[Nell’s POV]
The porch is closer to the cabin. That's the reason—if the boys wake up, I'll hear Ash's indignant wail through the window, Rowan's quieter fussing that somehow carries further because it's designed to make you panic.
Perfectly logical. Nothing to do with the man beside me threading feathers onto a hook with hands that have no business being that precise. Oren's fingers work the line in slow, deliberate turns, and my pulse has developed a mutinous streak I haven't sanctioned and can't seem to court-martial.
"Jory's daughter finished her first scarf." I keep my eyes on my own knitting because looking at his hands is a strategic error. "Crooked, too tight, dropped three stitches in the ribbing."
"She bring it in to show the group?" He doesn't look up either, and the parallel focus gives the conversation a shape that makes honesty easier—two people building separate things in the same lamplight.
"Wore it in June." My needles click and I bite back a grin that has no business being this wide. "The most gorgeous disaster of a scarf I've ever seen."
"You are the expert." He clips a thread with his teeth, casual, like the sentence doesn't need emphasis.
"I can't believe I teach people now." The wool catches on a rough spot on my thumbnail and I smooth it free. "Six months ago I couldn't get through the first session without my voice disappearing halfway through a cast-on demonstration."
"I remember." His hands go still on the fly, and the silence reshapes itself around those two words.
My needles stop mid-stitch, the yarn taut between my fingers, and something behind my sternum does a slow, complicated turn. "You were there?"
"Sat in the back." He picks up the next feather, examines it against the lamp. "Didn't want to crowd you."
"Why did you come?" My voice pitches lower than I planned, pulled down by something behind my ribs I refuse to examine.
"Wanted to see if you'd go through with it." The feather slides into place and his voice carries the same even weight he uses for everything—weather, strategy, things that rearrange your understanding of a year and a half.
"And if I hadn't?" My throat tightens around the question. "If I'd frozen completely and walked out?"
"I'd have asked you to teach me to knit. Right there, in front of everyone." He looks at me then, and the lamplight catches the angles of his face in a way that is deeply unhelpful.
"Badly. Loudly. Tangling yarn around every finger until you had no choice but to come over and tell me I was doing it wrong."
The image arrives fully formed—Oren, massive hands wrapped around size eight needles, fumbling a knit stitch in front of twenty compound members while I stood there with my vanishing voice and no option but to use it. A laugh comes out of me before I can catch it, deep enough that my ribs ache.
He smiles. Not the reserved quarter-smile I've memorized over two years of porch evenings—a real one, unhurried. Inside my chest something pulls taut and insistent, a thread I didn't know was slack reminding me it's been there all along.
"The weather's supposed to hold through the weekend." I change the subject with all the subtlety of a woman throwing a blanket over a fire.
He lets me. Picks up another hook, another feather, and the lamplight settles back to something manageable while my ribs hold the ghost of that laugh like a bruise I pressed on purpose.
Rhys doesn't disappear. That would be easier—a clean absence I could stop checking for across the compound like a nervous habit I can't unlearn.
Instead he stays, and stays useful, and stays alone. I watch him from the workshop window reading to a child on the bench outside the hall, his dark head bent over the pages, one hand turning them slowly.
He fixes a gate hinge the next afternoon, sleeves rolled, working the pin back with a patience that looks practiced. Eats alone at the far table, talks to Maren about firewood, carries water for Doris without being asked.
"He ate lunch at eleven forty-five, spoke to the carpenter for six minutes, and looked toward your cabin three times before turning away." Sable appears beside me at the washing line with a basket on her hip and the flat delivery of a woman reading a police report.
"I don't need surveillance, Sable." I clip a shirt to the line and the wind takes it sideways.
"I'm not surveilling." She hands me Ash's trousers, tiny and already stained at both knees. "I'm a concerned citizen with excellent peripheral vision."
"Your peripheral vision needs a hobby." I shake out the trousers and pin them beside the shirt, buying time with domesticity the way I always do when she's cornered me.
"My peripheral vision has a hobby." She clips Rowan's shirt beside mine, adjusting it until it hangs exactly even. "It's called keeping my best friend informed about the movements of the man who came here to steal her children."
"I didn't say thank you." I take the next item from the basket without meeting her eyes, because meeting her eyes means admitting I've been running the same surveillance with less honesty.
"You were thinking it." She hoists the empty basket and walks back toward the cabin with the stride of a woman who has won every argument she's ever entered, including this one.
The letter arrives on a Thursday. I'm crossing the compound with the boys on each hip—Ash pulling my hair, Rowan doing his slow, steady survey of the world—when I see Rhys on the guest quarters porch, envelope in hand.
My feet stop before my brain weighs in. His shoulders draw in a fraction as he reads, one hand gripping the railing hard enough that his knuckles go pale against the grain.
His jaw works twice, three times, and by the time he folds the paper his mouth is a line that doesn't belong on a face I've seen laugh.
He's inside within minutes. Through the window I watch him sit at the desk, pull paper toward him, uncap the pen. The reply takes less than an hour—I know because I've been stationed at my own kitchen window the entire time like the hypocrite I told Sable I wasn't.
Harlan's letters. The ones Rhys sends back filled with misdirection, false sightings, trails that lead hundreds of miles from this compound. He's still lying for me—every letter a risk, every seal a choice he keeps making from the wrong side of a distance I set.
Ash yanks my hair hard enough to make my eyes water and I shift him higher on my hip. Rowan's gaze finds my face from the other arm, steady and assessing, and for a terrible second I see Callum's eyes in my son's.
Not the violence—just the clarity, the way he could look at a room and know what every person in it was hiding.
I press my mouth to Rowan's forehead and breathe him in—soap, cedar, the clean-bread smell of toddler skin. Across the compound, a pen scratches paper, and the weight of someone's sacrifice sits in my chest beside the memory of his betrayal, both of them breathing, neither willing to leave.