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“I’d have stayed,” I tell him, so quietly the room barely gives it back. “If it was only me. I want you to know somebody would have.”

He does not move.

I get up off that table at some hour with no name to it. The dress goes on with the hooks in the wrong houses. My hands are shaking, my ribs hurt, my mouth hurts.

I stand in the dark looking at a gold mask on the face of a man who asked me to stay, and I think it in whole words: if I leave now, I keep this as it is. One good night, with nothing after it to spoil it.

The door sticks. I lift the handle a finger’s width and put my hip into it as gently as anybody has ever done anything, and it still bangs.

Down the stairs. Through the tail of the party, gone to sour wine and three drunks and a fiddler asleep under his own chair. Out into the street with the harbor coming up cold and green, laughing at nothing, badly, the whole way to the fen road.

Halfway home, with the sky going grey behind me, I put my hand in the pocket of the borrowed dress for the warmth of it and find it empty.

My apprentice token. Bronze, the size of a thumbnail, struck by Corentin with my initial in it the year he took me in. It has lived in my work apron for fifteen years. I moved it for one night.

I stand still in the road and laugh, one crack of it, into the fog.

Then I keep walking, because the chapter house comes for Anna at dawn, and I have to be on the block at ten.

ENORA

Iam back with an hour to spare and my boots soaked to the ankle. I stand in the shop doorway and watch four men take a year of work out of a building on a hand sled. She scrapes going over the threshold, a noise no bell should make, and I have to hold the doorframe.

“Mind the crown,” I say. “Mind it. There’s a strap mark on her already and I’ll know if you put another one on.”

“Yes, mistress.”

“And she wants oak. Tell the chapter house. Say it to a man who writes things down.”

“Yes, mistress.”

They go off up the Morlac road with her tipped on her side under a tarpaulin, and that is that.

Corentin is at the window. He has got himself out of the chair and across the room on his own, which he has not done since the feast of Saint Ronan, and he is holding the sill with both hands.

“You’ve been out all night,” he says.

“I have.”

“Good.”

I put the kettle where he can reach it. I put the physician’s note on the table, flattened, because he will want to read it when I am not here to be furious about it. I put my share of the last commission money in the pot on the shelf and tell him where it is, twice.

I am doing the jobs so I do not have to look at him. I know that. I do the jobs anyway.

“Katell’s coming Tuesdays and Fridays,” I say. “She offered. I told her if she moves your bench I’ll come back for her.”

“Nora.”

“I’ll write as soon as I know where I’m going. I’ll send the address, and if you don’t answer I’ll assume the worst and arrive.”

“Nora.”

I stop.

He takes one hand off the sill and holds it out, and I go and take it, and his fingers are cold and light, and up close I can see how much of him is gone.

“Come back in thirty days,” he says.