Chapter 163

Kaia

He came back a little before noon.

I had been up since he left. I had walked home from the lake at dawn with the rest of them, after the old women had sung the sun up over the eastern ridges and Cassandra had stood alone at the edge of the ice in her black coat and greeted it, and nobody had asked where her son was. I had let myself into Liam’s house and made coffee I didn’t drink, and sat at the kitchen table in my coat, and watched the lane.

When I saw him coming up it, I didn’t go out. I made myself sit where I was.

He came in and shut the door and leaned on it, and looked at me across the kitchen. He was gray with tiredness. There was snow on his boots up to the knee and something in his face I had never seen there. Not grief, exactly. Something older than that, and further down.

“You came back,” I said.

“I said I would.”

I got up then. I didn’t go to him. I put the kettle on, because it was what he always did, and I understo