Sect Year 1 · ninth month · night of day 9 · the fourteenth life: Brack Quay, his sixty-seventh year
He had counted Nell’s breaths through the three nights of her fever. He had lost the count near the end. He had kept on counting after he could no longer hear anything at all, because it was the only thing left in the house that still had an order to it. He had thought then that the counting was for her. Lying here, with his own breath going in and out easily past the place where it used to catch, he understood that some of it had been for himself as well. He had never once asked himself what that meant, and now he thought he would like to.
Aubin had not come in. He stood in the doorway with the lamp still in his hand and his face wet and set, and in its light he looked very young, like a boy at the foot of a stair who has been told he may not climb it. Behind him his wife had come up two steps and no further, the folded shawl over her arm.
“Father.” Aubin’s voice caught on the word and went on past it. “You’re awake.”
