Let her look.
Katya finally sat and sipped her own tea. Still watching.
“You got the line in clean,” she said after a moment.
Harper nodded. “Yes.”
Silence settled again.
Katya’s gaze flicked once to Pav then back to Harper’s face.
Then she looked away.
That was the closest thing to acceptance Harper was going to get for now.
When the tea was finished and Harper had finished eating, Katya cleared the plate and glasses and then returned. "You should sleep." Her voice was brisk.
"I'm fine."
"You're not." Katya looked at her the way Harper had looked at Pav when he said the same thing. The same unimpressed certainty. "The antibiotics will take hours. He's stable. The fever won't break tonight."
"I know."
"Then sleep."
Harper looked at Pav. At the IV. At the steady rise and fall of his chest.
"There's a bed in the next room," Katya said from the doorway.
Harper didn't move but smoothed her thumb along Pav’s wrist.
Katya sighed and left the room. She returned with a blanket—heavy wool, dark blue, smelling of cedar. She draped it over Harper's shoulders without ceremony.
"Stubborn," Katya muttered. It might have been the first warm thing she'd said.
Harper pulled the blanket around herself with her free hand. Her other hand stayed in his.
She closed her eyes—just for a moment.
Her head tipped sideways against the back of the chair, her fingers still laced through Pav’s. The sound of his breathing carried her under, his pulse steady beneath her fingers.
Proof.
For now.
30
Pav came back in pieces.
Not all at once—in fragments, a signal breaking through static. Warmth first. Real warmth, not the feverish burn of the last twenty-four hours but clean sheets and blankets and a room that held its heat.
Then sound.
A car driving past outside. Someone’s radio in another room. The creak of old floorboards settling. Domestic sounds that belonged to a world he’d been outside of for so long they were foreign.
Then her.
Her fingers laced through his, loose with sleep but still holding. Her breathing was slow and deep. The rhythm of someone who’d fought sleep until it won.
