The boy. Check the boy.
She had checked him at midnight, and his breathing had been steady. The new rhythm he was learning was less effortful than the one he'd been born into. She felt a small, fierce spark of pride at the thought, then caught herself feeling it, and didn't know what to do with that either.
But it was something to do with her hands.
Something that had nothing to do with the dream or with the man who'd stood at a well in the afternoon light and called it a mistake. The memory of his voice, cool and dismissing, made her jaw tighten as she sat up.
She pulled on her shawl, the wool rough against her shoulders, took the candle, and went down the corridor. The flame flickered wildly in the draft, casting her shadow long and distorted against the stone.
The door to James's room was already open.
She stopped in the doorway, her breath catching in her throat.
Anthony sat in the chair beside the bed. Not straight, not alert. His elbows on his knees, his head bowed forward slightly, not sleeping but close to it. His shoulders were slumped, the heavy weight of the day, or perhaps the years, seeming to pull at him.
This is what he looks like when no one is watchin'.
The thought arrived before she could stop it. She almost stepped back into the corridor with it.
The posture of a man who had surrendered to exhaustion without quite conceding to rest. The flickering candlelight traced the sharp line of his profile, usually so severe, now softened by the shadows of fatigue.
His hand lay on the edge of the mattress beside James's blanket.
Not on it. Beside it. An inch from the boy's arm, and she understood immediately that it had been there a long time.
The sight sent a sudden, sharp ache through her chest, a feeling so physical she nearly stepped back.
Protecting without claiming comfort.
The thought arrived without her asking for it, and she could not send it back. She watched the way his fingers twitched once, a subconscious reach that he suppressed even in his half-sleep.
She had seen a hundred patients' kin sit this way. She had never once felt it like this.
The fire had burned to embers.
In the low red light, his face held nothing it held during daylight. No command in it. No wall. Just a man in a chair beside a child'sbed in the small hours, keeping a watch no one had asked him to keep.
James's chest rose. Fell. Rose again, at its new pace. Steadier, more trusting. She focused on that sound, grounding herself in the boy's recovery.
He's been sittin' here listenin' to it.
Learnin' what better sounds like.
Her chest felt admiration. It was a heavy, complicated feeling that made her throat feel tight.
She should go back. She had seen what she came to see, the boy was well, the breathing held.
She took one step forward instead, and her candle moved, and the light shifted across the room. The floorboard beneath her foot gave a treacherous, high-pitched groan.
The floorboard.
He heard it before he saw the light. The third board from the doorway, the one that had needed fixing for a few months, and he kept forgetting because nothing in his life gave him cause to notice floorboards at three in the morning. The sound actedlike a brand pressed to the back of his neck, hot and immediate, snapping him upright before he'd decided to move.
He was upright before he'd decided to move. His heart hammered against his ribs, a frantic rhythm he fought to stifle.
His spine straightened.
He felt his expression do what it always did. Close over itself the way a fist closed, fast and practiced, the instinct of a man who had learned early that being caught unguarded was another word for being caught weak. He felt the skin tighten around his eyes, the cold mask sliding back into place.
