Chapter Text
As soon as she recognises him, her thin, high shriek fading, the girl looks over his shoulder, a flicker of hope warring with the terror in her eyes. If she was alive out there and saw you comin’, she’d run the other way. There is nowhere for her to run in this dingy basement, but it is clear she is hoping for Rick or Shane to appear behind Daryl. The kinship he feels for this bedraggled kid he barely knows, the second of connection as she is found and he is her finder, vanishes. Daryl lowers the crossbow and she flinches, raising her arms to protect her head. Her hair is dark with dirt or sweat or both.
“Damn. I ain’t gonna hurt you.” He resents having to say it, the wound in his side from yesterday’s search still throbbing, the stitches irritating him. He tells himself her reaction is a reflex. She’s been alone out here for three days; her fear probably kept her alive.
She drops her arms, and in the filth on her cheeks there are fresh tear tracks. He glares at her.
“You hurt?” he asks roughly. “Bit?”
She shakes her head, and tugs at the hem of her T-shirt, the pale blue fabric smeared with mud and some kind of oil. Daryl looks around the cramped basement. A clutter of sports equipment lies against one wall, a football helmet, waterskis, fishing rods and paddles for a kayak. Against the opposite wall is the moth-eaten, sagging couch on which Sophia appears to have been sleeping. An old backpack serves as a pillow, and a half-eaten tin of sardines balances on one arm. The stink of the fish is undercut by the smell of rotting fabric. The floor of the basement is two inches deep in black water, leaked weeks ago, he guesses, from a burst pipe somewhere in the wall. A wooden desk stacked with box files stands near the sporting equipment. The high, narrow windows are so caked with dirt that they let in only the most meagre moonlight, which sits on the water like gasoline on asphalt, a sickly rainbow refracted through a row of jars on the windowsill. These contain nails, screws, coils of wire, the jumbled bits and pieces every self-respecting man Daryl knows keeps near his toolkit.
“Where’s my Mama?” The girl’s voice, quavering and soft. He looks at her again, trying to remember how old she is. Nine? Ten? She is scrawny and nondescript, though he sees for the first time now that she has freckles across her nose, like the softer, less obvious ones her mother has. He scowls.
“At a farm nearby. We been stayin’ there while we look for you. Your momma—” He hesitates, and then lies. “—an’ your daddy, they been real worried.”
Her eyes well up, and he curses under his breath. Truth be told, her father has displayed little more than irritation at her disappearance, but has used it as a reason to spend his days in a camping chair in the shade, smoking and snoozing, looking hurriedly mournful when anyone takes notice of him. Her mother, on the other hand, has been distraught. Daryl shifts uncomfortably. Carol. He tries not to think of her by name mostly—there’s no point, she’ll die soon enough at her husband’s hands or a walker’s—but for some reason her distress at the missing girl set his nerves jangling, beginning an unbearable cacophony that he didn’t know how to stop other than searching for this kid. He tries to sound less gruff, because her blue eyes remind him of the woman’s and he doesn’t need the clamour of more misery in his head. Not when he’s just found her.
“Gonna take you there. But we gotta wait for mornin’.”
The thought is as depressing to her, apparently, as it is to him, judging by the way her face crumples. But it is dark out already; he didn’t actually sleuth her presence here like Sherlock fucking Holmes—her tracks went cold at the creek. He came here seeking shelter for the night after he wandered too far from the farm. Not for all the beer between here and Maine would he venture out into the night with this kid and walk the long miles back to the farm. He tries to think of something comforting to say, and looks around again, water sloshing as he shuffles his feet. “Good spot you found here.”
She cries harder, her bony little shoulders shaking as she presses a hand to her mouth. Yeah, he thinks. Keep the noise down. Instantly, he hates himself, because he has seen her mother make the same gesture in the past three days, stifling her stricken weeping so her husband doesn’t lose his shit. The kid probably learnt it from her.
“Hey now.” He is running out of ideas, so he gives up and walks back to the stairs, ascending far enough to haul the trapdoor closed. God knows how the kid did it on her own with those stick arms. The house has no attic. If it did, he likely wouldn’t have found her, because he’d rather be up in the roof than shut in a dank basement. The darkness of the room increases only slightly as he closes the door; the house above is darker than the night outside.
The girl has sat down on the couch, curling herself into the corner where the empty backpack is, and since there is nowhere else to sit, he joins her. With unusual care, he plucks the tin of fish from the arm of the couch before sitting down. Food is food, and he has nothing left of the jerky and apples he took with him when he left the farm this morning. He holds the can out to the girl, and she shakes her head.
“I’m full,” she whispers, and sniffs. Shrugging, he snags a sardine and, tipping his head back, drops it into his mouth. It is oily and salty, and his stomach rumbles.
“You hide somewhere else before this?” he asks as he pinches out another fish. “Found an empty tin of these. Makeshift bed.”
She says nothing, and he glances at her, licking oil off his fingers. She is staring at him, her eyes unsettlingly blue and rimmed with red. She nods.
“I cried when no one came in the morning and the walkers found me.” Her voice quivers. “So I had to run away. But I brought some cans with me.”
He grunts, genuinely impressed. “Smart.”
She stares at him a moment longer with her owl eyes. Her scrutiny makes him uncomfortable, Shane’s words still ringing in his ears, and he looks down at the can to avoid eye contact. Three sardines left, and some oil. He tips the whole lot into his mouth, viscous liquid dripping off his chin, and chews grimly. Tossing the can across the room, he reaches for the canteen of water at his waist.
“Ain’t like anyone’s comin’ back here,” he snaps, because there was a twitch of her sneakers when he threw the can, the pressure of her gaze encompassing yet another judgement. He thinks of the empty sardine tin neatly tossed in the trashcan at the last place she hid, and scowls, rubbing his oily fingertips together before unscrewing the canteen. There is a quiet sniffle from the other end of the couch, and his frustration threatens to erupt, the balls of his feet pressing into the swampy rug, ready to catapult him out of his seat. He closes his eyes and finds himself thinking again of her mother, who cried sometimes even before the child disappeared, while she cooked for the group and served meals—wept soundlessly and without expression, as though it were a necessary bodily function. Her husband ignored it, and so they all did. Daryl took off by himself when she got like that, to escape the itchy feeling under his skin at the sight of her face all wet with tears. There is nowhere he can go right now to escape the girl. He sighs, and drinks.
The water in his canteen is lukewarm and stale. He offers it to the kid once he’s had his fill, but she shakes her head. When he doesn’t retract his arm immediately—trying to figure out how to encourage her to have some—a look of fear crosses her face.
“No, thank you,” she whispers, and waits, tension in her neck and shoulders. He lowers the bottle and closes it, at last thinking of something to say to her.
“Your momma, Lori says she cleaned up the RV for you,” he says, a note of pride in his voice for having remembered this information. “Made it…nice,” he finishes lamely, and Sophia’s chest heaves, a sob audible in her throat before she grits her teeth and hides her face in the crook of her arm.
“Jesus.” Daryl lets his head fall onto the damp, reeking upholstery behind him and squints up at the beams above them. The humid air vibrates with the girl’s struggle to suppress her crying. He lifts his head. “Ain’t nothin’ to cry about now. You kept yourself alive an’ tomorrow you’ll be back with your momma. You—you did good.”
She gulps, scrubbing at her face, and stops weeping. He senses obedience in the change rather than recovery, but he isn’t going to encourage her to continue. They sit in silence again, and he starts getting sleepy. No need to keep watch down here, he decides. They’re shut in and they’ll need their energy tomorrow to get back to the farm.
Making sure his crossbow is within reach, balanced on top of an old pet carrier beside the couch to keep the string from getting wet, he wriggles deeper into the cushions and lays his head back once more. Nowhere near as luxurious as that bed in Hershel’s house where the old man stitched him up. But soft, at least, and quiet. He closes his eyes. Mosquitoes are buzzing in the basement, drawn by the filthy water.
“Are there horses?” The question is just above a whisper, and she sounds congested, her nose all stuffy from crying. He lifts his head and peers at her.
“Huh?”
She hesitates, her arms folded across her chest, her shoulders hunched as though it has taken all her courage to ask the question.
“On the farm.”
“Oh. Yeah.” He settles back again. It is easier to talk when he isn’t looking at her. “Buncha them. At least one asshole.”
The sound is so quick as to be barely noticeable. But Daryl is attuned, to a wearying degree, to the people around him, and so he notices. A breath concertinaed into a…laugh? He turns and squints at her. She is beet red, watching him nervously. Jesus.
“You get a kick outta my language?” He tries to sound avuncular. It is a hopeless effort. She shakes her head rapidly, thin fingers gripping her upper arms as she presses herself back into the corner of the couch. He can smell her fear, hear the rabbit-quick staccato of her heartbeat. They are kin once more, for a moment that sickens him, and then it passes and all he can smell is grey water, all he can hear is the bugs and the woods outside.
“I’m kiddin’,” he barks, and her pupils flare, the skin of her arms greenish-white around her fingertips. He abandons any attempt at humour. “Should watch my mouth round kids. Sorry.”
He turns back to the ceiling so he doesn’t have to watch her stare at him. He is exhausted, not only from the injury in his side and the rigours of today’s search, but from the difficulty of being whoever this girl needs right now. Rick, his mind offers up, and he quells the bitterness that rises in the back of his throat, because Rick was the one who lost her in the first place. Not that it seems to matter. Her daddy blamed his wife—beat her bad, though the only visible evidence of this is the slow, stiff way she has moved the last three days, and the fact that she has worn long sleeves in the sweltering heat. She was hurt bad enough that Daryl gave her a wide berth; bad enough that he missed Merle extra, because Merle might just have whooped her husband’s ass while the rest of them looked the other way. Daryl? He’d like to pulverise that asshole’s face too, but it ain’t his problem, not when there are two cops right there. Just like the girl ain’t your problem. He quashes the thought. He doesn’t want to think about exactly why he’s been so focused on finding her.
The girl lays her head down—Daryl observes this out of the corner of his eye—and gives another quiet sniff.
“Go to sleep,” he mutters. “Got a lotta walkin’ to do tomorrow.”
Dawn comes with barely a change in the air of the basement. Daryl wakes at sunrise as usual, but he doesn’t get up, rolling his head to watch the grubby windowpanes lighten. For a moment, the dust and the dishwater light melt into a solid, dull shade, a strip of featureless grey. Then the sun moves, and the panes are dirty again, the light distant.
He is stiff and sore, the stitches in his side aching, the muscles bruised in his fall from the horse protesting more now than they did yesterday. Hershel warned him he needed to rest. But if he’d listened, he’d be in that comfy upstairs bed right now instead of here, in a room that stinks of fish and sewerage, the missing girl sleeping silently at her end of the couch.
He steals a glance at her. Her arms are folded, her head resting on them and her legs drawn up to her chest, her body folded into the smallest space possible. Asleep, she does not provoke nearly as much anxiety in him. She appears peaceful, doll-like besides the dirt on her face and, he now sees, a few scratches beneath it. Her face is caught between a childish roundness and the shape it will become as she grows, revealed sooner than it should be by her sardine diet for the past three days. She will look like her mother, Daryl thinks, the sweep of her jaw and her long neck, though there is something of her father in her face, too, blurring the sharpness of her features. The woman is a mess of incongruities, a face from a fancy painting capped with a rough buzzcut, skin smoother than Daryl’s but hair as grey as Dale’s. Eyes—fucksake. He huffs out a sigh and frowns at the sleeping child. As if she senses the change in his gaze, she stirs, her limbs clamping closer to her body in instinctive protection.
“Mornin’,” Daryl says. She yawns, covering her mouth with one hand. Her nails are bitten to the quick, just like his, dried blood clotted beside her thumbnail. “You got any more sardines?”
They share her last tin, splitting it down the middle, though she tries ineffectually to suggest he take more. He scowls at her and she keeps quiet. He has noticed her momma portioning out her family’s food, dividing her own between her husband and her daughter until she is left with barely anything for herself. He doesn’t need the kid doing that shit before she has to walk miles through the woods.
He drinks more of the brackish water in his canteen and gives her the rest. The faucets in this house are dry—he checked when he found the place last night—but he’ll refill the bottle on their walk. She drinks obediently, wiping the mouth of the canteen with her hand before returning it to him. It makes him aware of not having done the same for her, and he shoves the water into his pack irritably.
“C‘mon.”
She hesitates as he climbs the steps to the trapdoor, gazing around as though leaving a place that means something to her, and not a gloomy shithole where she might have died. He shakes his head.
“Said c’mon. You wanna see your momma tonight we gotta get goin’.”
Belatedly, he wishes he had softened his voice; he didn’t mean to half yell at her, to hold her mother over her that way. But it works. She scurries up the steps behind him and is ready when he thumps open the trapdoor, following him into the cool, bleak hallway of the house.
He did a cursory once-over of the place when he got here yesterday, but it’s lighter now, and he’s less exhausted, so he sticks his head into the rooms lining the hallway as they head for the front door. Musty furniture, dust-covered bookshelves and sideboard. In the bedroom, he finds only men’s clothes, and though he takes a few shirts he drops them at the front door in favour of a heavy raincoat, thick enough for storms, large enough to be useful for a multitude of purposes. He folds it and stashes it in his pack, and then, glancing at Sophia, he goes into the kitchen and finds a butcher’s knife. A little big for her hand, not useful in the long term, but good enough. He proffers it to her handle first, and her eyes widen.
“Take it,” he tells her. “Aim for the eyes or the temple if it’s a walker. Anywhere if it’s a person—hard enough to hurt ‘em.”
“A person?” she whispers, and he marvels that she should need this explanation despite having grown up with a man like her father.
“Yeah, a person. There’s bad people out there, not just walkers.” He crouches in front of her so they’re eye to eye. There is a sheen in hers, and her fingers are tentative on the handle of the knife as she accepts it. “I’m gonna keep you safe. ‘Kay? But that don’t mean you don’t need a way to keep yourself safe too.” He stands up, the eye contact suddenly too much. “Like you did till I found you.”
The fresh air, despite the heat already setting in for the day, is a relief after the basement, the forest full of the sounds of morning. He moves too quickly at first, doesn’t realise the girl is panting behind him, red-cheeked, until he stops to fill his bottle at a stream. She is surprisingly quiet for a child—rolls her feet instinctively over the forest floor, perhaps in imitation of him—and he has almost forgotten she is there. She stops at his shoulder as he holds the canteen in the current, and he realises she is breathing quickly. He glances at her and hands her the water.
“Shoulda told me to slow down,” he mutters, aware that she was as likely to do that as she was to sprout wings and soar over the trees. She shakes her head, and there is a stubborn set to her mouth he hasn’t seen before.
“I want to get back to Mama,” she says, and returns the bottle, wiping it carefully. He takes a long drink and refills it, considering her as he screws on the lid.
“All right,” he says, and he almost smiles, his mouth twitching in one corner because of the determination on that freckled little face. He did not expect it from her. But then again, he didn’t expect her still to be alive. Hope and expectation, he has known since he was a child, are not the same thing.
Afterwards, he is angry with himself that the emptiness of the woods, the absence of the dead, didn’t draw his attention sooner. The closer they get to the farm, the quieter the trees become, as though the birds and small creatures have fled the area. But he only realises this later. He is less and less aware of his surroundings as his eagerness to deliver the child grows. He listens with half an ear for danger, and keeps an eye on the changing shadows, but mostly, he thinks of the moment the girl’s momma will see her again. Each time he imagines that moment, he thinks of a statue in his hometown church, where he went only once, for his momma’s funeral: the serene mother holding her child, Mary’s face smooth and peaceful despite the chipped paint. He has seen other versions of her since, in churches between here and Atlanta, and he likes her better than the effigies of Christ crucified that appear in some. If he were to be convinced of God’s existence, he would more likely find it in that woman’s gentle contemplation than in the resigned despair of the man.
The trees thicken in the last two miles before they reach farmland, and there is no high ground from which to spot the smoke that is smudged against the sky. In the shade of the canopy, the pair trudge in silence as they have since the bungalow. Conversation is a waste of energy, and it comes naturally to neither of them. The girl is no longer flushed. Her face is white as chalk, her steps slower and slower, her T-shirt sticking to her with sweat.
But half a mile out, he smells it: the acrid stink of burning. And the sharpness of it is enough to jolt him back into full presence in the forest, its eerie quiet the first thing, belatedly, which he notices. He halts, holding a hand up to the girl, who looks at him in bewildered exhaustion. There is no sound other than their breathing, and the crack of twigs as she arches one foot in its filthy sneaker, stretching her calf muscle.
The smoke is coming from the direction of the farm; that much he can tell without seeing it. Fear grips him, shapeless at first and then specific: Carol. He thinks of her first—not Rick, not Dale, not Hershel or Glenn or any of the other women. He thinks of her because of the kid, who has stopped shifting and grown very, very still at his side.
“What’s that smell?” she asks quietly, and he doesn’t answer, because if she can pick up the scent then she already knows what it is.
“Need to move a bit quicker,” he says, and tears fill her eyes. He unstraps his crossbow and hands her his pack, taking her knife and shoving it in his belt. “Put this on your back. Then climb on mine.”
Despite his adrenalin, despite the distraction of the fire ahead, the manoeuvre is a deeply uncomfortable one. He cannot remember when last someone touched him other than in fights, and it is worse because the girl has to cling to his back, the sweat-soaked cotton of his shirt, the scars beneath it which he imagines she will somehow sense. He hangs his crossbow awkwardly across his front and crouches so she can put her arms around his neck, his hands under her knees. At the first sensation of her skin—a tiny wrist brushing the side of his neck—he shudders and has to fight the urge to fling her off. She waits, as though the sudden tension in his muscles is something she understands, and then she completes the movement and he hoists her up.
Only in last stretch of trees before the farm begins does Daryl grasp what has happened. Increasingly, the forest floor is chaotic, branches broken and leaves kicked aside, dirt churned up where nothing is growing. The horde on the road the day Sophia went missing dragged up the roadside in the same way, their lurching footsteps making and erasing tracks until all that was left was haphazard destruction. This horde must have passed through in the night, and, he realises as he reaches the treeline at last, they crossed perpendicular to the route he has just taken with the girl.
The barn is burning, what is left of its walls smouldering, sending a steady trail of smoke skywards. The grass of the field where Daryl pauses is trodden flat, and in a fence to his left he can see a walker caught between the bars, hooked on a nail. Sophia’s arms tighten around his neck.
“Mama,” she whispers, and all his fear is in her voice, right at his ear. He drops her legs and lets her land on her feet, grabbing his shirt to steady herself.
“Stick close,” he barks, and lifts his bow. It is evening now, the sky behind the smoke painted in lurid shades of pink and purple. It will be dark in an hour.
The farmhouse still stands, but to reach it they have to cross two fields and pass the remains of the barn. Daryl puts down three walkers as they head towards the house, ignoring the squeak the girl makes as he puts a bolt through the head of the first one, a woman in a business suit and a gold locket that flashes briefly in the dying sunlight as she falls. The other two have been dead for longer, clothes and hair ragged and washed out from exposure to the elements. They are picking clean the rib bones of Nellie the horse, whose mangled body lies at one end of the pasture. Daryl doesn’t stop longer than it takes him to stab each one in the temple with his buck knife.
Beside the barn, among smoking planks of wood, are two bodies, charred and unrecognisable; impossible to know without looking more closely whether they were human yesterday, or dead before they burned. Sophia has not let go of the corner of his shirt, and he has not shaken her hand off. If he did, he would have to turn back and look at her to make sure she was with him, and he does not want to see her crying again.
There are a handful of other walkers wandering the farm, but he does not bother hunting down the ones that aren’t in their way. These are the stragglers, dragging damaged limbs or so glutted by feeding that they move even more slowly than usual, and some invisible tide seems to carry them in the direction taken by their predecessors. Maybe their steps default to the heavily worn trail from one end of the farm to the other. Maybe the scent of the other dead guides them. Whatever the case, he leaves them to it.
He passes his bike as they approach the house: knocked over in the dirt, but intact. Later he will see if it still goes. Dread sits low in his belly at the sight of the house, its windows smeared with blood and grime, handprints visible on the panes. The porch railing has sagged and broken in places, and there are walker bodies between the barn and the house, bullets in their heads.
He and Sophia are almost at the steps to the wraparound porch when the front door, somehow intact though streaked with gore, opens: Sophia Sophia, the woman’s voice cutting through the miasma of smoke and silence. The child releases his shirt and steps forward, and then, wordlessly, responds with a movement so fluid that it is almost beautiful, the way an animal is beautiful as it starts to run. For an instant, those coltish limbs find a desperate grace, the girl shrugging off the pack, flying up the steps and into the arms of the woman coming to meet her.
In the doorway, the husband stands, but Daryl can’t look at him directly, because the woman’s face is bruised, one eye blackened, a fresh scab in the corner of her mouth; and one of the bare arms embracing her daughter has a plum-coloured handprint above the elbow, the flesh pressed and pressed until blood burst to the surface. The girl does not notice these things, or does not acknowledge them. She is clinging to her mother and sobbing, heedless of the way the woman tries to favour her ribs on one side, and a moment later Carol gives up, relinquishes herself to the embrace, though a spasm of pain passes across her face. Her eyes are closed, her hands soothing the child with a slow, gentle caress of her back. My baby my baby. Daryl’s throat is dry and achy.
“Where was she?” It is Ed speaking, and Daryl flicks his eyes to the man’s face, his slouching shoulders, the hand resting on the doorjamb. The knuckles are red, and rage passes through Daryl, so intense, so complete, that he is made weightless by it, and then made dizzy by gravity’s rushing return.
“House ‘bout ten miles out.” He jerks his head towards the barn. “The hell happened? A horde? Where’s everyone else?”
Carol stands up, hugging the girl to her side, her fingers buried in dirty strands of hair. Father and daughter have not yet acknowledged each other, Daryl realises.
“They fought and then they fled,” the woman tells him, misery and resentment in her voice. “They left, in cars, no one would stay to wait for you and Sophia.” She glances over her shoulder and ducks her head. “Ed and I, we hid in the attic from the horde.” She covers her mouth with one hand, her eyes swimming with tears. Daryl bites into his thumbnail. “Thank you,” she says, softly, as though her gratitude is a secret. “Thank you for finding her.”
He shrugs, averting his eyes from hers.
“C’mon an’ say hello to your daddy now.” The man holds out his arms in a gesture that appears unnatural where it should be anything but, and Sophia steps reluctantly away from her mother. Daryl rocks on the balls of his feet, restless, agitated by the new bruises on the woman and the discovery that the four of them are alone here.
Ed hugs the girl close, enveloping her in his arms, putting his mouth to her ear and murmuring something no one else can hear. She nods, her eyes lowered, her body stiff as though she were made of wood.
“Which way’d they go?” Daryl asks Carol’s feet.
“I don’t know.” Despair in the words, and shame. “It all happened so fast.”
“Buncha cowards.” Ed keeps Sophia with him, resting against his belly, her back to him and his arms across her chest. Daryl frowns. “My wife an’ me, we been perfectly safe in the attic.”
The fingers of one of Carol’s hands drift absently to the wound in the corner of her mouth, a delicate flutter of contact that suggests it is hurting her. Daryl looks down at the toes of his boots, the seams in the wooden steps.
“Do you think we can catch up to them?” the woman asks. He makes himself look at her, the swollen eye and blue cheekbone, the puffy lip. That rage drifts through him once more, its edges extending now beyond Ed, to the people who left her alone with him after seeing what he did to her when Sophia went missing. You left her too. The ground is hard under his feet, the heft of his own body too much for a moment.
“Not tonight,” he says, his voice hoarse. He clears his throat. “Kid needs to sleep an’ eat. An’ we won’t see shit once it’s dark.”
“They’ll be back.” There is a note of unearned authority in Ed’s voice, a challenge, and Daryl bristles.
“Why? Far as they know the place is burnt down.” He shrugs. “If it were me, I’d keep goin’. Keep headin’ away from the big cities.”
Ed snorts, his hands moving to Sophia’s shoulders, and Carol tenses minutely.
“Why don’t we find some food,” she says in a gentle, soothing voice completely at odds with her posture. “And you two can wash up and get some rest.” She glances at Ed, her head bowed, and he narrows his eyes at her for a second before nodding sharply.
“We’ll make plans in the mornin’,” he says with an air of condescension, and turns into the house before Daryl can respond, moving Sophia ahead of him, still gripping her shoulders. In his wake, the silence between Daryl and the woman is taut as a violin string, his every breath threatening to set it quivering. Slowly, he meets her eyes, needing something he can’t articulate even to himself. Despite the swelling around one eye, her gaze is clear, almost silver as the twilight turns towards darkness. He can see she wants to follow her daughter inside, can see that she is straining towards the child with a need that fills him with yearning of his own. For what, he thinks. He doesn’t know.
“Thank you, Daryl.” Her mouth barely moves. The string hums and she blinks. “I don’t—I don’t know how to thank you.”
He means to dismiss her thanks again, but finds to his surprise that he wants to claim it. When he nods in acknowledgement, she smiles, and he is glad he didn’t shrug off her gratitude a second time. Her smile is soft and generous, so much so that it cracks open the scab in the corner of her mouth. And as he walks past her into the house, he is aware of her hand rising to her lips, one fingertip catching a bright bead of blood.