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I bend for the water and wash the crumbs down with half the bottle.

"You didn't leave the porch," I say.

"I said I wouldn't."

Men told me plenty this past year. Most of it was lies, and the rest was threats they meant to keep. I watch Knox's face and wait for him to ask for something in return. All he does is look out at the drive past the porch steps.

"There's a doctor in Fredericksburg who owes me a favor," he says. "And there's Nell Yarbrough, who doctors our horses. One of them comes up these steps before noon. You pick which."

He isn't asking. Daddy used to hand his congregation choices like that, standing over us from the pulpit, and I hated it. Knox does it sitting on the porch floor, looking up at me with one hand loose on his raised knee.

A doctor would put my name on a chart. Sheriff Harlan never came looking when I disappeared, and I'm not about to trust that the men who took me can't get their hands on a medical record. I just got away from them, and I'm not leaving them a trail.

Nell knows my face from the feed store, and she never tells a soul in town what she treated or whose it was.

"The vet," I say. "Vets don't file reports."

"Not on people." He pulls his phone out of the vest. "So Nell's about to treat the prettiest mare she's seen all week."

That almost makes me laugh. Even the start of one hurts my ribs, so I swallow it.

He makes the call without getting up. "Nell, it's Knox. She picked you. Come now, and come by yourself. Her ribs might be cracked, and her right hand's busted up. Bring the wide tape, and don't tell anybody where you're going."

He hangs up, thumbs out a text, and looks at what I'm wearing: the torn shirt and the pants stiff with mud and grassburs. "Hector's bringing you something clean. It's mine, so it'll be big on you."

"Everything's big on me now."

Knox looks away toward the drive. His hand has closed into a fist on his knee, and he doesn't say one word.

"When Nell checks me over, you'll wait outside," I tell him.

"All right."

"The door stays cracked so I can see your back the whole time."

He doesn't answer right away. "So you know where I am."

"That's the idea."

"Done. My turn. Nell says you need a real doctor, you go. No argument."

I don't like it, but it's fair.

I sit on the threshold with the knife across my knees until Hector's truck comes up the drive. Hector climbs the porch steps with the hitch in his walk I heard in the barn yesterday evening. He hands Knox a stack of clothes, a boxed deadbolt, and a toolbox with a drill on top, and he touches his hat brim to me on his way back down. Knox lays the clothes in my lap.

I hug them to my stomach, knife and all, and push myself up the jamb until I'm standing. My ribs make me pay for every inch.

Inside, I push the door shut with my hip and lock it. Then I carry the clothes into the bathroom.

I set Royce's knife on the edge of the sink. There's still blood in the grout where I punched the shower wall. Last night I never turned this water on.

The hot spray stings my split knuckles so much I have to brace my left hand on the tile. The water swirls brown around the drain for a long time before it runs clear.

I shut off the shower, step out, and dry off before I pull on Knox's shirt. It's soft flannel, worn thin at the elbows, and the sleeves hang past my fingertips. I roll them back just far enough to free my hands and leave the cuffs over my wrists. The sweatpants are cinched as tight as the drawstring goes, but they still ride low on my hips. Everything smells like laundry soap.

A diesel engine comes up the drive. I grab Royce's knife off the sink and go to the window beside the door and move the curtain. A pickup is pulling in with a white vet box built onto its bed, the kind with a compartment door for every drug and piece of equipment a large-animal vet needs.

Knox goes down to meet Nell, and they talk out by the truck, where I can't make out the words. After a few minutes, Nell pulls a field kit out of one of the compartments and follows Knox up the porch steps. She raps hard on the door. I let her in and leave the door cracked behind her.