Four months ago...
The candle had burned down to its middle. Its flame shook against the low ceiling, as if it were embarrassed by what it could see.
Sofia lay half on top of him under the rough blanket, her breath warm against his neck, her fingers moving slowly through his hair. She was twenty-eight, a widow from the next village over, and she came every few weeks with a basket of cheese as her excuse. She stayed one night. She left before anyone was awake. He had never promised her anything and she had never asked. That was the whole arrangement, and neither of them had ever said it out loud.
"You're thinking about something else," she whispered.
"No."
"Liar." Her lips brushed his shoulder. "I don't mind tonight."
She pushed the blanket down to her waist.
The candlelight loved her. It ran down the line of her throat and pooled in the hollow beneath it, slid over her breasts and the soft curve of her stomach, and turned her skin the color of warm honey. She sat up astride him and let her black hair fall forward, a dark curtain around their faces. Her hands found his wrists and pinned them to the pillow, lightly, a game she had never once pretended he couldn't win.
"Look at me," she said.
He did. For a few seconds, he truly did.
Then she bent down and kissed him, slow and deep, and he stopped being able to think. His hands slid free of hers and went to her hips. Her skin was hot under his palms, and he felt her shiver when his thumbs found the dip of her waist. She made a small sound against his mouth. He rolled her beneath him in one movement, and the old bed groaned, and she laughed, low and breathless, her legs closing around him.
After that there were no words in the room.
There was the creak of the bed frame, and her nails dragging down his back, and the long, shaky breath she let out when he moved against her. There was the heat of her mouth at his throat, her whisper in his ear, *yes, there, don't stop,* and the rough scrape of his own breathing, and the slow tightening of two tired bodies reaching for something they both knew they would not find there. On the ceiling, the candle's shadow lurched and swayed with the rhythm of them. When it finally stilled, it stilled all at once.
She lay across his chest afterward with her heart pounding against his ribs, and neither of them said anything at all.
He woke before dawn.
He woke that way every day. No alarm, no reason. His body had learned it from ten years of sleeping lightly, the way a man sleeps who is afraid he will miss a knock. He sat up on the edge of the bed and rubbed his face with both hands, and listened.
Nobody was knocking.
Sofia was asleep on her side, her black hair spilled across the pillow, one arm flung out across the place where he'd been. The blanket had slipped to her hip. In the gray light her back was a long, smooth curve, a thin white scar running diagonally below the shoulder blade where she'd once fallen off a roof. Asleep, she looked younger than she was. The wariness had gone out of her face.
He looked at her for a long time.
Then he said quietly, "Sofia."
She opened her eyes slowly. "Is it time?"
"Yes."
"Can't I sleep a little longer?"
"The boy will be here soon."
"Mateo?" She sat up, dragging the blanket over her chest, and gave him a look that was trying hard not to be a reproach. "You're afraid of a twelve-year-old?"
"I'm afraid of the village."
"The village knows."
"No one knows."
"Everyone knows, Esteban." She said it gently. "They just don't say it. That's how people live now."
He didn't answer.
She climbed out of bed and dressed in the dark, quickly and quietly. He kept his back to her, as if he were giving her a privacy he hadn't earned. He heard the slide of the chemise over her skin, the small rasp of a lacing, the tiny sigh she made when she bent for her shoes. Once she stopped behind him and rested her palm flat between his shoulder blades. It was warm. It stayed there for a moment.
He almost turned. He almost caught her wrist.
She took her hand away.
"Shall I come back next month?" she asked at the door, settling her shawl.
He didn't answer right away.
"No." He didn't turn around. "Don't come back."
A short silence.
"I knew," she said. She didn't sound bitter. "From the first night. You never look at me. You look at something behind me."
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be." She opened the door, and cold dawn air slid into the room. "The only mistake I made was forgetting you're still married. Even after ten years."
And she was gone.
He went downstairs barefoot and lit the lamp.
The photograph stood on the shelf beside the stove, where it always did. A dark-haired woman with her hair pinned up in a hurry. A half-meant smile. She was looking into the lens as if she knew her husband was standing just behind the photographer, trying not to laugh.
He stood in front of it with his arms hanging at his sides.
He had nothing to say. He could still feel the warmth of the bed on his skin, like a small, sour shame. He could smell something in his own hair that wasn't Sofia and wasn't anyone else. It smelled like betrayal, though he couldn't have said if it was one.
"I'm sorry," he whispered.
The photograph smiled as it always smiled.
"I'm not all right, Elena." He wiped his face with his hand. "I haven't been all right since that day. I think I've been pretending."
He picked up the wooden frame, wiped a finger across dust that wasn't there, and set it back in its place.
That was how he started his days, whenever he started them.
His house stood at the edge of the village, the last one before the trees. Gray stone, old timber, a ceiling so low that a tall man had to duck under the beams. He'd built it himself, with his father, before anyone he knew now had been born. He had lived in it with Elena after the wedding, and Lucia had filled it up with her voice and her crayons and her laughter, which used to scatter through the rooms like seed.
Now all it held was the sound of his own feet.
He made coffee on the little stove, black and bitter, ate half a stale loaf, and took his axe from its hook by the door. A long-bladed axe, the elm handle worn dark and glossy by years of his sweat. It was the one thing in the house that still meant what it had always meant.
Outside, the air was the color of ash. Dew gathered on the doorsteps of the empty houses.
Marina was a small place. Thirty houses around a square of black cobbles, a well, a little church with a cracked bell that hadn't rung in ten years. Half the houses were shut. Shutters closed, doors bolted, and on some of them somebody had chalked the owners' names, as if a neighbor had been afraid of forgetting.
People had learned to walk past those houses without looking. They ducked their heads and quickened their steps, the way you pass a grave you'd rather not call a grave.
Esteban knew they weren't graves. He couldn't have said how he knew. He had no proof. It was only that every time he passed one of those shut doors, he felt something that didn't feel like grief. It felt more like waiting.
"You're late, boss."
He looked up. Mateo was sitting on the stone step in front of his house with his arms around his knees and the sneer that twelve-year-old boys spend years perfecting.
"You're the one who's late."
"I've been here an hour!"
"You've been here ten minutes. I saw you from the window, running up the road."
Mateo went red, then laughed. He was thinner than a boy his age should be, with messy brown hair and skin burned dark by the sun. His eyes were still too wide to hide that he was often hungry. His father had been a carpenter, and one of the ones who'd vanished. His mother had died two years before that. The boy lived in a narrow house with a blind grandmother who never left her chair.
Esteban had never asked him to work. Two years ago the boy had just turned up one morning, stood at the door without saying a word, picked up a small bundle of kindling, and followed him out. That was how it started.
"Here."
Esteban gave him half a loaf from his coat pocket.
"I ate."
"You didn't."
"I *ate*."
"Mateo."
The boy pressed his lips together, took the bread, and started nibbling at it fast, like someone who doesn't want to be seen hungry. They walked to the forest together, the man with his long heavy stride, the boy half a step behind.
Before dawn, the forest didn't look like itself. The trees stood in the mist like columns. Birds were singing, but quietly, as if afraid of waking something.
Esteban loved this hour. He'd never told anyone, and wouldn't have known how. But there, with the axe falling in a steady beat and the sweet smell of sap rising off the cut, he found something close to peace. Not joy. Something lighter than pain.
"Why do you always cut the big ones?" Mateo asked, gathering branches.
"They burn longer."
"They're harder."
"They are." Esteban raised the axe and let it fall. "They're worth more."
"My dad said you don't cut wood. You understand it."
Esteban stopped for a moment.
"Your father was a good carpenter."
"I know." The boy smiled a little, then went quiet.
They were used to this. There were places in their talk that neither of them went, pits under the dead leaves, and they stepped around them lightly. Mateo had never asked about Esteban's wife and daughter. Esteban had never asked about Mateo's father.
They worked.
At noon they carried a load of firewood into the village. Mateo went off to his grandmother's. Esteban went on to the little market in the square.
It wasn't much of a market. A few carts, a woman selling bread, an old man with iron tools, a boy with chickens. They all spoke quietly, as if silence were something they were afraid to break.
"Firewood, Esteban?" said Silvia, the bread woman.
"Twenty pieces."
"Same as always." She gave him a tired smile and handed over two warm loaves and a small sack of flour. "This is extra. Don't argue. I know how hard you work."
He took it without arguing. Silvia had lost her husband and three sons that same day, and she'd gone on baking every morning since, as if she didn't know how to do anything else. If anyone asked, she said, "Bread doesn't wait."
"I heard the traders from the north are talking about men in black coats," she said, wrapping a loaf in cloth.
"What about them?"
"Nothing. I'm just afraid." She looked toward the horizon. "Nothing's come down from the north in years."
"They'll pass."
"You think?"
"I don't know."
It was his answer to everything. *I don't know.* In this world, nobody did.
That evening, after Mateo went home, Esteban locked the door and lit a small lamp.
He ate what he'd made. Then he climbed the narrow wooden stairs. At the end of the upstairs hall was a small door, painted a faded blue.
He went in.
Nothing had changed. The little bed with its yellow blanket. The doll with one arm lying on the pillow. The toy chest with its broken lid. And on the wall facing the window, a crayon drawing: a house with a red roof, a tall man, a woman, a girl, and over them a sun with uneven rays.
Lucia had been six when she drew it. She'd stood in front of the wall with her eyes wide and told him, "That's you, Papa. Your arms are long because you're carrying me."
She would have been sixteen now.
He sat on the edge of the bed and smoothed the yellow blanket with his hand. He hadn't spoken in this room in a long time. He only came in and sat and let the silence fill whatever was left.
Downstairs, on the shelf by the stove, was Elena's photograph. When he came home tired she'd say, *You're late.* Then she'd wipe her hands on her apron and put a bowl of soup in front of him.
Ten years, and no one had said it to him since.
He went back down, put out the lamp, and lay on his bed. He stared at the dark ceiling for a long time.
He wasn't looking for anyone. He didn't think there was anyone left to look for. He cut trees and lived his day and waited for the days to end.
He slept well, unaware of what awaited him the next day.