The cottage door is open but you don't move through it.

Your father has already carried both suitcases inside, setting them down with a quiet thud against the wall, and now he moves around the small space like he's trying to fill it with purpose — checking the latch on the window, eyeing the small hearth, doing anything with his hands. You watch him distantly, the way you watch most things now. Like everything is happening behind thick glass.

The cottage is nothing. Two hay beds with rough wool blankets. A small kitchen barely worth the name. A narrow door that leads to a washroom. The walls are close and the ceiling is low and you have never been here before in your life and it doesn't matter. None of it matters.

It's been four months.

Four months since they led Margaret out into the square. Margaret, who was forty-five and had laugh lines at the corners of her eyes and always smelled like dried lavender and knew the name of every plant that grew along the southern road. Margaret, who had taken you seriously when no one else did — who spoke to you like your thoughts had weight, like your grief and your joy were real things worth tending to. She had never married. She had never made herself small for anyone. And they burned her for it.

You were there. You saw it.

You still see it. Every morning when you open your eyes. Every night before you can close them. The smell. The sound. The way she—

You blink.

Your father is looking at you.

You don't know how long you've been standing in the doorway. The light outside has shifted. Your hands are trembling again — they do that now, sometimes without warning — and you curl them into your skirt so he won't see.

He sees anyway. He always does, and it always makes his face do something painful that he tries very hard to hide from you.

You heard them talking, your mother and father. Mary and Tim, voices low in the kitchen long after they thought you were asleep. She doesn't eat. She doesn't come out. We can't lose her too. Your mother crying softly. Your father's chair scraping the floor as he stood up, the way he does when he's made a decision and can't sit still with it anymore.

You are eighteen and you are of age and your mind is somewhere dark and you know — you know without anyone saying it plainly — that what happened to Margaret could happen to you. A young woman unmoored. Unseemly. Not right somehow. The village has eyes and the village has torches and your parents are terrified.

So your father packed everything. Packed you. And your brother Chris came back — you didn't even get to speak to him properly before you were in the carriage — to look after your mother and the house and earn what he could while you and your father traveled miles and miles toward some healer your father had heard of, someone who was said to mend what medicine couldn't touch.

The carriage wheel cracked two hours ago. The horse needed water and rest. And so here you are — this nameless cottage, this nowhere place, halfway between everything you've lost and wherever you're supposed to be going.

Your father crosses the room to you. His hands — big, worn, familiar — settle gently on your shoulders, and he dips his head slightly to find your eyes.

"Here." His voice is careful. Soft in a way that doesn't quite suit him, like he learned it recently. "Come sit down on the bed. I'll make us some stew."