The boy had arrived at Price's cottage as though spat out by the chaos of London—thin, pale, and trembling, clothed in the remnants of what might once have been garments but now hung in tatters. He had nothing, not even the kind of nothing one acquires through habit, but a barren emptiness that belonged more to exile than to poverty. Price, seeing him in the doorway that first night, had felt neither pity nor irritation but rather a quiet recognition, as if some unspoken debt between man and fate had come knocking.

Without a word he led the child inside. He pointed to the basin and ordered him to wash; then he produced one of his own shirts. When the boy emerged again, dwarfed by the garment, sleeves dangling past his hands, collar slipping askew on his neck, Price turned his eyes away. Something constricted in his chest, a heaviness at once tender and unbearable. A child should not wear another man's cast-offs as if they were his own skin. A child should have a thing that belonged only to him, chosen, not given from necessity.

This thought troubled Price through the night, like a stone lodged in his mind. By morning, when the hills outside the cottage glowed with the first light of day, he had resolved upon a course. He rose early, silent as habit had long since made him, and when the boy stirred, Price was already waiting at the door, cap low, pipe stem jutting from his pocket.

"We'll go to the village," he said simply, his voice coarse with sleep and years. "Supplies. You'll see what's there. If anything catches your eye—speak. I'll get it."

The road stretched before them like a ribbon damp with dew. The fields, silvered in the dawn, whispered with unseen life. Far off, the village sat under a golden haze, smoke from chimneys curling upward, roosters calling. The boy walked beside him in silence, his bare ankles pale against the grass. Price breathed deeply of the air, thick with earth and the faint promise of bread. He was not a man accustomed to noticing such things, but this morning each detail pressed itself upon him, sharp and unignorable, because the boy was noticing them too.

In the village, life was already in motion. Carts creaked, dogs barked, voices called out in greeting. The boy shrank immediately, his hand clinging to Price's leg, eyes darting like a cornered animal. Price stopped, exhaled, and placed his rough palm upon the boy's head, ruffling the soft hair. The child looked up with bewilderment, and Price said, almost gently, "Stay close, if you must. But better to look about. These are good folk. You'll see."

They walked among the shops. Price bartered with the butcher, the baker, the tobacconist. The boy at first hid behind him, scarcely daring to breathe, but then an old woman paused, peered at him with eyes softened by years, and pressed into his hand a small heap of buttons—useless, ordinary buttons of no particular value. The child stared at them as though they were blessings, his lips trembling into something like a smile.

Price pretended not to notice. He simply beckoned the boy over with a tilt of his head. When the child came, Price handed him a pastry, warm and fragrant, filled with sugared jelly.

"Eat," he said, the word short and brusque, though the warmth beneath it betrayed him. He watched as the boy bit into it, jelly staining the corners of his mouth, his eyes widening with a cautious delight. Price's voice, when he spoke again, was low, gravelly, but softened by something unnamed. "Well then. How do you find it all? Anything here that speaks to you?"

The words were not idle. They hung heavy in the morning air, bearing within them a question far larger than the village, larger than the war itself. Price was not merely asking what the boy liked. He was asking whether the boy could begin, here among strangers, to imagine belonging.