Four in the morning smells like nothing yet. That's the best time to work — before the day's had a chance to put its opinions into the air.

I count pills into paper twists on the counter by lamplight: amoxicillin for the Trewitt boy's ear, prednisone for old man Casker's chest, the child's inhaler for whichever of the three cabins actually has a kid wheezing this month, which changes, because pack rations reach the human-born households last and pack medicine reaches them never, so I'm the whole supply chain, one woman and a garden and a ledger I lie in twice a season.

I sign the ledger for half of what I'm packing. Kastel doesn't count past the first line and Sable doesn't ask, and if anyone above them ever bothered to check, the answer they'd get is that the herbalist runs light on inventory, which is true, technically, in the sense that all my inventory runs light after I've taken from it.

The ford's got maybe a day left before the melt closes it for good, is what Casker told me last week through his coughing, and a day up here means hours, and hours mean I need to be moving before the light's even decided what color it wants to be.

At the motor pool the air still holds the night's cold in its teeth. Fennick's there before I am, which never happens, hopping foot to foot in the wash of the yard light like the ground's too cold to stand on properly.

"Second truck's off the road," he says, before I've got the first box down. "Alpha's trust pulled the plates end of March. Something about the season, insurance, I don't — I don't actually know, ma'am, they just pulled 'em."

Which means one truck. Which means whoever's got that truck today has the whole motor pool's worth of leverage over whether three human-born families get their antibiotics before the water rises over the ford and eats it for the season.

Kade's already got the tailgate down.

He doesn't ask if I need a ride. He takes the first box out of my arms like it was always going to be his job and sets it in the bed, square, careful of the inhaler's cardboard corner, and says, "Ford's got maybe six hours left in it," in the same flat tone he'd use to tell me the sky was grey. Not an offer. A fact he happens to be standing next to.

I let him load the rest.

The road up is frost-heaved and half-drowned already, the truck finding every rut the winter left behind like it's been here before and remembers where it hurts. Kade drives with both hands on the wheel, unhurried, the kind of careful that isn't nerves.

"You keep these runs off the ledger," he says, eyes on the road, not on me. Not a question. A statement wearing a question's clothes, same trick Dorian pulls, except it lands different coming off him — like he's handing me the sentence to do with what I want rather than setting a trap under it.

"Extra stock from a bad order last fall," I say. "Kastel over-ships every October. Easier to use it than log it."

"Mm."

"And the families don't like being on record needing charity. Casker especially. Man'd rather cough himself into the ground than admit he took something free."

"Sure."

"And it's not charity, technically, it's medicine I'd throw out anyway come spring, expired stock, so there's nothing to log."

Three lies, stacked one on the other like firewood, and he takes each one the second it's handed to him — nods, mms, lets it sit — and doesn't believe a single word, I can tell that much from the set of his jaw, the particular stillness of a man choosing not to call a woman a liar to her face. It unnerves me worse than if he'd just said it. A man who calls you out, you know where you stand with him. A man who lets you lie and files the lie anyway — that's a man keeping a ledger of his own, and I don't know yet what column I'm going in.

The ford, when we reach it, is not a ford anymore so much as a suggestion of where dry land used to be a week ago. Meltwater runs brown and fast over the running boards, higher than either of us thought it'd be this early in the day, and Kade looks at it for exactly two seconds before he says, "We walk the boxes," like that settles something, and it does, because there's no other way across with the truck sitting that low in the current.

We go on foot with the boxes held chest-high, the water climbing to mid-shin, and it comes through my boot seams inside four steps — not cold like weather, cold like a burn, a hot-white shock up both shins that has nothing reasonable to do with actual temperature and everything to do with how a nervous system processes an insult that fast. My left collarbone, badly set nine years now, gives its small mean pull the second the chill reaches my shoulder, an old debt collecting on schedule.

We get the boxes to the Trewitt porch. We get them to Casker's. We get the inhaler to the third cabin, where a girl of maybe six is indeed wheezing in the doorway, and her mother's face does something I don't examine too closely because examining it would take more than I've got to spare today.

Then we turn back for the truck, and the sky, which had been doing a reasonable impression of thaw all morning, changes its mind entirely.

It goes from grey-gold to the color of a dropped nickel in under twenty minutes. By the time we're back at the crossing the sleet's coming sideways, and the truck — parked, Kade thought, on solid enough ground — has settled to the axle in mud the color and consistency of cold gravy.

"Leave it," Kade says, already turning me by the shoulder, not gripping, just a directional pressure I could shrug off if I wanted to. "Line shack's a quarter mile. We're not winching anything in this."

The north line shack is one room, tin roof, a stove with a door that doesn't sit flush, and — Kade discovers this with his arm shoulder-deep in the flue and a string of language I file away for later — a bird's nest packed into the pipe like God's own insulation.

"Century of engineering," he mutters, dragging out a fistful of dead grass and one intact, ancient egg, "defeated by a robin."

I sit on the one bench with my socks peeled off, laid over my knees, and my feet are the color of skim milk and I can't feel the little toes at all, which in my professional opinion is worth mentioning out loud.

"Core temp's probably still fine," I say, to the room, in the voice I use for patients who need to hear a diagnosis instead of a feeling. "Feet'll ache like hell in ten minutes when the blood comes back, that's the worst of it barring frostbite, and we're not two hours in yet so frostbite's not the concern. Concern is daylight — we've got maybe three hours of it left and a truck that isn't moving till that mud sets up harder, which it won't till the sleet quits, which it's not going to for a while, so." I flex my toes. Nothing happens. "So we sit here and do inventory on our own extremities until the sky decides."

Kade, still elbow-deep in the flue, laughs. Once. Short, surprised out of him like I'd startled it loose rather than earned it, and it does something to his whole face that I did not budget for and don't have anywhere to put.

I don't know what to do with a man's laugh landing on me like that. I pick up my other sock and pretend to examine it for holes it doesn't have.

The stove takes another twenty minutes to draw properly, and once it does, the heat stays exactly where the physics says it should — a two-foot circle in front of the grate, generous to no one past that radius. Kade sits on the far bench. Deliberately far. Far enough that I clock the distance as a decision and not an accident, and that, too, unsettles me worse than if he'd sat close — because a man who crowds you, you can read. A man who measures out the space on purpose is doing math you're not invited to see the working of.

My fingers have gone white past the first knuckle. Not from vanity that I'm hiding it — I genuinely didn't notice until I go to unwrap the gauze roll for no reason at all, some reflex of hands needing a job, and can't get a grip on the paper.

Kade sees it before I say anything. Of course he does.

"Can I?"

Two words. He doesn't move toward me on the strength of them. He just asks, and then he does something almost nobody in this pack has ever done in my hearing, which is wait — actually wait, no filling the silence, no assuming the question answers itself — until I nod.

Then he crosses the two feet of cold floor and takes both my hands between both of his and holds them, not rubbing, not performing warmth, just holding, close enough to the stove that some of its two-foot mercy reaches us both.

Four seconds. I count them, the way I count jars, the way I count floorboards, because counting is the only tool I've got for a moment I don't have a better one for. His hands are rough across the knuckles in a way mine aren't, gun oil ground so far into the calluses it's practically a second skin, and under it the woodstove ash and the crushed mint smell that's been sitting somewhere in the back of my nose since the infirmary two days ago, closer now, warmer, doing something to the base of my throat I refuse to name.

Four seconds, and then I pull my hands back and say, "Sorry," too fast, too clipped, an apology for a thing that wasn't an imposition, which is its own kind of confession if he wanted to read it that way.

"Don't," he says. Just that. And lets it die there, doesn't press, doesn't ask sorry for what, and somehow the not-asking is worse than an interrogation would've been, because it means he already knows the shape of the answer and isn't going to make me hand it to him.

I need something to fill the quiet or I'm going to sit here listening to my own pulse for the next hour, so I ask him the question I've been carrying around unlit since he told me, in the garden two days ago, that he counts the fence line and the seasons like a man keeping a ledger nobody assigned him.

"Why are you still here." Not unkind. Genuinely wanting the arithmetic of it. "Three years since you broke with him. Everyone who could've left, left. You could've been in Idaho inside a week."

He doesn't answer right away. He looks at the stove door, at the two feet of heat it's willing to give, and when he does answer his voice has gone flatter, the way mine goes flat when I'm reading a chart I don't want to be reading.

"My mother's in a care home outside Sandpoint. Has been a while." A beat. "My sister's buried on Ironroot ground."

That's all he gives me. Not the name. Not the date, though I already know it, everyone in this pack who's been paying attention knows it, the fourteenth of August, three years gone this summer — but he stops there, at buried on Ironroot ground, like the sentence has a locked door two words further in and he's not opening it today.

I don't push. I've spent thirteen years respecting locked doors because I have several of my own.

The sleet slackens around four. We go back out to the truck with a come-along and a length of chain from the shack's wall hooks, and getting the truck out of the mud is forty minutes of the kind of work that doesn't leave room for anything but itself — him on the winch, me guiding the wheel from the cab, both of us reading each other's next move without either of us saying what it is, and the wordless efficiency of it unsettles me more than the hand-warming did, if I'm being honest, because at least the hand-warming had a beginning and an end I could count. This just works, the way water finds a level, and I don't trust anything that works that easily.

He drives me down through the dusk with the wipers ticking sleet off the glass, and neither of us says much, and it's not an uncomfortable silence, which is its own alarm bell.

At the infirmary he doesn't just drop me. He idles at the curb, engine running, headlights washing the porch boards, until I'm actually through the door — I clock it through the window as I go, the truck sitting there a beat too long, watching to make sure the door shuts behind me before he pulls away.

I could call that surveillance. I've spent nine years calling anything that watches me surveillance, on principle, because in this pack watching is never neutral. But I stand in my own dark hallway and I can't honestly make the word fit what I just saw, and not being able to name it is somehow worse than if I could.

My cottage is three hundred yards past the infirmary, down the garden path, past the tansy bed gone soft and dark in the last light. I go in through my own door, which I locked this morning, which is not locked now.

I stand in the doorway a second, boots still wet, the cold coming up through the wet wool of my socks and settling into the arch of each foot like it's found a permanent address there.

Nothing's missing.

That's the first thing I check, the reflex a decade of low-grade paranoia has trained into me — count what's gone before you count what's wrong — and there isn't a single item out of the cottage. My mother's kettle's on the stove where I left it. The lamp's where I left it. The bread box, the salve tins, all present and accounted for.

But my mother's grey barn coat, which has hung on the left hook since 2011 because that's the hook it's always hung on, is on the right hook now.

The seed ledger, which I leave angled a little off the table's edge — a habit, a tell, a thing I do without thinking because a book squared perfectly to a corner is a book someone's handled and set back down by rule instead of by feel — is squared. Dead square. Corner to corner, like a soldier standing at attention.

And the tin box. The one under the floorboard beneath the stove, the one that holds what's left of my mother's paperwork from 2011 — the thin folder of things Sable let me keep, the ones that weren't taken — has been opened and closed by hands that didn't know which corner of the yellowed paper inside faces out.

I always leave it facing out. My mother's handwriting on the top sheet, angled toward the lid so it's the first thing I see if I ever have to open it in a hurry.

It's facing in now.

I stand there in my wet socks with the cold climbing my shins the way the meltwater did at the ford, and I understand, in the flat, precise, coroner's voice I use for facts I can't yet afford to feel, that someone has been in my mother's papers today while I was three hundred yards away teaching a man how cold my own feet were.

And that whoever it was knows exactly how close they came to being wrong about the coat, the ledger, the tin.

Which means they'll come again, better informed next time.