Chapter 7: Half a Vial

Conall stood with his back against the instrument cart and his hands open at his sides.

I took off my gloves, one finger at a time.

"I never went to the shed," he said.

"I watched her put the second vial back."

"Say it plainly."

"The bond is still open on my end." His voice was flat, like a man reading his own sentence. "I've felt you every hour since the stone."

The needle tray was still on the floor, and I looked at it so I wouldn't have to look at him.

"Every hour."

"You slept badly the first week.

"Your hands hurt on Tuesday from the clinic's bleach.

"Tobin had a nightmare last Thursday, and you held him until it stopped."

I couldn't move.

"You're angry right now," he said. "Not at me. At yourself, because you let me touch your thumb."

"Don't."

"I'm sorry. I'm telling you what you asked me to say."

My hands had started to shake, so I put them in my armpits.

"I felt nothing from you for a week. Nothing. I thought the Unbinding had worked on both of us."

"It didn't."

"And before." I heard my own voice go thin. "Before I drank it. The six years.

"I lay awake in that house and cried so quietly the neighbors couldn't hear.

"I told myself you didn't even know."

Conall shut his eyes.

"Say it," I said.

"I knew."

"All of it?"

"Every night, Catriona. I felt you cry every night for six years."

The room tilted, and I put my palm on the cold steel.

I had spent all those years believing he was too cold to feel it.

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