Page 30 of Property of Prophet

“You cheated,” I say.

“I don’t know how to cheat at cribbage.”

“Nobody knows how. It comes to you when you need it.”

“I didn’t need it. You dealt me a decent hand.” He tilts his head. “You want to shuffle?”

“What I want is an explanation.”

“For winning?”

“For winning a game you learned forty minutes ago.”

He picks up the deck and shuffles it, the cards moving through his big hands with the same unhurried competence he brings to everything. “I pay attention,” he says. “Seemed like a useful trait... you accuse everyone who beats you of cheating, or just the ones you taught?”

“That is exactly what a cheater would say.”

“That’s excellent logic.”

The laugh comes out of me before I can catch it, the kind of laugh that sounds surprised by itself. I press my lips together, but it’s already too late and in the room. He goes completely still across the table, watching me with an expression so careful it almost undoes me, as if I’ve handed him something rare, and he’s not sure he has the right to keep it. Bear’s tail thumps twice against the cabin floor.

“Deal,” I say.

He deals.

The second evening, I rest the generator and bring out the oil lamp. It throws a small amber world across the table, and the storm outside presses against it as if it’s trying to get in. The sound is extraordinary, not the howling I expected but something constant, a roar that shakes the glass and fills all the available frequencies.

We eat, clean up, and sit back down at the table, and for a long time neither of us says anything, which should feel awkward but doesn’t.

“What do you miss?” Prophet asks.

I look up from my coffee. His face is half in lamplight, the dark of his hair catching gold at the edges, and the gray at his temples is more visible than usual in this light. He has a good face. A hard one, worn in the way that comes from weather and years and whatever his life was before a crater in my snow. Not handsome the way men are handsome in photographs, but the kind of face you find yourself looking at twice without quite knowing why. I’ve been careful not to look at it for weeks.

“What do I miss about what?” I ask.

“The work,” he says. “You haven’t talked about it since you told me.”

He means the hospital. Lake Erie. The career that was taken from me by people I trusted with everything I had, and who decided it was worth less than what they could get for it. I sit with the question for a moment, turning my coffee cup in my hands.

“I don’t miss the people,” I say. “Turns out the people were the problem.” My jaw tightens. “What I miss is competence... being the person in the room who knew exactly what to do. Everything else disappeared inside a case. No noise, no past, nothing except the problem in front of me and the next right move.” I look toward the stove. “Out here, competence is survival. There’s nobody else’s skill to build on. If I get something wrong, there isn’t another surgeon standing beside me to fix it.”

He’s watching me like he’s genuinely hearing it, not waiting for me to finish so he can say something reassuring, but taking it in, the whole weight of it.

“You’re still that person,” he says. “The one who knows what to do.”

“Not in the same room.”

“No.” He sets his cup down. “A harder one.”

The storm hits a pitch outside that rattles the windowpanes in their frames, and Bear lifts his head from his paws and then puts it back down, deciding it doesn’t require action. The lamp bends sideways, recovers, and keeps burning.

“I keep thinking about what you said,” I tell him, and I didn’t know I was going to say it until it’s already out. “That night with the books. What you said about recognition. Knowing something’s true without knowing why.”

He goes still in the way he goes still when something lands somewhere real.

“I recognize you,” I say it at the table, to my hands, anywhere that isn’t his face. “I don’t know what you are. I don’t know why you’re here, what comes next, or what any of this means. But I recognized you from the beginning, before you could stand up, before you could tell me your name, and I have been pretending.” The words are out before I can pull them back. I press on, because stopping now would be worse. “And I don’t know what to do with that.”

He’s quiet for long enough that I finally look up. His face is open in a way I don’t see from him often. There’s something underneath the composure, something he’s decided to let me see rather than something that escaped him.