I stand at the foot of the bed.
I stand there longer than I mean to.
Then I go. I build a fire in the stove. I boil water. I wash the blood off my hands in the kitchen sink, scrub the skin raw, find a clean henley in the dresser in the mudroom, peel the smoke-soaked one off my back and hang it on the porch. I take the turnout gear into the shed and I hose it down and I pack it into a bag and I tell myself I'll deal with it in the morning.
I come back in and I stand at the kitchen sink with both hands braced on the counter and I let my arms shake. They want to shake. They have wanted to shake since I was on the stairs going up. I let them. I keep my head down over the sink and I let my shoulders drop and I let my jaw unclench the way I used to let it unclench in the shower after a bad pull, and after about a minute my hands go still again. That's discipline. I've had that discipline for twenty years.
It used to work faster.
I come back inside.
Evangeline.
She hasn't moved. She's warmer now. Her breathing is a sleep breathing. The color in her cheeks is almost right.
I sit down in the chair across from the bed.
I watch her sleep the way I used to watch patients in the ambulance bay my first year on the job. With the quiet intentness of somebody who is responsible for a life they did not ask to be responsible for. The light from the stove makes the room orange. Her hair fans out on my pillow.
Somewhere in the city Val is in her office looking at a closed folder. Somewhere a body is being pulled out of the east wing. Somewhere my phone is dark on the seat of my truck, off, off, off. Somewhere tomorrow is coming.
I sit in the chair and I watch a woman I have just committed my life to and I do not know her middle name.
I do not go to sleep.
My phone buzzes on the kitchen counter where I plugged it in to charge. I cross the room. I pick it up. Val.Done?again, second time, an hour later than the first.
I type back, one letter at a time, with a hand that is steadier than it has any right to be.
Done.
I set the phone face down on the counter. I go back to the chair. I watch Evangeline Clark sleep under my quilt in the orange light of the woodstove, and I call it my first honest lie.
4
EVANGELINE
Iwake up because someone is breathing in the room.
It's the second thing I notice. The first is that I am warm. Not the warm of a burning house, not that thin hot air that presses at the mouth of a wet towel. A clean warm, wool against my collarbone, cotton under my cheek, a weight of quilt across my hips. I am under a quilt. I am in a bed I do not know. The quilt smells like cedar and like woodsmoke and like a soap I don't recognize, and somewhere near me there is a slow steady breath that is not mine.
I keep my eyes closed.
In eleven years of rooms full of Daniel's friends, I learned to listen before I look. Breath is the cleanest information you can get in a strange room. The breath I'm hearing is to my right, low, seated. Not asleep. Awake breath, waiting breath, the kind of breath somebody makes when they are holding themselves still on purpose. I count through five of them. I learn the room by sound. A fire somewhere, not close, crackling behind a door of iron by the tone of it. A clock ticking. Wind in trees. Not the wind a city makes against a house. The wind of forest.
I open my eyes.
The ceiling above me is plank pine, knotted, the kind of pine that has been cut close to the tree it came from. No plaster. No molding. A single light fixture, off. Dawn comes through a window I cannot see yet and turns the pine a warm orange. I turn my head on the pillow an inch at a time.
A man is sitting in a chair across the room. No, not a man, a woman. Masculine enough to mistake for male from a distance. Or if you weren’t paying attention.
She's in a clean dark henley and dark jeans and boots without laces yet. Her hair is short, dark, pushed off her forehead like she ran a hand through it wet. Her muscular forearms are across her thighs. Her strong hands hang empty between her knees. There is a raised ridge of scar along the outside of the left forearm that runs from the wrist most of the way to the elbow, and in the light from the window the scar is a pale track against her skin. She is watching me. She has been watching me. I can see in the way her eyes are on my face that she has been watching me for some time.
I do not startle.
I was expecting to die in my husband's house. Waking up anywhere at all is a gift I wasn’t sure I wanted, but I can afford to be slow with.
"Hi," she says.
