Chapter 15: The Glass on the Left

Abel's POV

I filled the glass every night at ten.

I did it for ten years, and I never told a soul.

Dad did it the first year, and then his hands got bad, and I took it over without a word between us.

Water from the kitchen tap, half full, on the left side of her nightstand.

I figured if she ever came back, she shouldn't have to wonder whether anyone had thought of her.

I kept the hall light on a hand's width, the way he used to.

Nobody knew that was me.

The morning after she said she would stay, I woke in my own bed over the milk house and listened to the house.

She was down there in her room with the light off and the door shut.

I had stood in the hall at midnight and listened to her breathe, and it came in long slow counts that were not fours.

She was truly asleep, and nobody was watching her do it.

That was the thing I could not stop turning over.

The rule in the hall that first night was mine.

Nights only, no names, no eyes opened.

The others thought I was sparing her a fright.

I was sparing us the sight of her face turning toward the car.

If she never woke up, she never had to decide to leave.

It was a coward's rule, and I was good at it.

I did chores until noon, and my hands knew the work even when my head didn't.

At one she came up the loft ladder.

I was stacking bales with my shirt off and hay in my hair.

She stood at the top rung in cutoffs and a thin white shirt, and she looked at me for a long time.

"It's daytime," she said.

"Yes."

"Clint told me days we're good."

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