The anchor reached three in the autumn of the plague's second year, and Thomas did not tell anyone for four days.
He was not proud of that. He had promised Victoria, in a garden two years earlier, that she would know everything from that point forward, every reading and every fragment, and he had kept the promise faithfully for two years and then simply — hadn't, for four days, for no reason he could properly articulate beyond a vague and cowardly hope that the number might climb back before anyone had to know it had fallen.
It did not climb back. It never had, not once in five years.
He told her on the fifth evening, and she took it in silence, and then said something he had not expected at all.
"I want to stop counting."
"Victoria—"
"Not the readings. You'll keep those, and I'll keep hearing them, exactly as we agreed." She set down her quill with a deliberateness he recognized as her holding herself together. "I mean I want to stop counting. I have spent two years doing arithmetic on you, Thomas — nineteen, twelve, nine, six, three, as though if I tracked the interval precisely enough I'd be able to predict the day and prepare for it properly. It hasn't worked. It's never once worked. All it has done is make me experience your ending four hundred separate times instead of one."
Thomas sat down slowly across from her.
"I don't know how to stop being afraid," she said. "I've tried. I'm not able to. But I can stop measuring, and I think measuring is most of what's actually been killing me these past two years." Her voice cracked slightly and she pushed through it. "You said something to Aldith once — that you'd learned to build the days instead of mourning the ones you were afraid of losing. I've been nodding along to that for a year and a half and quietly doing the exact opposite in every private moment I've had."
"I know," Thomas said. "I've watched you do it."
"You never said anything."
"You'd have stopped doing it in front of me and kept doing it alone. That seemed worse."
Victoria let out a breath that was almost a laugh, and put her face in her hands for a moment, and when she looked up again her eyes were wet but her expression had steadied into something Thomas recognized — the particular clarity she arrived at after she'd finished arguing with herself.
"Three," she said. "All right. I'm not going to pretend that isn't frightening. But I'm going to stop treating it as a countdown, because a countdown implies I know what happens at zero, and I don't, and neither do you, and neither does that machine in your pocket. For all either of us actually knows, zero is the moment the connection ends and you stay exactly where you are, an ordinary man in an ordinary valley with no strange light in his hand and no letters from anywhere."
Thomas had, he realized, never once seriously entertained that possibility.
He turned it over now with something close to vertigo — the simple, unglamorous chance that the ending he'd been dreading for two years was not a death at all but merely a severance. That he would lose his mother's letters and the falling number and the last thread back to a world he could no longer even remember correctly, and would go on, afterward, living in this one.
"That would be its own kind of grief," he said slowly.
"It would. It would also be a Tuesday, and then a Wednesday, and then thirty more years of Tuesdays with me." Victoria reached across and took his hand. "I'm not telling you it will be that. I'm telling you it might, and that I've spent two years never once allowing myself to hope for it, and I've decided I'm done with that particular discipline."
They sat together a long while in the counting room, the candle burning down between them, and Thomas found that the number in his tunic had not changed at all and yet felt, somehow, considerably lighter than it had that morning.
"Three," he said again, testing it.
"Three," Victoria agreed. "And supper's cold, and Wat's coming at first light about the eastern spur, and I would very much like to spend this evening being a person who has a husband rather than a person who is losing one."
He went to supper with her, and it was cold, and it was entirely ordinary, and he thought about it often afterward as one of the better evenings of his life.