Ansel did not come to the schoolhouse on a Monday morning. Louisa waited, watching the road from the window, telling herself he was only late, that the snow had slowed him, that a man of sixty took longer to get going on a cold morning. By midday, when the children were restless at their desks and Ben was standing at the door looking down the road, she knew. She left Tess with Alma Frost's daughter, who had come to help with the younger children, and she rode to Ansel's cabin through snow that came up to the horse's knees.
She found him in bed, flushed with fever, his breathing shallow, his hands hot when she took them in hers. He tried to sit up when he saw her, and to make a joke of it, and the effort cost him so much that Louisa felt the old fear rise in her throat like water in a well: the fear she had lived with since Joseph's last winter, the fear that every person she loved was only lent to her, and that the winter always came to collect.
"Don't," she said, and her voice was steadier than her hands. "Don't get up. Don't talk. Just breathe."
She stayed three days. She sent Ben to keep the school open with the older children, because a school that closed at the first hardship would teach the wrong lesson, and she sent word to Pastor Reed, who came to sit with Ansel in the evenings so Louisa could sleep. She made broth. She changed cloths. She watched the fever climb and break and climb again, and in the long night hours, when Ansel's breathing was ragged and the cabin was silent except for the wind, she found herself talking to him the way she had once talked to Joseph in his last illness — not prayers, exactly, but the plain truth, spoken aloud because silence was worse.
"You are not going to leave me with a school and no teacher," she told him once, in the dark, when his eyes were closed and she was not sure he could hear. "Do you understand me, Ansel Grey? I have buried one man I loved. I will not bury another. Not this winter. Not ever, if I can help it."
His hand moved, weakly, and found hers on the blanket. His fingers closed around it, and they were cooler than they had been.
"Stubborn woman," he whispered, and his voice was rough, but it was his voice, and it was awake.
"Yes," Louisa said, and she laughed, and the laugh broke into something like a sob, and she did not care. "And you are a stubborn man, which is why we suit each other as partners. Now drink this broth, or I will pour it down your throat myself."
He drank. The fever broke for good the next morning, the way fevers do when they have run their course, leaving him weak and thin and ravenously hungry and, to Louisa's immense relief, thoroughly himself. She made him eat, and then eat again, and when Pastor Reed came that evening he found them both at the table, Ansel wrapped in blankets like a chastened king, Louisa scolding him for trying to reach the primer shelf, and the cabin warm with lamplight and the smell of soup.
"You gave us a fright," Pastor Reed said, setting down his hat.
"I gave myself one," Ansel admitted. "But I have a nurse who does not accept excuses, and a school that does not wait. I will be back at my desk by Monday."
"You will be back when Louisa says you are back," Pastor Reed said, and Louisa, to her own surprise, laughed until her sides ached, because it was true, and because it was funny, and because laughter after fear tastes sweeter than any other kind.
Ansel returned to the school on the following Monday, thinner, slower, but standing at his desk with his chalk in his hand, and the children cheered when he walked in — actually cheered, twenty-seven voices rising at once, and Tess loudest of all. Louisa, standing at the back of the room with her hands folded, felt her eyes fill, and she did not bother to hide it. A school that cheered for its teacher was a school that would hold. A family that nursed its sick through a winter fever was a family that would not break.