The supply closet smells like dried rosemary and dust. Maren counts jars the way other people count prayers—with absolute conviction that the universe will collapse if she loses her place.
"Sixteen jars of preserved tomatoes, four cracked, one suspicious." She holds a jar to the window light and squints at it like a personal enemy. "Nell, does this look green to you?"
"Everything looks green against sunlight." I take the jar from her and set it aside. "That's how light works, Maren."
"I don't trust tomatoes that change colour under interrogation." She marks something on her list and reaches for the next shelf. "People who change colour under interrogation, I trust even less, but that's a—"
The scream cuts through the window glass like it was never there. Not a tantrum, not the pitch Ash uses when Rowan takes his toy—this one comes from a place inside the human throat that exists only to announce something has gone wrong past fixing.
My clipboard hits the floor before the sound finishes. I'm through the door and across the compound in a dead sprint, and somewhere behind me Maren's footsteps pound but I don't turn because the scream came from the creek and my children are at the creek.
Doris stands at the water's edge, one arm reaching toward the current, mouth open. In the swollen creek—spring melt, fast, frothing over rocks I let my babies play beside—two small shapes tumble through grey-green water.
Ash went first. Of course Ash went first—the boy who crawls toward every danger like it's issuing a personal invitation. And Rowan followed, because Rowan always follows his brother, quiet and trusting, into whatever disaster Ash walks into next.
I can’t breathe. Something seizes my chest, renders my limbs useless, and I can’t breathe, because my children are drowning and—
Then a shape moves past me so fast the air shifts against my face. Rhys—already in the water, boots and all, chest-deep before my brain registers that he was closer than anyone else.
The current hits him at the waist and he braces, one arm closing around Ash, the other scooping Rowan from the surface. A rock edge catches his shoulder—fabric tears and red blooms through his shirt.
He doesn't flinch. Just turns his body into a wall between the current and my children and fights his way toward the bank one step at a time, both boys screaming against his chest.
I'm in the shallows before I decide to move. My hands close around Ash's body and then Rowan's, and I pull them into me so hard my arms shake with the force of holding something you almost watched disappear.
Ash's screaming rattles my collarbone. Rowan has gone silent—wide-eyed, fingers twisted in my shirt, breathing in short gasps that tell me his body hasn't caught up to being safe yet.
Rhys stands knee-deep beside me, water streaming from every surface, chest heaving. Blood runs from his shoulder in a thin line that the current catches and carries downstream.
"Thank you." The words come out broken in the middle, split across a fault line I didn't know my voice had. "Rhys, I—thank you."
"They're safe." He says it the way you state coordinates—plain, certain. "That's what matters, Nell."
"Your shoulder." My eyes track the red spreading through torn fabric. "That needs a check out, you're bleeding through—"
"I've had worse." Three words, flat and plain, delivered without performance or self-pity—like he's reading from an old inventory list. And the way he says them tells me exactly whose hands gave him worse.
Doris reaches us breathless, both hands over her mouth. "I turned for one second—he was right beside me, I swear on my life he was right beside me—"
"It wasn't your fault, Doris." I press my face between my boys' wet heads. "Ash moves faster than physics should allow."
"He gets that from you." Sable materialises at my elbow, already wrapping a blanket around the twins. "The part where he sprints toward the worst possible option at full speed—that's pure Nell genetics."
"That's not comforting, Sable." But my mouth does something traitorous, and she squeezes my arm once, firm and warm, before steering Doris toward the hall with a hand on her back.
Rhys hasn't moved. Creek water pools around his boots, and the gash in his shoulder has soaked through to the undershirt. He watches me hold my boys and his hands hang at his sides, loose, empty—the hands of a man who just held something precious and gave it back without being asked.
The healer patches Rhys after dinner—six stitches, a bruise spreading purple across his collarbone. Maren delivers the report with the efficiency of a woman who extracted it from Doris, who stationed herself outside the healer's door like a sentry paying penance.
He opens the guest quarters door in a dry shirt, shoulder wrapped in white bandages. His eyes drop to the folded fabric in my hands before coming back to my face.
"Before you say anything." I hold it out between us—dark blue wool, cable stitch, two evenings of work while the boys slept. "It's a thank you."
He takes it. His fingers close around the wool slowly, the way you close your hand around something that might disappear, and his thumb crosses the cable pattern once. Twice.
"Nell." His voice is so quiet the night almost swallows it. "Nobody has ever made me something twice."
The words land in my chest and stay there, heavy, pointed. In his coat pocket, folded beside letters I shouldn't know about, a green scarf holds the same stitches in a different colour. Years apart, same hands—and the fact that he kept count tells me everything about how rarely it happened.
"I don't know what to do with that." He holds the blue wool against his sternum, and the lamplight catches the stitches I spent two nights perfecting. "I genuinely don't know what you do when someone—" His jaw works and the sentence doesn't finish.
"You say thank you and you wear it when it's cold." I keep my voice light because the alternative involves acknowledging what's building in the charged air of this doorway. "It's not complicated."
"It is, though." His eyes hold mine and neither of us pretends he's talking about the scarf. "It's the most complicated thing anyone's ever handed me."
"Keep pulling my kids out of rivers and I'll make you a third." The joke sits between us, perfectly formed, and neither of us laughs. His thumb stops on the wool and my hands curl at my sides.
"Goodnight, Rhys." I step back because staying means something I don't have the courage for yet.
"Goodnight, Nell." He holds the scarf against his chest, and the door closes with the softest sound a door has ever made.
Halfway across the compound, Ash—the wolf, not my son—falls into step beside me. His nose bumps my thigh once, warm, checking, and I let my fingers graze his ear without slowing down.
Through the dark, Oren's porch light burns steady. I don't look—not because I don't want to, but because looking right now would be the most honest thing I've done all week.
My hands smell like blue wool and creek water. Inside my chest something has rearranged itself around a shape I'm not ready to hold up to the light, and the hum in my belly—quiet for months—stirs once and settles.