"Then you know what to expect." She sat back. Looked at him, not with the assessment face she usually had, but with something else. Something that had been there for a while but was harder to see through the layers. "Why didn't you say anything?"
He said he considered various answers. "Because there were more important things." he said finally. "Last night there were more important things." "And this morning—I was going to say something after you checked the perimeter. After I—" A pause.
"Yes." She looked at him. "You." she said carefully, "are the most stubborn man I have met in my life." "And I grew up around men who thought suffering quietly was the same as being strong." He opened his mouth.
"Don't agree with me." she said. "It'll make it worse." He closed his mouth. Something happened in his face. Very briefly, she saw it.
Was that almost a smile? No, it was something. It wasn't a smile. She stood up, turned away, and he was nearly certain, nearly, that something happened in her face, too. He ran a fever that night, not dangerous, not the climbing kind that takes you somewhere you can't find your way back from, just enough to make everything feel slightly underwater.
He stayed on the cot this time. Nayeli had been firm about that in a way that didn't really leave room for discussion. And Tsula brought him water every few hours, and Nayeli checked the binding before she slept and after. He drifted in and out, and in the drifting he talked. He didn't know he was talking.
That's the thing about fever. It lowers the guard you've spent years constructing. The careful governance of what comes out of your mouth, the monitoring. He talked about Eleanor, about the sound of her voice first thing in the morning before she'd fully woken up, about the argument they'd had in the second winter about whether to try moving further south, about the way she'd looked at him the morning everything went wrong, that December morning 1886 when she'd known before he did that something was happening and it was too early and it wasn't right. Nayeli sat near him.
She didn't speak. She listened to a dead woman come alive in a man's fever words, and she understood something about grief that she'd known in theory but was seeing differently now, that it doesn't diminish, it just waits, patient as stones, until the guard comes down and then he said a name. She almost missed it. He said it quietly, like something precious being set down, like something he'd been holding so carefully for so long that even saying it felt like a risk. William, once, and then he was quiet.