The doctor was older than Elias had expected.
He came through the kitchen door with Lucjan holding it open behind him, and what Elias noticed first were his hands. They were the hands of a man who had been using them for a long time—knuckles enlarged, veins prominent, the skin loose over the bones but the fingers still precise. He carried a black leather bag in his left hand, the handles worn pale from decades of being picked up and set down. His coat hung from his shoulders the way coats hung from men who had been larger once and had not bothered to replace the coat. He had not shaved. The stubble on his jaw was white.
Margaret came in behind him and stopped just inside the door, her back against the wall. She had not spoken on the walk back from the doctor's house. She did not speak now. Her arms were wrapped around herself, her shoulders pressed to the plaster as if the wall were the only thing holding her upright. Elias might have wondered about it if there had been space to wonder, but Anna was on the table and there was no space for anything except what was directly in front of him.
Lucjan closed the door. "Dr. Nowak. He has been looking after this valley since before I bought the farm. Thirty-five years. Maybe more."
"Thirty-seven," the doctor said. His voice was low and even. He was already crossing the room toward the table where Anna lay. "I started in the spring of 1902. An outbreak of scarlet fever in the village. I was twenty-four and I thought I knew everything." He set his bag down on the chair beside the table. "I knew nothing. I have been learning ever since."
He looked at Anna.
His face stilled—the particular stillness of a doctor taking in a serious wound, absorbent, cataloguing. His eyes moved from her face to her chest to the bandage on her leg and back to her face. By the time he spoke again, he had already formed a picture of what had happened and what needed to happen next.
"How long has she been unconscious?"
"She… She woke briefly in the truck," Elias said. He was at the head of the table, his hand resting on the wood near Anna's shoulder. "Not since the pharmacy."
"The pharmacy?"
"I stitched the wound there. A running suture. It was not clean. There was glass in it still. I took out what I could find."
The doctor looked at him. Elias was covered in dust and dried blood—some of it his father's, most of it his sister's, some of it his own. He had been awake since the first bombs. He had watched his parents die and pulled Anna from a burning car and sutured her leg on the floor of a looted pharmacy. He was still standing. He did not know how.
"You kept her alive," the doctor said. "Good."
Elias did not feel as though he had kept her alive. He felt as though he had been running downhill in the dark and Anna had simply not died yet. The not-dying was mostly her own doing. Partly Margaret's. Only a very little bit his. He nodded once and said nothing.
The doctor turned back to the table. Liliana was already at his elbow, a basin of boiled water in her hands and a stack of clean cloths beside her on the chair. She had lit an oil lamp and placed it near Anna's leg, where the morning light from the windows was weakest. The lamp gave the kitchen a warm, focused quality, the way a room became when something serious was happening in it.
"Liliana," the doctor said. It was not a question. It was an acknowledgement. They had done this before.
"Doctor," she replied. She folded back the cloth that had been covering Anna's leg.
The wound was worse in the lamplight.
The crude running suture Elias had placed in the pharmacy was still holding, but the skin around it was red and beginning to swell. The wound ran diagonally across the front of Anna's thigh—eight inches, the stitches uneven, some too tight, some too loose, all of them placed with fingers that had been shaking in a room that had been shaking while bombs went off two streets away. There was dirt in it. Fibre from the cloth Margaret had pressed against the wound. A faint greenish tinge at the deepest part that might have been the residue of glass or might have been the beginning of something worse.
The doctor looked at it without speaking. Then he put two fingers to Anna's wrist and took her pulse, his lips moving slightly as he counted. He checked her pupils with a small torch from his bag. He put the back of his hand against her forehead and held it there.
"Pulse is fast but regular. A hundred and ten. She has lost a significant volume of blood." He straightened and looked at Elias. "The wound is deep. The glass went in at an angle, which is better than straight down, but it means the damage is wider than the surface suggests. I need to open it. The sutures have to come out. The wound must be irrigated and debrided. Inspected for any remaining fragments. Then it can be closed again, properly this time." He paused. "She will need something for the pain. I have a small amount of morphine. Not enough for full sedation. Enough to take the edge. The rest she will have to endure."
Elias nodded. His jaw was tight. "Do it."
The doctor opened his bag. He began laying out instruments on a clean cloth beside the lamp: a scalpel with a worn bone handle, a pair of forceps, a curved needle, a spool of catgut suture, a small glass bottle of iodine, a paper packet of sulphanilamide powder. His movements were unhurried and deliberate. He had done this many times before. The instruments were old but clean, the scalpel recently sharpened, its edge catching the light.
"The morphine first," he said. He filled a small syringe from a brown glass vial, held it up to the lamp, pushed the plunger gently until a bead of liquid appeared at the tip. Then he turned to Anna.
At which point Anna opened her eyes.
One moment her face was slack and still. The next her eyes were open and she was looking at the ceiling, and then at the lamp, and then at the doctor, and then at Elias. Her lips moved. It took a moment for sound to come—a long, slow effort, the kind that belonged to someone trying to push a word out through water.
"Ma…" She stopped, swallowed. "Ma…"
"Anna." Elias leaned closer, his hand tightening around hers. "I'm here. I'm right here."
Her eyes found his. They were glassy, unfocused, moving in and out of clarity like a radio signal drifting. "Eli… where's…" She stopped again. Her throat moved. "Where's…"
She could not finish the word. But everyone in the room knew what it was.
The room went still.
Elias opened his mouth. Closed it. He had told himself he would be ready for this. He was not ready. He had been answering versions of this question all morning—where are we going, where will we sleep, what was that sound—and each time the answer had been something he could work with, a direction, a plan. This one had no direction. This one went straight down.
From the doorway, Margaret spoke.
"They didn't make it, Anna."
Her voice was level. It was the same voice she had used in the hallway at six o'clock—I'll get Mama and Tata—steady in a way that had been the worst thing about it. She had not moved from the wall. Her arms were still wrapped around herself.
"The car," she said. "After we got out. A bomb... They—they didn't make it."
Anna did not look at her. She was still looking at Elias. Her brow creased, very slightly, the way it creased when she was trying to solve a problem that did not make sense.
"Didn't…" She stopped. Swallowed again. The word seemed to take all of her. "Didn't… make it?"
She was waiting for him to say it was not true. To say Margaret was wrong. To say their parents were in the next room, or coming soon, or anywhere at all.
Elias said nothing.
The sound she made was not a word. It was not a scream. It was the particular noise of a child's chest being hollowed out from the inside—a low keening that went on and on until her breath ran out and she had to drag in another and the keening started again. She tried to sit up. The motion pulled at the wound in her leg and the keening broke into a scream—grief and pain becoming one sound, high and raw.
Elias put his hands on her shoulders, trying to keep her flat. She struck at him—weakly, without force, her small fists hitting his chest the way they had hit him when he pulled her from the Fiat.
"You—you said—" She could not get the rest out. Her breath was coming in gulps, too fast, too shallow. "You said—they would—you said—"
"I know." His voice splintered. "I know. Anna, I'm—"
"Don't—don't—" She shook her head hard, the motion frantic, uncoordinated. "I don't—I don't want—I want—" She could not finish. The words kept breaking, falling apart before they reached the air. "I want—I want Mama—I want—"
She collapsed back against the table, her chest heaving, her face blotched and swollen. Her leg was bleeding again where the movement had pulled at the wound. The keening had stopped, but what replaced it was worse—a raw, exhausted weeping that seemed to come from somewhere below language, below comfort. Her lips kept moving, trying to form words that would not come.
Liliana moved to the table. She placed one hand on Anna's forehead and the other flat on her chest. The pressure was firm and steady.
"Breathe, little one." Her voice was low, the voice she had used with labouring women for twenty years. "Breathe. You are here. Your brother is here. Your sister is here. You are not alone. That is what matters now. Breathe."
Anna's chest heaved under Liliana's palm. But the pressure was something solid, something she could push against, and after a moment her breathing began to slow. The sobs continued, quieter now—the sobs of a child who had run out of the strength to cry properly.
Liliana looked down at Anna's face for a long moment—not as a midwife assessing a patient, but as a woman looking at a child who had just become an orphan. Her thumb moved once across Anna's forehead, a small unconscious gesture, before she stilled herself and stepped back.
Then Anna's expression shifted.
It was a subtle thing. Elias saw it because he had been watching her for hours and had learned, in that time, to read every shift in her face. Something had surfaced behind her eyes. A memory. A connection being made.
She turned her head on the table and looked at Margaret. Her voice, when it came, was not the voice of the child who had been keening a moment ago. It was quieter. Slower. The voice of a child putting pieces together in real time and dreading the shape they made.
"Margaret… Margaret, you—you told me—when I was—when I was small—you said—"
Her breath caught. She was shaking again, but not from cold or pain.
"You said they would—Mama and Tata—you said they would—an explosion—you said—" She stopped. Swallowed. "You said—you said I would—and Eli—you said we would—in a room—a room with no—with no air—you said—"
She could not finish. The words kept breaking. But the terror in her eyes said everything the words could not. She was looking at her sister with an expression that contained everything: the years of fear and resentment, the desperate wish to have been wrong, and underneath it all the dawning, shaking recognition that she had not been wrong. That Margaret had never been wrong.
"Mar… garet." The name came out in two pieces. "You said—you said I would die."
Lucjan turned from the stove.
He had been standing there quietly, giving the family space. When Anna spoke—when she named the explosion, when she named the room with no air—his head came up. His eyes found Margaret.
"Margaret." His voice was quiet. It was not angry—or if it was angry, it was an anger he had learned to control a very long time ago and wore now as something cooler. "A word. Outside."
Margaret did not move. She was still looking at Anna. Her face was white. Her hands were clenched at her sides.
"Now," Lucjan said.
He opened the kitchen door and stepped out into the yard. The collie, which had been lying beside the stove, lifted its head and watched him go but did not follow.
Margaret looked at Elias. Just for a moment. Her eyes met his and there was something in them he could not read—half apology, half terror, and something else entirely, the thing that had been in her face since the hallway and had not left since.
She followed Lucjan outside.
The door closed.
Through the window, Elias could see them standing together in the pale morning light. Lucjan was speaking. Margaret was listening. She was not looking at him—her arms wrapped around herself, her face turned down toward the dirt. The collie had followed her out and was sitting at her feet, its head tilted, as if it could hear something in her voice beyond the window glass. Lucjan's hand came up and rested briefly on her shoulder—not the gesture of a man delivering an accusation, but the gesture of a man delivering something heavy and trying not to make it heavier. Margaret nodded once. Twice. She was crying, but the crying was silent, the way Margaret always cried.
The conversation lasted less than a minute. Then Lucjan opened the door and Margaret came back inside.
She walked to the table. She knelt beside Anna. She took her sister's face in both her hands—the same gesture their mother had made in the Fiat, telling Anna to be brave.
"Anna." Her voice was wet and raw and it shook at the edges, and that shaking was somehow more convincing than steadiness would have been. "Anna, look at me."
Anna looked at her. Her eyes were swollen. She was waiting for the confirmation of her own death.
Margaret leaned closer. Her forehead nearly touched Anna's.
"I was eight years old." Her voice broke and she steadied it. "I was eight years old and I was frightened and I said things I didn't understand. I have spent every day since wishing I could take them back. Every single day." She swallowed. "I don't know if what I saw was real. I thought—I thought if I told you, it would help. I thought if you knew, you would be ready. That was stupid. I was a child and I was stupid and I am so sorry."
Anna's lips moved. It took a moment for the words to come. "But… but they died. Mama and—and Tata. They died. Exactly how you—"
"I know." Margaret's voice cracked. "I know they did. And I don't know why. I don't know if I saw something true or if I was just a frightened child who said something terrible and then the world made it true by accident." She pressed her forehead to Anna's. "But I know this. You are here. You are alive. Elias is here. I am here. And I am not going to let anything happen to you. Do you hear me? I will not let anything happen to you."
Anna was crying again, but it was different now. Quieter. The crying of a child receiving something she had needed to hear and was not quite able to believe but wanted to.
Margaret leaned closer still. Her lips moved against Anna's ear, so quiet that Elias, standing at the head of the table, caught only the shape of the words. Umarłabym za ciebie. Nie pozwolę. Obiecuję. I would die for you. I won't let it happen. I promise.
And then something even quieter—words meant only for Anna.
Anna's face, as she listened, underwent a small shift. The tension in her jaw loosened. The terror in her eyes gave way to something quieter—grief unaccompanied by prophecy. She lifted her hand, a brief fumbling gesture, and pressed her fingers against Margaret's cheek. Her lips moved, very slightly, forming a sound that was almost a word. Mar… She did not finish it. She did not need to.
Margaret pulled back. She wiped Anna's face with her sleeve. She kissed her forehead. She stood and went back to the wall and wrapped her arms around herself and did not speak again.
Anna was still crying, but it was a quieter crying now. She was looking at the ceiling and her lips were moving, forming a word she did not speak aloud. Mama.
The doctor had been waiting. He had used the time to prepare the morphine, and now he stepped forward and took Anna's arm gently.
"This will sting. Just for a moment. Then the pain will be less."
Anna did not react to the needle. Her body accepted it the way a body accepted something that was only the latest in a long series of violations.
She was somewhere else now. The morphine carried her down into a place where the edges of things were softer.
The doctor waited. He counted. He checked her pupils again. Then he turned to the wound.
"I am going to begin now," he said to Elias. "You may wish to step away."
"No," Elias said. "I'll stay."
The doctor nodded once. He picked up the scalpel.
He worked quickly. His hands did not hesitate. The first suture came out with a single clean motion, the thread sliding free of the skin. Then the second. Then the third. The wound opened under his fingers, the edges separating, revealing the torn muscle beneath. The doctor irrigated the wound with boiled water from the basin, flushing out the dirt and the fibre and the small dark fragments of glass that had remained. The water in the basin beneath the table turned pink, then red. Liliana replaced it without being asked.
"There," the doctor said quietly. "The glass missed the artery. A centimetre to the left and she would have bled out before you reached the pharmacy."
Elias did not feel lucky. He felt as though he had been holding his breath since six o'clock and had forgotten how to let it go.
The doctor reached for the iodine. The smell of it filled the kitchen. He applied it to the wound, working methodically, and Anna's body jerked once—a reflexive flinch—but she did not wake.
"Now we close," the doctor said. He reached for the sulphanilamide powder. "This is new. It will help prevent infection."
He threaded the curved needle with catgut. The stitches were even and close, each one drawing the torn tissue together. He worked from the deepest part outward, closing the muscle first, then the subcutaneous layer, then—
Anna's breathing changed.
It happened in an instant. One moment her chest was rising and falling with the steady rhythm of morphine sleep. The next it was rapid and shallow, a series of quick caught breaths. Her face, already pale, went grey. The hand that had been gripping Elias's went slack.
"Doctor." Elias leaned forward. "Something's wrong."
The doctor looked up from the sutures. He saw Anna's face. He put two fingers to her throat.
"Her pressure is dropping." He put the needle down. "She's going into shock."
"From what?"
"Blood loss. The body can only compensate for so long. The surgery—the stress of it—" He was already reaching into his bag. "Adrenaline. Liliana, elevate her legs. Now."
Liliana lifted Anna's legs onto a folded blanket, raising them above her heart. The doctor filled a syringe from a small glass vial. His hands were steady. His face was not. He had the look of a man who had done this many times before and was still afraid of it.
Elias leaned over the table. He took Anna's face in his hands, the same way Margaret had done, the same way their mother had done in the Fiat.
"Anna. Anna, listen to me. You are not going to die. Do you hear me? Not today. Not on this table. Mama told me to protect you. Do you remember what Mama said? She said she would never leave you. Right here—" He touched her chest, two fingers flat against the sternum, Hanna's gesture, the one he did not know he remembered. "Right here, always. Do you remember?"
The doctor injected the adrenaline into Anna's thigh.
Anna's body arched once—a sudden violent contraction that lifted her shoulders off the table. Her mouth opened. She dragged in a breath that was almost a gasp. And then another. And then her chest was rising and falling in a rhythm that was too fast but present.
The doctor put his fingers to her neck again. Counted. Waited.
"It's working," he said. "The pulse is—"
He stopped.
Elias watched the doctor's face change—watched the brief relief give way to something tighter.
"It's not holding." The doctor's voice had gone flat. "The pressure is rising and then falling again. The bleeding—there must be something deeper, something I can't see. She's losing too much volume." He looked at the instruments on the cloth. At the wound, half-closed. At Anna's face, which was grey and still. "I've done everything I can."
The words landed in the kitchen like a door closing.
"No." Elias gripped the edge of the table. "Do something else. There must be something else."
"I'm sorry." The doctor's voice was heavy. "I have nothing more. The adrenaline will keep her a few minutes. Perhaps longer. But unless the bleeding slows—"
"Let me."
The voice came from the stove.
Lucjan stepped forward. He had been standing apart, watching, his arms folded, his face calm in a way that had seemed like patience and now seemed like something else—the patience of a man who had been waiting for the right moment and had just watched it arrive.
He reached into the inner pocket of his coat and produced a small glass vial. It was old—the glass thick and slightly uneven, the kind that had been blown by hand rather than machined. Inside was a clear liquid, faintly amber, slightly viscous. It caught the lamplight.
"Use this," Lucjan said.
The doctor looked at the vial. He frowned. "What is it?"
"My grandmother's recipe. A distillate of certain herbs—wild garlic from the high meadows, a root that grows only in the eastern Carpathians above the tree line. A few other things." He held it out. "It stops bleeding. It prevents infection. I have used it on animals for years. I have used it on myself. It works when nothing else will."
The doctor did not take it. "I don't know what this is. I can't put an unknown substance into a child's open wound."
"She is dying." Lucjan's voice was still quiet, but there was something behind it now—a pressure, a certainty. "You said yourself you have nothing more. This is something more."
"An old family remedy—"
"Has kept my animals alive through injuries that should have killed them." Lucjan held the doctor's eyes. "Has kept me alive through things I don't talk about. I am not asking you to trust the recipe. I am asking you to trust me."
The doctor looked at the vial. At Anna. At Elias.
Elias looked at Lucjan. At the vial. At the stranger who had walked into a bombed pharmacy three hours ago with exactly the right supplies and exactly the right knowledge, who had not flinched when the bombs fell two streets away, who had driven them forty kilometres west through columns of refugees and military checkpoints, who had carried Anna in his arms while she called him Tata.
"Let him," Elias said.
The doctor turned to him.
"She's my sister." His voice was shaking. "She is my sister and she is dying and I will not stand here and watch her die because we were afraid of an old man's recipe. Let him try."
The doctor held his gaze for a long moment. Then he took the vial from Lucjan's hand.
He removed the stopper. He smelled the liquid. His brow furrowed—not with suspicion, but with the particular curiosity of a man who could not identify a substance and wanted to. The liquid was clear and sterile, faintly amber, and it smelled of earth and something sharper beneath it.
"If this harms her—" the doctor began.
"It won't," Lucjan said.
The doctor tipped the vial over the wound.
The liquid fell in a thin stream, spreading across the torn tissue with a faint shimmer that caught the lamplight. Where it touched, the slow weeping of blood from the deepest part of the wound began, almost immediately, to slow. The tissue seemed to contract slightly, the edges of the wound drawing together of their own accord. Anna's leg twitched once—a small involuntary spasm—then was still.
The doctor stared at the wound. He put his fingers to Anna's throat.
"Her pulse is steadying." His voice had changed. It was quieter now, almost disbelieving. "The bleeding is stopping. I can see it stopping."
"Use the rest of it," Lucjan said. "All of it. Don't be precious."
The doctor tipped the vial again. The last of the liquid spread across the wound and settled into the tissue. Anna's breathing, which had been shallow and rapid, began to slow. Her face, grey a moment ago, began to regain a faint wash of colour.
The doctor was silent for a long moment. He looked from the wound to the empty vial to Lucjan's face and back again, as if he were trying to reconcile what he had just seen with thirty-seven years of medical knowledge and finding that the two did not quite meet.
"I've never seen anything like it," he said quietly.
"It is an old family recipe," Lucjan said. "Nothing more."
The doctor looked at him for a long moment. Something passed between them that Elias could not read.
"Your grandmother," the doctor said finally, "must have been a remarkable woman."
"She was," Lucjan said. "She was the wisest person I ever met."
The doctor turned back to the wound. He picked up the needle and continued suturing—the final stitches, closing the skin in a clean even line. His hands were still shaking, very slightly, but he did not pause. When he tied off the last suture and snipped the thread, he sat back on his stool and exhaled.
"It's done. She's stable."
Liliana bandaged the leg with practiced efficiency, the roll of linen passing around and around in a firm spiral from knee to hip. She tied it off and stepped back.
The doctor sat heavily. His hands were bloody. His face, in the lamplight, looked every one of his sixty-one years.
"She will live." He said it as a fact. "The wound is clean. The bleeding has stopped. She needs rest—absolute rest, for at least a week. Fluids. Broth, water, milk if you have it. The fever may still come. If it does, send for me immediately, no matter the hour. If it does not—if she wakes tomorrow morning clear-eyed and lucid—she will recover fully." He looked at Elias. "Your sister is strong. I have seen grown men die from less. She held on."
Elias nodded. He could not speak.
On the table, Anna's hand moved. Her fingers uncurled slowly and curled again—the small reflexive motion of a child dreaming.
The doctor packed his instruments into his bag. He moved slowly, the way men moved when the urgency had passed and the weight of what they had just done was beginning to settle on them. At the door, he paused and looked at Lucjan.
"That remedy of yours," he said. "If you ever decide to share the recipe, I would like to know it."
Lucjan inclined his head. "Perhaps one day."
The doctor nodded. He looked out the window at the pale grey sky. "I will be at my house. I have supplies. I can take in wounded, if any come this far." He paused. "They will come. Before this is over, they will come."
"I know," Lucjan said. "We will be ready."
The doctor looked at Elias. "Your sister will need you when she wakes. Be there. That is the most important medicine you can give her now."
Elias nodded. The doctor opened the door and went out into the morning. The door closed behind him.
---
The kitchen was quiet.
The fire in the stove ticked and settled. The collie rose from its place by the hearth, circled once, and lay down again with a sigh. Anna was asleep on the table, her breathing slow and even, her face soft in the way faces became soft when the body had stopped fighting and begun to heal. Margaret was still standing against the wall, watching her sister breathe. She looked tired in a way that went beyond exhaustion—the tiredness of someone who had been carrying a weight for a very long time and had just been told she would have to carry it a while longer.
Liliana was at the stove, ladling broth into a cup. She brought it to Elias.
"Drink. You need it."
Elias took the cup. His hands were shaking. He had not noticed they were shaking. The broth was warm and salted and it tasted of nothing, but he drank it because she had given it to him and because refusing would have required more words than he had left.
Lucjan was standing near the window, looking out at the yard. The silence in the kitchen had the quality of a held breath.
"My parents are dead," Elias said.
He said it flatly. He had not planned to say it. The words came out of him the way water came out of a cracked vessel. He had been holding them since the Fiat, since the iron, since his mother's raised hand, and they had finally run out of space to be held.
"My parents are dead and I don't know what to do."
Lucjan turned from the window. He crossed the room and stood beside Elias. He did not touch him. He simply stood there, a solid presence.
"You will do what your parents would have done," he said. "You will take care of your sisters. You will put one foot in front of the other. You will get through today. Tomorrow you will do the same. And the day after that. And eventually—not soon, but eventually—it will not feel like drowning."
Elias looked at him. Lucjan's face was tired in a way that looked earned, the tiredness of a man who had buried people and gone on living. His eyes were kind without being soft. He had the particular authority of someone who had survived something and was not going to tell you what it was, because telling would not help.
"How do you know?" Elias asked.
Lucjan was quiet for a moment. Then he said, simply, "Because I have done it."
He did not elaborate. Elias did not ask him to.
They stood together in the quiet for another moment. Then Lucjan straightened and looked toward the window, where the light had shifted from pale morning to the harder white of midday.
"The sheep," he said. "They'll be unsettled. The bombing—they hear it further than we do, and they don't understand what it is. I need to check on them." He looked at Liliana. "The ewes in the far field. The ones with lambs."
"I'll go," Liliana said.
"No. You've been on your feet since before dawn. Stay. Get these children to bed." He glanced at Elias, then at Margaret, still standing against the wall. "All of them."
Liliana nodded once. She did not argue.
Lucjan crossed to the door. He paused with his hand on the frame and looked back at Elias. "Rest," he said. "You've done enough for one morning. The world will still be here when you wake."
He went out. The door closed behind him, and a moment later Elias heard the sound of the truck starting in the yard, the engine catching on the first try the way it always did.
Liliana turned from the stove. She wiped her hands on her apron and looked at the table where Anna lay and then at Elias.
"She can't stay there. She needs a proper bed. There's a room upstairs—the one at the end of the hall. The window faces east. It's quiet. The morning light won't wake her."
Elias looked at Anna. She was still asleep, her breathing slow and even, her face relaxed in a way it had not been since the first bomb. He did not want to move her. He did not want to do anything that might disturb the fragile peace that had settled over her.
"If I lift her—"
"You'll open the wound," Liliana said. "I'll carry her. You walk beside us. Margaret—" She looked toward the wall. "Margaret, go upstairs. The room at the end. Turn down the bed. There are extra blankets in the cupboard on the landing."
Margaret nodded. She pushed herself off the wall and crossed the kitchen without speaking. Her footsteps were slow on the stairs, but steady.
Liliana bent and lifted Anna from the table. She did it the same way she had lifted her from the truck—without hurry, with the easy strength of a woman who had carried many small bodies in her time. Anna's head rested against her shoulder. Her bandaged leg hung at an angle that Liliana supported with one hand, careful and sure.
Elias followed them up the stairs. The floorboards creaked under his weight—old wood, worn smooth by generations of feet, the sound oddly comforting in the quiet of the house. At the end of the hall, Margaret had turned down the bed. The sheets were white and clean, and they smelled faintly of lavender, the dried kind that was kept in drawers and had been there a long time. The window looked out over the fields to the east, where the sky was pale and empty of planes. A thin curtain moved slightly in the draft from the window frame.
Liliana laid Anna down. She arranged the pillow under her head and drew the blanket up to her chin. She put two fingers to Anna's wrist and counted, her lips moving. Then she straightened.
"She'll sleep for some time. The morphine, the blood loss—her body needs it." She looked at Elias. "You should sleep too. The room next door is made up. Margaret, the one across the hall."
Margaret was standing in the doorway. She had not come fully into the room—she was still half in the hall, her arms still wrapped around herself. She looked at Anna in the bed and her face did something complicated.
"Margaret," Liliana said gently. "Rest. Please."
Margaret nodded. She turned and went across the hall. The door closed behind her with a soft click.
Liliana looked at Elias one last time. "If she wakes, if the fever comes—call me. I'll be downstairs."
She left. Her footsteps descended the stairs—each one a small distinct sound, the fifth step from the bottom creaking more loudly than the others—and then the house was quiet.
Elias stood beside Anna's bed. He looked at her face—the dark lashes against her cheeks, the small furrow between her brows that was still there even in sleep, the colour slowly returning to her skin. He thought about his mother, who had looked at Anna exactly this way a thousand times. He thought about his father, who had called her little one in the back of the Fiat, who had used his last breath to tell them to save her.
He pulled the chair from the corner of the room and set it beside the bed. He sat down. He was not ready to lie down. But he watched Anna breathe, and the light through the east window moved slowly across the floor, and after a while his eyes grew heavy and his head tipped forward and he slept.23Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡcrS9VhWlQp
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