Chapter 151

Sloane

I waited five days.

Five days of sleeping, and eating whatever Teague put in front of me, and sitting by the stove with my leg up on a stool while the cracked skin on my hands healed and the ache went slowly out of my bones. Five days of the cabin, and the two of them moving round me in it. Malachi out at the woodpile, or on the roof, or gone into the trees for hours with an axe over his shoulder. Teague at the table with his whetstone. The three of us at supper, saying very little.

On the sixth morning, I woke before light, and the leg didn’t hurt.

It ached. It always would. But it was the old, deep, patient ache that Daphne had promised me, not the sharp one, and when I stood up and put my full weight on it in the cold dark of my room, it held.

I dressed. I went out through the main room as quietly as I could. Malachi was asleep in the chair by the stove, the way he had slept every night since the storm, with his head tipped back and his