Four in the morning and my body gives up on sleep the way it's given up on a lot of things lately — abruptly, without negotiation, like a tenant who's decided the lease is over and starts carrying furniture out before the sun's up.

I lie there a while anyway, staring at my own ceiling instead of the lodge's, no crack shaped like Idaho on this one, just the water stain over the stovepipe that's been there since before my mother died, and I tell myself I'll get twenty more minutes. I don't. I get up, because lying still with nothing to do is its own kind of interrogation room, and I'd rather be the one asking the questions.

I go to the infirmary in the dark, let myself in the east door out of a habit that has nothing to do with Ossian's schedule this early, and I take the small mirror off its hook and a penlight out of the drawer and I carry both into the back room like a woman bringing tools to a job.

Because that's what this is. A job. I decide that before I've even sat down on the exam table, because deciding it is the only way I know to survive being both the patient and the one holding the chart.

I take a blank sheet, and I write the date, and then I write myself up the way I'd write up anyone who walked in off the county road with a story that didn't match their injuries.

Lac. lower lip, healing, minimal residual.

Contusion, L clavicle, over old malunion. Tenderness moderate. ROM full.

Contusion x3, R lateral ribs, sites consistent with blunt force, no crepitus, no guarding on deep palpation.

No hematuria on visual.

Clinical shorthand, the kind I've used ten thousand times on other people's bodies, boys with winch-cable hands, men with logging injuries, the occasional woman who slipped on wet flagstones so many times in one winter it started to sound like a season rather than an excuse. I write it the way I'd write it for them. Third person, almost. Patient presents with. It's a trick, and I know it's a trick, and it works anyway, right up until it doesn't.

—

I date the entry, and then I stop, pen still touching the paper, because the colors are wrong.

The lip's closed. Not scabbed-closed, healing-closed — closed like a wound a week old, the split seam knitted enough that when I run my tongue along the inside of it I get smoothness where I should get a ridge my mouth hasn't learned to avoid yet.

The rib bruises should be black going on purple, the deep angry color of day three, the color I've charted a hundred times on other people and told them that's going to look a lot worse before it looks better. Instead they're green-yellow at the margins already, that late, lazy color a bruise wears on its way out the door, day nine or ten, day we don't need to check on this anymore.

And the shoulder.

The shoulder is the one that stops me cold, because the shoulder has an old injury living inside it, a badly set fracture line from years back that gives me a hot little tug whenever I lift my arm past a certain height, worse in cold weather, worse when I'm frightened, and three days ago Dorian's first blow went straight into that old ridge like he was aiming for the weak point in a fence, and it should be locked up tight right now. Splinted by its own swelling. Immobile.

I lift my arm over my head. Full range. Not even a flinch worth writing down.

"Well," I say out loud, to the empty room, in the flat voice I use for bad news that isn't mine to feel yet. "That's not textbook."

—

I test it, because that's what you do with a finding that doesn't make sense — you push on it again, harder, to see if it holds.

I press two fingers into the worst of the rib bruising, the spot that made me hiss three days ago when I first got my clothes off in front of my own mirror, and I press until I know for a fact I'm hitting bone, until any normal three-day-old contusion would have me seeing static.

I get pain. Real pain, not nothing — I'm not made of stone, whatever else I am — but it's pain I can breathe through, pain that sits inside a manageable box instead of blowing the lid off, and that is not what a rib bruise three days deep is supposed to give a person, and I know that the way I know my own name, because I have spent thirteen years pressing on other people's ribs and charting exactly this kind of pain at exactly this kind of interval, and the interval is always longer. Always. Every single time, for every single patient I have ever had, the interval is longer than this.

"That's not textbook," I say again, quieter, and something in my own voice on the second pass sounds less like a coroner and more like a woman standing at the edge of a hole she just noticed under her own feet.

My legs decide, without consulting me, that they're done holding the rest of me up, and I sit down on the floor of the back room with my spine against the cold metal leg of the exam table, and I stay there for a while doing nothing at all, which for me is its own kind of alarm bell, because I am not a woman who does nothing.

—

Sable comes in at seven with two mugs of her burnt, over-boiled coffee and a brown bottle of ferrous sulphate rattling in her coat pocket, already talking before she's fully through the door, already three sentences into a lecture about sleep and iron and how a healer who doesn't take care of herself is about as much use as a stethoscope with the tubing cut.

She sees my mouth before she sees anything else.

I watch it happen — the exact half-second where her face goes from lecture to still, the way a woman's face goes still when she's spent thirty years learning not to react to things and the training kicks in a heartbeat before the feeling does.

"You want the door shut," she says. Not a question. She's already got her hand on it.

"I slipped," I say. "Wet flagstones by the woodshed."

It comes out smooth. Too smooth, probably, the kind of smooth that only happens when a lie has had three days to set like a bruise of its own. Sable looks at me for one long second — long enough that I feel the scars along my right ribs start their itch, top to bottom, the way they do when my body knows before my head's caught up that it's being examined by someone who could see straight through the story if she let herself — and then she shuts the door anyway.

"Right," she says.

That's it. That's the whole exchange. She doesn't ask what kind of woodshed splits a lip along the inside seam of the mouth instead of the outside where a fall would land it. She doesn't ask why I'm sitting on the floor at seven in the morning with a mirror and a penlight laid out beside me like surgical instruments for a procedure on a patient of one.

She never has. Not in eight and a half years. Not the last time either, when I was twenty and the story was a woodpile and everyone, including her, agreed to let the woodpile carry the weight of what actually happened.

I am so grateful for her silence I could weep into it, and so furious at it I could put my fist through the exam table, and both of those things sit in my chest at exactly the same size, exactly the same weight, taking up exactly the same room, and I have gotten so good at holding two opposite things at once that I don't even stagger under it anymore. I just drink her terrible coffee and let her check my pulse.

—

She takes my wrist between two fingers, counts under her breath, purses her mouth at whatever number she lands on, then tips my chin up with one knuckle and pulls my lower eyelid down to look at the conjunctiva, the way she's done a hundred times to a hundred iron-poor pack women who've never once told her the real reason their blood runs thin.

"Anemic," she says. "And stubborn, which I could've diagnosed from the doorway." She sets the ferrous sulphate bottle on the counter with a click. "Twice a day. With food, or you'll just give it straight back to the tansy bed."

"Yes, Sable."

"I mean it, Mira."

"I know you do."

She looks at me one more second, the kind of look that has a question folded up small inside it, tucked into a pocket she's decided not to reach into today, and then she picks up her bag and goes, and I watch her cross the yard through the infirmary's front window, silver hair coiled tight at the back of her neck, sleeves pushed to the elbow even in the cold, walking the way she always walks, like a woman who has never once let a single thing slow her down.

She has never once asked me, I think, watching her go. Not the woodpile. Not this. Not in eight and a half years of setting my bones and taking my pulse and handing me iron tablets like iron is the actual problem.

I don't know yet whether that not-asking is the kindest thing anyone's ever done for me or the thing I'll never forgive her for. Maybe there isn't a difference. Maybe that's the whole trouble with Sable Renaux, and with me, and with every woman in this pack who's learned that the fastest way to survive a thing is to make sure nobody ever says its name out loud.

—

Junie comes by at nine with the lodge laundry list, which isn't a real reason to come to the infirmary and both of us know it, but it's the reason we've agreed on, so I take the list and pretend to check it against my supply of bleach and lye soap while she stands in the doorway not quite leaving.

"Dorian's been up before five," she says, to the middle distance, same as always. "Three mornings running. Cook's been complaining, says nobody tells her to have coffee on before five and then acts surprised when there isn't any."

"Okay."

"And Dr. Kastel ran the panel machine all Tuesday afternoon. On nothing." She frowns at her own sentence, like she's not sure it makes sense even as she's saying it. "I mean — nobody's blood. He just ran it. Calibration, maybe? I don't know what that means."

"Neither do I," I say, which is true, and which is also, I suspect, going to stop being true very soon, and I hate how much of my life lately is made up of sentences that are true right up until they aren't.

Junie takes the laundry list back and goes, and I stand there a while with the vinegar smell of the counter in my nose and the particular kind of tired that isn't about sleep at all, that lives lower down, in the bones, and I think about a machine running on nothing, calibrating itself for something it hasn't been given yet, and I don't like the shape that thought is starting to take.

—

I wait until the infirmary's empty and then I go home, and I dig the old tin box out from under the floorboard by the stove, and beneath my mother's surviving papers, at the bottom, is my own ledger from the autumn of 2016 — not a diary, I never called it that, I called it a seed ledger even then, even at twenty, because a seed ledger was a thing a healer's daughter was allowed to keep and a diary of what her body looked like after the alpha was done with her was not.

Eighteenth of October. Twenty-first. Twenty-fourth. Three entries, three days apart, in a hand smaller and more cramped than mine is now, like the girl who wrote it was trying to take up as little room on the page as she took up in the world.

Left clavicle, contusion, old break site.

R lateral ribs, three sites, deep.

Lip, inner, laceration.

Nothing to the face. Nothing to the abdomen.

I sit at my kitchen table with those pages next to my chart from three days ago, and I make myself read them the way I'd read anything, left to right, top to bottom, and by the second line I already know what I'm going to find because my hands have gone that particular kind of steady — surgically steady, the calm they only manage right before the rest of me comes apart — and steady hands, on me, always mean I already know the answer and I'm just making myself walk the long way around to it.

Same targets. Same order. Left clavicle first, into the old break. Ribs, right side, three sites. Mouth. Nothing to the face where a scar would show at Circle dinners and lodge suppers and every place a man like Dorian has to be seen being civilized. Nothing to the belly, ever, not once, not in either year.

Eight years and six months apart, near enough, and the same three places, in the same order, both times.

—

I sit with that for a long time, because there is a version of this where I let it be a memory, let it be grief, let it be the ordinary awful thing that happens to a woman twice by the same man, and there is another version where I make myself look at it the way I'd look at any set of symptoms that repeated themselves on a schedule, and the second version is the only one I can survive right now, so that's the one I pick.

Rage doesn't repeat like that. I know rage. I've stitched rage's handiwork more times than I've stitched anything else in this territory — rage is sloppy, rage goes wherever the fist happens to land, rage doesn't skip the face for cosmetic reasons and skip the belly for reasons of its own. Rage is not precise. Rage does not keep to a pattern across nine years the way a surgical checklist keeps to a pattern across a hundred identical procedures.

But this did.

Which means it wasn't rage. It was procedure. Someone did a specific thing to my body, on two specific dates eight years and six months apart, in a specific order, and did it that way both times on purpose, and the only reason a person repeats a procedure exactly is that they already know what result they're trying to produce.

I think of the small room off the hearth. Count the days for me.

I think of last cycle — the twenty-first, the same night, and I do the arithmetic before I can stop myself, twenty-eight days out from there and where that lands and what that would mean if there were anything to count yet — and then I stop myself hard, both hands flat on the table, because there is nothing there. There is nothing to count. Human-born women do not carry an alpha's child. It's in every page I've ever read on the subject, it's the documented, uncontested, thirteen-year-old reason the Vance line is dying out from under him one failed pregnancy at a time, and whatever this is, it isn't that, because that isn't a thing that happens.

I put the thought down. I do not trust myself to pick it back up yet.

—

At seven-forty Kade's truck comes down the infirmary road, slow, engine low, and it slows further as it passes my gate — slows enough that I know he's seen the light on, know he's deciding something behind that windshield — and then it doesn't stop. It goes on toward the motor pool the way it's supposed to, and I stand at my own window watching the taillights go and I understand, with a clarity that has no business showing up this early in a day already this ruined, that he's giving me the choice of whether to call him over.

I don't call him over.

I don't know if that's strength or cowardice. Maybe there's no difference in this life either.

—

I burn the 2016 pages in the woodstove before I can think better of it, feed them in one at a time so the flame doesn't get too big too fast, and I watch my own cramped twenty-year-old handwriting curl black at the edges and go, because some things you can carry as evidence or you can carry as memory but you cannot carry as both, not without it costing you something you don't have to spend.

The 2025 chart I keep. I fold it once and slide it into the tin, in with my mother's papers and the ninety-one dollars and the half-sheet that says internal haemorrhage and nothing else, because if there is one thing thirteen years in this pack has taught me it's that the only safe place for the truth is somewhere nobody thinks to look for it.

On the back of the page, before I close the lid, I write one line, in my mother's shorthand — the compressed, private script she used for her own seed ledgers, the one she taught me before she taught me anything else, back when I thought it was just about plants.

Two words.

Not temper. Method.