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Rafe looks at me. I don't say anything, so he puts the shears down.

"Manon."

"Don't talk." Her hands are shaking now against my chest. "I need you to not talk for a minute."

"You've gone very pale."

"I've gone pale?" She looks up and her eyes are enormous and wet and furious, and not one bit of the fury is aimed at me. "I threw a blade at a person. I threw a blade at a person. Do you understand what I am? I'm a doctor. There is a man in that chair with missing fingers and I made it worse⁠—"

"You didn't."

"I'm so sorry."

She whispers it into my chest, so softly I feel it more than hear it. Two minutes ago she wanted to hurt me. Now she's apologizing, small and shaken, with her forehead against my shirt, and something in me just gives way. The scalpel I could stand, but this apology I have no idea what to do with. My good arm comes up on its own and settles at the back of her head, and I hold her there for a moment.

Seven years I've spent learning her, and never once have I been sorry about a single moment of it, including now. But this woman has just apologized to me and meant it … just like this. I'd let her do it again tomorrow. I'd let her do it every day for the rest of my life if this is what comes after.

"Don't," I tell her.

"I could have hit your neck!"

"Manon." I put my hand over hers where it sits on my shoulder and hold it there. She lets me. "Have you eaten?"

She stops. Blinks.

"What?"

"Have you eaten since this morning?"

"There's a knife in you."

"There's a scalpel in me and it's in muscle, you said so yourself." Her mouth does the thing. The little press. "You've been awake twenty hours, at the very least. Can’t fool me. You’ve forgotten to eat. Now your hands are shaking. I'd like to know whether that's adrenaline or lack of breakfast."

"I hate you."

"Table's at eight."

"You're not going to dinner like this."

"Then you'd better be quick."

Daniel arrives at a run with the trolley. She takes it off him without looking and puts on gloves before the thing stops moving.

"Come now. And you can explain Meridian to me while I do what I must."

"I fully intend to."

She wheels the trolley out ahead of me. Daniel holds the door open, staring, like he can't believe what he's just watched—a woman walking into this house, stabbing me, and start giving orders everyone actually follows.

I pick up my jacket. The shirt's ruined but I don't care about that at all. That's a first.

"Février."

The old man is still standing where he was when she started on him, cane in one hand, gaze fixed on the door she's gone through.

"Tell Henri the ninth and the twenty-second are mine. He keeps the eastern crossings, I stay off the docks, and nobody touches Marku until after the wedding. I'm not burying men in a month when I've got a marquee booked." Getting my arm into the sleeve is not pleasant. "And the caterers want the final number by Friday. Oh, the swans are non-refundable."

He doesn't answer for a moment.