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“That’s yours now,” I said. “Fine.”

I was not ashamed of my behavior.

Shame was for a male who hid what he did or lied about it after. I’d done what I did in front of a witness, with her name coming apart in my mouth. It happened. I happened. Pretending otherwise would insult us both.

But there was a distance between not being ashamed and knowing where to put my eyes the next time she looked at me. I didn’t have words for the wall. And day after tomorrow, she’d be living under my roof, and I’d be handing her my house keys with the same hands that had boxed her in against her own shelving.

The words needed to come first. Before the wagon. Before the keys.

I practiced on Turnip.

“Rain,” I told him. He swung his head around, chewing on the strap. “The tea did the walking. The rest was mine. I’d take back the walking, but I don’t want to take back the rest.”

Turnip pulled more of the strap into his mouth, like a male eating one long noodle.

The Weatherby twins came with my feed order at noon the next day and brought village gossip along with them.

They came up the track standing on the wagon, and they had the good sense to wait until the sacks were unloaded and stacked before they started in on what they had to say.

Then what they said made no sense at all.

“Everyone’s talking about it,” Struan said. “Old Tom’s version has furniture breaking.”

“No furniture broke,” I huffed.the younger one

“Mrs. Piddock says you succumbed to a love potion,” Nastru said, easily hauling a sack onto his shoulder. “She says the tea witch’s daughter finally lost patience with you. Those are her words.”

“Watch your mouth about Rain.”

Both boys straightened, and their ears went flat against their heads. Struan’s half tail twitched.

“About Mrs. Piddock,” Struan said, “or⁠—”

“Rain brewed me nothing but kindness.” I took the last two sacks under my arms. “You can take that back down to the village square. Word for word.”

The boys looked at each other, a long twin-conversation happening between their eyebrows.

Without another word, they climbed onto the bench seat, gathered the reins to their beast, and rattled the wagon down the track.

I stood in my yard and thought about the next season. Rain would hear the rumors. She’d worry about what I believed, because her family had been accused before. Her craft was honest the entire way through, like straight grain in good wood. This village should know better than to spread rumors like that.

By the end of the day, there would be no distance between us.

My apology had to come first, and it had to come the right way. Words, for her, because humans took great stock in them.

I went into town late that night, when Willow Lane still belonged to the cats and the frost. Real cats, that is. They watched me from the bakery steps, and I nodded to them as I passed. They did not melt into puddles.

Rain’s shop door had been bothering me since the storm. The wind had racked it on its hinges, and it hung a finger’s width off true. She’d been shouldering it closed for days. I’d heard the scrape across the square each morning, and it put my teeth on edge. A good thing shouldn’t be left to rub itself wrong.

I took the door off its hinges. Recut the seats with a chisel and trued the frame where the storm had sprung it. Then I set new pins I’d forged the night before, hung it back, and oiled it. I worked quickly and quietly.

An ogre learns to be quiet on purpose. Small folk never have to.

The job took the rest of the night, and when I eased the door through its swing the last time, it went as easily as a hand through water.

After, I took the stone out of my coat.

I’d walked my creek line the evening before to choose it. Flat gray, a band of white through the middle, smooth from years of water. The best stone my land had made in my lifetime of picking them up and putting most of them back down.