Every instinct Noll Vey had sharpened across three decades of county fairs screamed at him to give Mira a comforter.
He knew six different versions of that speech by heart. You softened your shoulders, you looked down at the mother’s chapped hands with warm, rueful gravity, and you told her that because you had learned your lesson so thoroughly, the machinery of the world was already turning in her favor—that the cellar locks were triple-bolted, the clever clerks had found a loophole, and her children could sleep beneath their quilts without a shadow crossing the lane. Even if only half of it was true, people loved the sound of a repentant man promising that his repentance had fixed the roof.
Noll looked down at Mira’s wool apron, then past her to the three hundred weathered faces waiting between the weigh-house and the bakery, and kept his stone hands flat against the seams of his coat.
“It doesn’t,” Noll said.
Mira blinked once, her chin coming up half an inch as if she had braced her shoulder against a heavy door and found it already unlatched.
“My shame does not make your children safe by a single hair, Mistress Mira,” Noll said, his voice steady and unadorned in the cold air over the trough. “If shame stopped a ledger debt, Prit’s six previous masters would still be running warm baths and toll bridges instead of sitting in small boxes in his coat pocket. Whether I feel sorry or proud makes no…
