little less badly. By the end of the week, he can make bread that’s almost as good as mine, and he’s so damn smug about it.

I keep waiting for something to go wrong. I keep waiting for him to get bored, or annoyed, or to start expecting something back. That’s how it works with men in this village. They do one nice thing and then they want a medal and a blowjob and for you to stop talking.

Rowan doesn’t want a medal. He wants me to sit down. Every time I start to do something, he takes it out of my hands.

“I can carry the water, Rowan.”

“I know you can.”

“So let me.”

“No.”

He also doesn’t want me to stop talking. He wants the opposite. He asks me questions all the time. About my bees. About my grandma. About why I like my candles shaped the way I do. And then he actually listens to the answers, and he remembers them, and he brings them up three days later.

On the seventh night, I’m lying in our new bed with my head on his chest, tracing the grain on his skin, and I hear myself say, “You don’t have to do all this, you know.”

“Do what?”

“All of it. The boots. The bread. The carrying.”

He’s quiet for a second. “Do you want me to stop?”

“No! No. I just…” I don’t know how to say it. “I’m not used to it.”

“I know.” His hand moves slow up and down my back. “I watched the people in this village for a very long time, Hattie. I know how they treat each other. I know how they treat omegas who don’t do what they’re told.”

I don’t say anything.