Alice came dragging her coat by one sleeve, her hair already coming loose from its braid. Hope toddled after her in her nightdress, clutching the wooden spoon Sylvia had given her, the one she carried everywhere now as other children carried dolls. Martin scooped Hope up with one arm and took Alice's hand with the other, and Ned walked ahead of them to the door with his shoulders squared, as if he could hold the house up by walking bravely through it.
The wind hit them the moment Martin opened the door, and it was worse outside than it had sounded from within. Rain drove into their faces. The lane was already running with water the color of tea. Across the fence, Sylvia's cottage stood with its lamps lit, warm as a lantern in the dark, and Martin could see her shape at her own window, watching, waiting, the way she had watched and waited for them on the first day they arrived, when she had come across the lane with a pie in her hands and no questions at all.
He did not have to knock. The door opened before his fist touched it.
"Inside," Sylvia said. "All of you, inside, quick now."
She took Hope from his arms without asking, and she took Alice by the shoulders and steered her toward the fire, and she looked at Ned and said, "You too, young man, before you catch your death being brave," and Ned obeyed with a relief he tried to hide. Martin stood in her doorway, dripping, while the wind tore at his coat, and he watched his children settle themselves around another woman's hearth as if they had always belonged there.
"Your roof," Sylvia said, not as a question.
"It's going," Martin said. "I heard the north side go just as we left. The rest won't be far behind."
She nodded, as if he had told her the time of day. She did not offer pity. She did not offer to fix it. She put the kettle on and set out bread and cheese and the last of the apple butter, and she told Alice to fetch the dry blankets from the chest in the back room, and she told Ned to bring in more wood from the porch, and she gave everyone a task, which was the kindest thing anyone could have done, because a task is a rope to hold in a storm.
They ate by lamplight while the wind shook the cottage walls. Sylvia's cottage was small and stout, built low against the wind, and it held. Outside, the storm went on tearing at the valley. Martin could hear it working on his house across the lane: the groan of timber, the sharp crack of something giving way, the long sigh of a roof lifting and falling back like a chest struggling to breathe. Each sound was a nail pulled out of the life he had been trying to build.
Hope fell asleep first, curled against Sylvia's side with the wooden spoon still in her fist. Alice followed, her head on a folded blanket, her thumb near her mouth in a habit she had outgrown everywhere except when she was frightened. Ned fought sleep longest, his eyes going from his father to the window and back again, until Sylvia said, very quietly, "Ned, your pa is here. The house can wait until morning. Sleep is also work, when there's a morning to meet." And Ned, who obeyed Sylvia in a way he obeyed almost no one else, closed his eyes.
Martin sat by the fire long after the children slept. Sylvia sat across from him, mending a tear in Alice's coat by lamplight, her needle moving steady as a metronome. The storm drummed on the roof above them, but the cottage held, and in the quiet between gusts, Martin heard himself say something he had not said aloud in three years.
"I wasn't there when she died."
Sylvia's needle stopped. She did not look up at once. She finished the stitch she was on, tied it off, and then she looked at him, and her face was not surprised and not pitying. It was simply open, the way a door is open.
"Tell me," she said.