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In the morning there's a covered pot on the table that wasn't there when I went to sleep, still warm. A stew made of squash and thyme, the smell of hours on a stove. Beside it, the same square capitals.

EAT SOMETHING THAT ISN'T CRACKERS.

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Eli

I watched her sleep in her car for an hour before she ever saw this valley.

She was at the turnoff where the paved road runs out, engine off, head tipped against the driver's window, one hand still on the wheel. Hospital scrubs under her coat, pale blue, and a badge clipped to the pocket with the photo turned in. The laminate had flipped over when she slumped. SLOANE A., RN — ICU. I read it through the glass.

Her breathing was wrong. Too fast and too shallow, even asleep, the breathing of somebody whose body has forgotten how to put itself down. There was a frown between her eyebrows she didn't let go of in her sleep.

I stood at the edge of the trees and counted her breaths for an hour, and when she woke and started the engine and drove down into the valley, I followed on foot.

I have keys to every cabin in Hollow Creek. I change the washers and clear the flues and stock the wood, and Edna trusts me with them because in five years I have never used one for anything else.

I used the Maple cabin's key at midnight.

The room smelled of wine and cold and her. Crackers on the counter. Protein bar wrappers in the garbage. Her boots still on up in the loft; I could see the soles over the edge. I poured the wine down the sink and fed the stove until the room was warm, and then I stood at the foot of that ladder for a long time.

I told myself I needed to check her breathing.

That's true. It's also not why I put my boot on the third rung.

She lay on her back with her mouth open and her hands curled at her sides like a child's, and one braid had come loose across her cheek. Brown skin gone ashy with exhaustion. Fourteen breaths a minute, still too shallow, but slower than in the car. I stood there with my head above the edge of her loft and watched her breathe until it evened out, and something in me that has been shut for five years came open and has not gone shut again.

I went up one more rung. Drew the quilt out from under her boots and up over her, to her chin, and folded the top edge back. She didn't stir.

Then I went down and pulled her chair out from the wall, turned it to face the ladder and sat in it until four.

I didn't do anything. I sat with my hands between my knees and listened to her breathe, and every so often she made a small sound in her sleep, a catch, like somebody about to say something and deciding not to. I wanted to know what it was. I wanted to know everything that went on behind that frown. I wanted to be the thing she said it to. I sat in the dark in a stranger's cabin wanting things I haven't let myself want in five years, and when the window started going grey I made myself get up and leave the chair where it was, turned toward her, so she'd know.

My mother died on a ward in Guelph at four in the morning with a call button in her hand. Six hours before anybody came. I was a botanist then, a man in a lab who thought the worst thing in the world was a failed trial. Afterwards I sold the house and came up here and grew things that keep people alive, and I didn't let anybody near me.

Somebody should have been watching her sleep.

Somebody should be watching this one.

I left the herbs and the note, and I stood in the trees until she woke at twenty to three and came down the ladder with the poker in her fist like she meant to use it. Good. I watched her find the wine bottle. Watched her read the note and put the poker down very gently, the way people set things down when their hands have started to go. Watched her turn and look at the ladder and see the dirt on the rung.

I left it there on purpose.

She locked the door that night. She put the chair under the handle, too. I stood on her porch at one in the morning and listened to her through the wood, lying up there awake, her heart going so hard I swear I could hear it, and I felt something close to pride.

Then I used my key.

I moved the chair and set it back where it goes. I fed her stove. I went to the foot of the ladder and stood there, and she did the cleverest thing I've ever heard a frightened person do — she faked sleep. Slow breaths through the nose, long and even. Twelve a minute, a nurse's idea of what sleep sounds like. Too perfect. Nobody sleeps that neatly.

I let her.

I stood there and let her lie to me, and I breathed in the cabin air, and under the woodsmoke and the lavender soap there was something warmer, something I know the smell of as well as I know the smell of turned earth.

She wasn't only frightened.

I stayed until I couldn't trust myself to stay any longer. Then I went out and locked the door behind me from the outside, so nothing else could get in to her.

It isn't much to look at, the last week of October. Everything cut back or gone to seed, the beds brown and silver with frost, the sunflowers bowed over black-headed along the fence. Most people see a dead garden. She stood there for eleven minutes with the spoon forgotten in her hand, and her face did something I hadn't seen it do yet. It came undone. The frown between her eyebrows let go, and her mouth went soft, and she looked at the rust and gold of my dying beds the way somebody looks at a thing they didn't know they were allowed to want.