The rain broke sometime before dawn, and by the time Thomas woke the second time — later than he could remember waking in over a year, the light already strong through the shutter-cracks — the valley outside had the scrubbed, oversaturated look of a world that had been rinsed clean overnight.
Victoria was not beside him. He found her downstairs, already dressed, standing at the open cottage door with a cup of small beer going warm in her hand, looking out at the yard the way she usually looked at a ledger page — cataloguing, though there was nothing here that needed counting.
"You let me sleep," he said.
"I let the whole valley run itself for one morning. It seemed only fair you should get some benefit from it too." She didn't turn around. "Wat sent word an hour ago that nothing has fallen down in the night, which I am choosing to take as a compliment to your workmanship rather than an accident of good luck."
He came to stand beside her. The garden plot Victoria had staked out behind the kitchen was a black rectangle of turned earth, glistening, waiting. Beyond it the flume-race caught the morning light in long silver ropes, and beyond that the roofs of Argenton steamed faintly where the sun was starting to work on the wet slate.
"I don't have anywhere I need to be today," Thomas said, testing the sentence the way he might have tested a joint before trusting his weight to it.
"No. You don't." Victoria finally looked at him, and there was something almost suspicious in her expression, as though she didn't quite trust him to hold that thought for an entire day without a distribution node collapsing somewhere to rescue him from it. "I've already told Elias not to bring you anything shorter than a full crisis. A fence. A fire. Nothing in between."
"That's oddly specific."
"I know you, Thomas. A small problem is more dangerous to a day off than a large one. A large one you can refuse on principle. A small one you'll tell yourself will only take a minute."
They spent the morning in the garden, which was not, strictly, a task that required either of them, since none of the seed would go into the ground for another month yet. Victoria set him to clearing the winter's stones out of the turned soil, a job with no urgency and no consequence, and he found, kneeling in the cold dirt with his sleeves pushed up, that he didn't miss the glass slab in his tunic even once in the space of two hours — the first time that had been true, he realized, since before the audit, since before the tether, since before any of it.
Old Joan found them there near noon, come up from the lower lane with a basket she refused to explain until she'd inspected the garden bed with open skepticism.
"You've turned it too early," she announced. "The frost isn't finished with this ground yet, whatever the calendar tells you. It'll heave again before the month's out and you'll be doing this twice."
"Noted," Thomas said.
"It never is, with you. You'll do it your way regardless, same as you do everything, and then you'll be surprised when the ground proves an old woman right." She set the basket down anyway, satisfied to have said her piece, and pulled out a covered dish that smelled of something baked and sweet. "This isn't charity. It's payment. My granddaughter finally got her explanation about the warm water in the wash-trough, and she hasn't stopped talking about tiny invisible fires in the pipes since. I'd have preferred charity. At least charity doesn't ask forty questions over supper."
"I'll go easier on the detail next time."
"You will not, and we both know it. Eat the tart before the crust goes soft." She looked between the two of them — Thomas with dirt to the elbow, Victoria with her hair coming loose from its pins in a way she would never have allowed on a working day — and something in her weathered face softened, briefly, into an expression that had nothing to do with tarts or frost. "It's a good thing, this. Don't let the valley talk you out of it too quickly."
She was gone again before either of them could answer her, back down the lane with the empty basket, and Thomas found he had no reply ready anyway.
The afternoon went slower than the morning, in the good way. They ate the tart sitting on the cold stone step with their shoulders touching. Victoria told him, for no reason he could identify except that the day had made room for it, about a house near the coast she'd stayed in once as a girl, before her father's fortunes had turned and the manor had needed a marriage more than a memory. Thomas found himself telling her, in return, about his father's garage — a story he had not told anyone in this world, not even her, because it had never before seemed to matter that anyone here understand what a garage was. She listened to the whole thing without once asking him to define his terms, which he understood, by now, to be its own kind of gift.
The light was going gold and then gray by the time the familiar small vibration reached him through his tunic, and he almost let it pass unnoticed entirely, absorbed as he was in the last of the daylight and the warmth of her shoulder against his. He drew the phone out from habit rather than urgency.
The green text was there, as it always was. His mother had written about the wet spring in Denver, about a leak in the garage roof his father kept meaning to fix, about nothing in particular — the ordinary, comfortable nothing that made up most of what she sent him, and that he had come to treasure precisely because it demanded nothing back.
It was only afterward, locking the screen and sliding the phone away, that some small clerical part of his mind — the part that had once tracked line-impedance to the second decimal without being asked — noted, almost idly, that the letter had come later than usual. Not by much. An hour, perhaps less. He could not have said, if pressed, exactly what the usual hour even was; he had simply always known it the way a man knows the weight of his own hand, without needing to measure it.
He thought, for the length of one breath, that he ought to mention it.
Then Victoria shifted against his shoulder and asked him something about the tart, and the thought went where a hundred smaller thoughts had gone all that good, ordinary day — set down, unremarked, and left to wait for a day that would have room for it.
The rain held off until well after dark.