It was perhaps an hour later, deeper into the market's noise and crowd, that I watched Flora do the thing that told me, with total certainty, exactly who she was underneath all the confusion.
We had wandered from stall to stall, mostly at my pace rather than any pace of her own choosing — she did not yet reach for things independently, not really, beyond the occasional caught attention, a hand lifting toward some particular color or shape that drew her — and I had been narrating quietly as we went, naming things the way I had been naming things all week, trusting the repetition to eventually take root somewhere. Cloth. Metal. Bread, though bread here is closer to a memory of bread than the real thing. Coin.
We had paused near the edge of a small, quiet square where a handful of souls sat against a low wall — the specific, unmistakable posture of souls who had traded away or exhausted whatever resources they'd arrived with and had nowhere pressing to be, waiting out the slow hours of an existence with nothing urgent left to fill them. One of them, a hunched, faded-looking silhouette whose presence carried the specific dim, worn quality I had learned to associate with souls who had been struggling for a very long time, sat slightly apart from the others, motionless in a way that read, even to my limited understanding of silhouette-body-language, as something closer to defeat than to Flora's earlier stillness.
I saw Flora's attention catch on him. I saw it hold.
And then, before I fully understood what she was doing, she crossed the small distance between us and him, and held out, toward this stranger she had never met and could not have explained anything about even if she'd had the words for it, the small glowing vegetable Perenna had given her not an hour before.
I felt something catch in my chest, watching it happen — a rush of feeling too complicated to name in the moment, made up of at least three things at once: tenderness, so sharp it was almost painful, at the sheer unguarded generosity of the gesture; a flicker of something like alarm, because I understood, watching it happen, that she had no concept whatsoever of what she was giving away, no understanding that the object in her hand was hers, had been given to her, meant something, was worth something, could be kept; and underneath both of those, something that I can only describe now, from this distance, as the specific ache of watching someone reveal, entirely by accident, the exact shape of their own heart.
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The faded soul on the wall looked up — or did whatever a silhouette does that approximates looking up — startled by the unexpected offering, and hesitated, clearly uncertain whether to accept something being given so strangely, so wordlessly, by someone whose posture and manner marked her, unmistakably, as new, as lost, as not entirely understanding what she was doing.
I could have stopped it. I want to be honest about that, in the telling — I could have stepped in, gently redirected her hand, explained, however uselessly, that the vegetable had been a gift meant for her, that she did not yet understand what she was giving up, that this was not a decision made with any real comprehension behind it and therefore perhaps shouldn't be allowed to stand.
I didn't.
I have thought, many times since, about why I let it happen, and I have arrived at the same answer every time: because whatever confusion sat underneath the gesture, the gesture itself was not confused at all. It was, in fact, the clearest, truest thing I had watched her do since I found her on that hillside — an instinct so deep, so entirely unlearned, that it had bypassed every gap in her understanding of ownership or exchange or worth and gone straight to something more fundamental than any of those concepts. She had looked at someone who seemed to need comfort, and she had given him the best thing she had, without a single thought toward what it cost her to give it, because the concept of cost had simply never occurred to her at all.
I did not want to teach her, in that moment, that this instinct was wrong. I wanted, very badly, for her to keep it.
The faded soul accepted the vegetable, eventually, with a quiet, uncertain thanks that Flora could not understand but that I watched land somewhere in her regardless, in the same wordless register everything landed in her — some faint, warm shift in her posture that told me, even without language between us, that giving the thing away had made her feel something good, something she did not have a name for yet but would, I suspected, come to seek out again and again once she understood there was a word for it.
"You'll need to learn, eventually," I told her later, quietly, as we walked away from that square, "that not everyone deserves what you just gave him so easily. That some people will take advantage of a heart as open as yours, and you'll have to learn to protect it a little, or the world will hollow you out trying."
She could not understand a word of it. But I said it anyway, because I meant it for myself as much as for her — a promise, half-formed, that I would be the one standing between her enormous, unguarded generosity and a world that did not always deserve it, for as long as she needed someone standing there.
"But not today," I added, softer. "Today, keep being exactly what you are. I'll worry about protecting it. You just — keep giving things away like that. It's the best thing about you, and you don't even know it yet."