greed look respectable.

He said he had only come to deliver the satisfaction note for Julian’s debt.

Tom’s eyes roamed the room, taking in the table, the broken bowl, Clara on her knees, and Elias pale in the chair with blood at his ear.

Tom smirked and said Clara looked busy settling in.

Clara’s face burned.

She closed her hand around the tweezers so tightly the metal bit her palm.

On the table beside her, the black insect still twitched.

She slid a jar over it before either man noticed.

Mercer laid a folded paper on the table and kept talking in the oily, soothing way Clara had come to hate.

Elias could not hear the words, but he watched their mouths and their expressions.

Once, when Tom laughed too loudly, Elias flinched and turned his head slightly, as if he had caught not sound exactly but the outline of it.

The men left after a few minutes, taking the warm air with them.

Clara barred the door behind them and turned back to Elias.

He had gone gray with exhaustion, but his eyes were fixed on her face.

She wrote carefully: There was a bug in your ear.

Behind it I saw metal.

He read the line once.

Then again.

Something changed in his face, not pain this time but memory.

He took the pencil and wrote with a hand that shook harder than before: My father used birdshot.

Clara looked up.

Elias stared past her, seeing some other room, some other winter.

He wrote in broken fragments.

A hunting accident when he was a boy.

A blast too close to his head.

Blood.

Screaming he could not understand.

Then Dr.

Crowe telling everyone that the deafness had always been there, that the pain was part of the condition, that nothing could be done but endure it.

Clara sat with him until dawn.

He slept eventually, the first deep sleep she had seen him take, while the jarred insect tapped weakly against the glass.

In the morning he woke before she did and was sitting at the table with a strange expression on his face.

Clara set a cup down too hard, and he jerked his head toward the sound.

She froze.

Very slowly she took up a spoon and tapped the rim of the cup.

His eyes widened.

He could not hear it clearly.

She could see that from the confusion in his face.

But he had sensed it.

Not through the floor or the movement in her arm.

Through the air.

Clara tapped again.

Elias pressed a shaking hand to the table as though steadying the whole room.

He looked at her with something wild and frightened in his expression.

Hope, after enough years, can look almost identical to terror.

By noon they were headed into Saint Jude.

The ride down the mountain felt different from the ride that had taken Clara up.

The snow was still there, the ravines still dark, the world still severe, but something between them had shifted.

Halfway to town Clara gathered the nerve to ask the question she had carried since the wedding.

Why did you agree to marry me?

Elias read it, held the notebook on his knee for a long time, then wrote slowly.

Your mother fed me once