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I should take my hand back. It's on the table between us and his is open beside it and neither of us has moved. Then I reach across and put mine in his palm.

His fingers close over it. Warm and delicate. He's holding it like it could be taken from him.

"Your father wasn't wrong to love them," I say. "He was wrong to do it alone. Nobody was standing beside him saying the numbers out loud and building another way. That isn't what love did to him. That's what loneliness did."

He goes very quiet. His thumb moves once across my knuckles. Slow. A line of fire.

"Rosey," he says.

I should correct him. Everyone in Bloomfield calls me Rosey, but nobody says it like that, low, like a word they're afraid of dropping. I should say Rosemary. I should say Ms. Brewer. I should say a number of things.

"I'm sorry," he says, hearing himself. "Rosemary. I didn't mean to presume."

"Everyone calls me Rosey."

"I know. I didn't want to assume I was allowed."

"You've been presuming since seven-thirty this morning."

"Then I'll go on presuming." There's the crooked smile. Small and surprised. "Unless you say otherwise."

I don't say otherwise.

It's half past ten by the time we've packed up. The whole building is dark except for the safety lights. My hands are full: legal pads, the hot plate cord, a stack of mill blankets, Charlotte's backpack. Roman looks at the bench where my daughter is sleeping with one arm flung out and her braid coming apart, then looks at me.

"I'll carry her."

"I've got her. I always do."

"You have everything else." He's not asking. "Let me."

He's gentle about it. Slides one arm under her knees and one behind her shoulders and lifts. She comes up out of the blankets like a sack of warm flour. She's nine and she weighs seventy pounds and he doesn't so much as shift his feet. Her head lolls against his shoulder and her eyelids flutter. She mumbles, thick-tongued, "Is the tie guy still here?"

"Still here," says Roman.

"'Kay." Her fist closes in his lapel. She tucks her face into his neck, against the collar, and goes under again. I watch him go absolutely still. The muscles in his jaw working. His arms tightening around her. When he looks at me over her head, there's something wrecked and astonished in his face. I have to turn around and lead the way down.

It's cold enough outside to make my teeth ache. The loading dock opens on the back lot, where my car sits alone under the one working light. Beyond the river the sky is huge and black and thickly starred.

The air smells like woodsmoke and frost and, faintly, from the Green, the apples they've been pressing all day for tomorrow. I open the back door. Roman lowers Charlotte into her booster seat so delicately you'd think she was made of glass. I buckle her in. She sighs and turns her face to the window.

I shut the door softly. We stand in the cold between the car and the dock steps with our breath going up white.

"Thank you," I say.

"For what?"

"For the carrying. And the rat in separate. And the—" I hold up the wrist in its wheat bag. "Everything."

"It was all selfish."

"I don't think it was."

"Rosey." He says it low. There's a space between us the width of a hand and neither of us has closed it. His arms hang at his sides like he doesn't trust them. "I should say something sensible. I'm your boss. I'm in the middle of a layoff. I should say good night and walk back to the inn."

"You should."

"I'm trying to."