“For me?”
He didn’t answer right away.
That was answer enough.
My throat tightened. “Kazan.”
“It’s for you.” The words came out rough. “The ones in town are made for minotaurs. You’d need help climbing in, and the controls are wrong. This one’s lower. Seat’s smaller. I moved the controls so you can reach them.” He pointed like the explanation might make the whole thing less enormous. “It can take the ridge road to New Knossos. Under an hour if the weather’s good. It reads the ground and avoids the bad spots.”
I couldn’t speak.
“So you can go to town,” he said, misunderstanding my silence. “Whenever you want. You won’t have to wait for me. You won’t have to ask.”
That one word hit harder than it should have.
I’d asked James for everything. To go out or stay in. To call someone. If I wanted to take longer at the store to buy things I needed with money I’d earned. By the end, I’d asked permission so often that I’d stopped noticing how small it made me.
And Kazan had built me a way out of his house.
Not a way to keep me close.
A way to leave.
My eyes burned, and I hated that he could see it. “You built me a car,” I said.
His ears twitched. “It’s a buggy. Cars have wheels.”
A laugh escaped me, shaky and wet. I pressed my fingers to my mouth, but it didn’t help.
He took one step toward me and stopped. The audit still stood between us, even in the barn. Even with sawdust on his arms and a gift hovering in the middle of the floor.
“This is what you’ve been doing?” I asked. “At night? In the field?”
He looked away. “Some of it.”
“I thought you couldn’t stand to be near me.”
His head snapped back toward me. “No.” The word was low and immediate.
“I thought maybe you were sleeping out there because of me,” I said. “That you were trying to keep your hands off me.”
His mouth tightened. “That’s also true.”
Heat rushed through me.
“But not because I can’t stand to be near you,” he added. “Never that.”
I looked at the buggy again. At the low step. The small seat. The controls made for my hands. “You were making this,” I said.
“I couldn’t make it in the house.” His mouth tilted, almost into a smile. “You’d have heard the cutter.”
That was such a Kazan thing to say that it almost broke me.
He turned and went to the workbench. For a second I thought he needed something to do with his hands, but then he came back carrying a flat wooden box. It was smooth and carefully made, the kind of thing someone built when the box mattered almost as much as what was inside.
He held it out. I took it, but he didn’t let go right away. His fingers were huge beside mine. Warm. Steady.
Then he released it, and I opened the lid.
