Umber began to walk again on the fifth morning, as if nothing at all had happened.

Linn felt it before she was properly awake: the long, familiar roll beneath her bed, the soft complaint of the beams settling into their old rhythm, the slow drift of the whole house over the green skin of the land. She lay with her eyes closed and let it rock her, and something in her chest that had been clenched since the day of the bell loosened by a notch. He had stopped for a guest. Now he was going on. It was only a house on the back of a very large friend, going about its business.

She got up, dressed, tied her hair, and checked the smile in the speckled mirror. It was in place. She went downstairs.

The first thing she noticed was the quiet.

It was a small quiet, the kind you only hear if you have lived with its opposite for a very long time. She was halfway across the kitchen, reaching for the flour crock, when she realized that she had walked straight past the storeroom door and it had not screamed at her.

She stopped.

The storeroom door had screamed at her every morning for six years. It was a thin, high, rusty shriek, somewhere between a startled goose and a rake dragged across slate, and it had long since become part of the house's morning, like the kettle and the first birdsong. Brammer had oiled it with lard. Fenn had oiled it with cooking oil. Mister Pettibone had once, with tremendous ceremony, dripped a single drop of his own tea onto the hinge and declared the matter closed. None of it had lasted longer than a day.

She went back. She put her hand on the latch and opened the door, slowly, bracing for the shriek.

It swung inward with a sound like a sigh.

She opened it again. Closed it. Opened it. Not a squeak. She crouched and ran a fingertip along the hinge, and it came away dark and slick with oil, but not lard, and not kitchen grease. It was something heavier and cleaner, the kind you keep in a tin in a toolshed. Someone had taken the pins out, polished them, set them back, and tightened every screw. The brass gleamed like a coin.

"Well," said Linn, to the empty kitchen.

She wiped her finger on her apron and stood there for a moment with her mouth slightly open. Then, because it was early and the bread would not make itself, she tied her apron strings and set to work. It was only when she went to drag out the little stool by the stove that she found the second thing.

It was not a stool. It was the chair. The small ladder-backed chair with the broken rear leg, the one she had been meaning to mend for two years, the one Brammer had propped on a folded dishrag so that it would stop tipping visitors onto the flagstones. It stood by the stove square and solid, its leg pale and new where a dowel had been fitted into the old dark wood, the glue seam so fine she had to bend close to see it. She pressed down on the seat with both hands. It did not so much as shiver.

The third thing was the stair. She found it when she went up to fetch the egg basket from the landing, and set her foot on the third tread, which had clicked under every step since she was a girl. It did not click. She stepped on it again, harder. Nothing. She stood on the staircase in the gray light with one hand on the banister and felt a small, hot, entirely unreasonable prickle behind her eyes.

The fourth thing was the shutter latch on the landing window. The fifth was the wobbling knob on the linen cupboard. By the time she reached the sixth, a loose hook in the pantry that had dropped a ham on Brammer's foot the previous autumn, she had stopped being surprised and begun, with a certain grim thoroughness, to keep count.

"Who," she said, to the kitchen at large, "has been mending my house?"

Brammer, who had come in behind her with a sack of flour on one shoulder, set it down with enormous care and looked at the ceiling.

"Not me," he said. "I don't do hinges. I do hinge-adjacent."

"What does that mean?"

"I stand near them and feel supportive."

Fenn, descending the stairs two at a time with his shirt half buttoned, said that he had been asleep, was still asleep, and could prove it, and that the person to ask was Mister Pettibone, who never slept and saw everything. Pettibone, from his shelf, took a long and deliberate sip of the tea Linn had just handed up to him before he replied.

"I do not touch tools," he said. "Tools are for creatures with thumbs. However, I observed the guest leaving the toolshed before dawn with a candle lantern and an expression of grim efficiency. I assumed he was committing a crime. I was prepared to be impressed."

"He's been in the toolshed?"

"He has been in the toolshed, the pantry, the upper hall, and the staircase, in that order. I took notes."

"A burglar," said Oda, from her chair, without opening her eyes. "They're very thorough, these days."

Linn looked at all of them. All of them looked, with great innocence, at the floor.

Then, from somewhere above her head, there came a sound she had not heard in two years: the sharp, rhythmic knock of a hammer, driven carefully and well.

She found him on the porch roof.

Or rather, on the ladder that leaned against the porch eave, with one boot on the sixth rung and the other on the seventh and his coat hung over the rail below. His sleeves were rolled to the elbow. The bandage showed white at the collar of his shirt, and she saw with a small, sharp pang that he was favoring that shoulder, keeping his weight on the left. The eave above him, which had been sagging like a tired eyelid since the winter before last, had been propped up on a length of timber and was being coaxed, nail by nail, back into line.

He did not hear her come out. He was whistling, very quietly, between his teeth. It was a tuneless sort of whistle, the kind a person makes without noticing, and it stopped dead the moment he turned his head and saw her.

"Good morning," said Corvin.

"Good morning," said Linn. She had folded her hands in front of her. She had put the smile on, and it was a very good one, bright and soft and perfectly polite. "That's so thoughtful of you. Truly. You really shouldn't have."

"I had time."

"It's a lot of work."

"It's four nails and a brace."

"And the storeroom door. And the chair. And the third stair, and the shutter, and the knob on the linen cupboard."

"And the ham hook," said Corvin.

"And the ham hook." Her smile did not move. "I do appreciate it."

He looked down at her. He had a nail between his teeth, which he took out with two fingers and tucked into the pocket of his waistcoat, and the movement was so ordinary and unselfconscious that for a moment she forgot what she had been about to say.

"You don't sound like it," he said.

"I beg your pardon?"

"You sound as though I've dropped a pie on your foot."

"I'm sure I don't know what you mean."

"You've got the voice," said Corvin. "The one you use for people who've done something kind and you don't know what to do about it."

Linn stared at him.

It was true. That was the dreadful part. It was true, and she hadn't known there was a voice, and now she heard it, bright as polished tin, hanging in the air between them. She felt her face grow warm.

"It's a very nice eave," she said, stiffly.

"It's a very bad eave. It's been falling down for at least two years. There's moss in that gutter older than the boy."

"I was going to get to it."

"When?"

"Soon."

"Linn."

"I have a lot to do," she said. "The house doesn't run itself. There's the garden and the guests and the accounts, and Oda can't climb ladders, and Brammer is afraid of heights, and Fenn is fourteen, and whenever I've asked anyone to help..." She stopped. She did not know where that sentence had been going. She did not like the shape of it. "I manage," she finished.

"I can see that."

"Then why are you doing it?"

"Because it was falling down."

"That isn't a reason."

"It's a perfectly good reason."

"It's a reason for me. It's my roof." She heard her voice rise and could not stop it. "You can't just walk about my house with a hammer, fixing things because you've decided they're broken. You didn't ask. You didn't say a word to anyone. I came downstairs this morning and the whole place had been rearranged around me, and I didn't know who to thank or what to say or how much I..."

She bit off the end of it.

How much I owe you.

The words had been there, plain as print. She had not meant to think them. She stood on her own porch in the clean morning light with her heart thumping and her face burning, and felt, for the first time in years, the old cold arithmetic starting up in her head: one hinge, one chair, one stair, one roof, a column of figures she would have to settle somehow, with soup, with stew, with whatever she had.

Corvin was looking at her with a strange, still expression. The hammer had gone slack in his hand.

"I'm not keeping accounts," he said, very quietly.

"Everyone keeps accounts."

"I don't."

"Then you're the first."

"Then I'm the first," said Corvin. "I'm sorry if it's a disappointment."

There was something in the flatness of it that made her angrier than anything had in months.

"Don't fix things in my house without asking me first," she said. "That's all I'm saying. It's a very simple rule."

His jaw tightened. "Then you fix everything yourself," he said. "Since that's clearly how you prefer it."

"It is how I prefer it!"

"I noticed!"

"Good!"

"Good!"

The word hung there. It had come out of both of them at once, loud and cracked and absurd, and Linn realized with a lurch that they were shouting. They were shouting, on the porch, at half past six in the morning, like two children over a stolen pear. Her hands had come unfolded. His had tightened on the ladder. A pair of sparrows burst out of the thatch above, scolding, and a long, ringing silence settled on the boards.

She was very much afraid that her face was the color of a boiled beet.

He was not much better. A dull flush had risen under his cheekbones, and he looked, suddenly, less like a hard man in a gray coat than a young one who had said something he could not take back. He opened his mouth. Closed it. Looked at the hammer as though it might help.

"Linn?"

Both of them turned.

Brammer stood in the doorway, enormous and blameless, with a colander in his hands and a look of the deepest, most innocent concern.

"The goat's in the beans again," he said.

"We don't have a goat," said Linn.

"We do today."

She looked at him for a long, long moment. Then she looked up at Corvin, who was looking carefully at the sky, and she made a small noise in her throat that might have been a laugh and might have been the first part of a scream.

"I'll see to it," she said, to nobody in particular, and went inside with her head very high.

There was, in fact, no goat. There was a pair of Tolliver's runaway hens, which had hopped aboard at the last stop and were scratching up the bean rows on the roof garden with ruthless joy. Linn spent forty minutes chasing them across the rooftop with a broom, muttering. It helped. It helped a little. By the time she had coaxed the second hen into a basket and set it, outraged, by the kitchen door, her temper had gone out of her like air from a bladder, and what was left behind was something worse: a tired, sore, thoroughly ashamed feeling, like a bruise she had pressed too hard.

He had been trying to help. She knew that. She had known it the moment he took the nail from his mouth. The trouble was that she had no idea what to do with it.

She knew what to do with a guest who wanted something. She knew what to do with a guest who needed something. She knew what to do with Brammer, and Fenn, and Oda, who all took from her and gave back in ways that made sense: a laugh, a hug, a thing carried, a thing mended, all of it folded into the great warm weave of the household. But those were the family. Those were the ones who had stayed, and she had never had to wonder why.

He was not family. He was a stranger who could not leave. And he had gone into her toolshed before dawn, and mended her house with his bad shoulder, and asked for nothing, not even a thank you.

It frightened her more than she liked to admit.

Because people who gave you things for nothing were people who might one day take them back. She had learned that, a long time ago, on a winter doorstep, in a thin dress, at six years old.

She kneaded the dough that afternoon as if it had insulted her mother. She did not look out of the window. She did not look at the porch, where the hammering had long since stopped, or the garden, where a tall dark figure had spent three hours digging out the clogged rain gutter and putting the dead moss in a bucket. She did not look at the gray coat hung over the rail, or the ladder laid carefully along the wall, or the neat row of tools, cleaned and put away in their right order in the shed. She noticed all of it. She simply did not look.

"You've been rolling that for half an hour," said Oda.

Linn looked down. The dough was as thin as paper. She had rolled it right through itself in one corner.

"Oh," she said.

"Mm." Oda was knitting. She had been knitting the same gray scarf for as long as Linn could remember, and it had never once got any longer. "The young man is a good worker."

"I suppose."

"A good mender."

"I said I suppose."

"He fixed my footstool," said Oda, serenely. "I didn't even ask. I was sitting on it when he came by, and he said, 'Excuse me, ma'am,' and tipped me gently off, and had it mended in four minutes. I haven't enjoyed a stranger so much in years." She clicked her needles. "I told him he reminded me of someone."

"Gran."

"I did not say who."

"Gran," said Linn, "please stop being delightful. I'm in a mood."

"I know, dear," said Oda. "It suits you. You've been so tidy for so long."

Supper was quiet. Corvin took his usual seat at the end of the bench, with his back to the wall, and said "thank you" when she put the plate in front of him, and ate with the brown mug at his elbow. He did not look at her. She did not look at him. Fenn, who knew when to be afraid, talked about nothing for the whole meal. Brammer laid a second slice of pie on Corvin's plate without being asked, in an act of silent and heroic solidarity, and the guest looked at it a moment and then, with great solemnity, cut it in half and slid one piece back.

Later, when the others had gone up and the house had grown dim and warm and heavy with the smell of bread, Linn found herself alone in the kitchen with a basket of laundry that did not need folding. She folded it anyway. She put it away. She banked the stove, and went to close the oven door, and her hand closed around the handle.

It did not wobble.

She stood very still.

The oven door handle had been loose since the autumn. It was a long, old, wooden thing, black with age, held to the iron by a single bolt that had worked its way slack until the whole piece swung like a pendulum whenever she touched it. It had burned her wrist three times a week for the better part of a year. She had cursed it thoroughly, in private, in language that would have made Pettibone drop his tea. She had never once asked anyone to look at it, because it was a small thing, an ordinary thing, and a keeper of the table did not trouble other people with small things.

The bolt had been replaced. It was tight as a drum. And around the wooden grip, from end to end, someone had wound a neat spiral of soft, dark leather, stitched along the seam, so that a person might take hold of it, red hot, in a hurry, with a pot in the other hand, and not feel a thing.

She closed her fingers around it.

It fit her palm exactly.

Nobody had asked her what she needed. Nobody had said, how do you take hold of that door, Linn, where does it burn? He had watched her, for five days, from the end of a table, with a cup in his hands. He had seen her wince, perhaps once, and put the knowledge away and said nothing. And then he had gone out before dawn, and made it right.

She stood there in the empty kitchen with her hand on the leather for a very long time.

She was not sure what she was feeling. It was not gratitude, exactly. Gratitude was simple, and she knew how to do it. It was a big, strange, awkward weight, like a gift that had been put into her arms without any instructions. It frightened her. It also made her want, absurdly, to laugh, and to sit down on the flagstones, and to put her face in her apron.

She did none of these things.

Instead, she took down the flour crock, and the butter, and the last of the apple preserve from the high shelf, and began, very quietly, to bake.

It was nearly eleven when she finished. The little pastry sat on a plain white plate on the table, golden at the corners, still giving off a soft cloud of steam. Just one. She had made a dozen, and she had put the rest in the tin for breakfast, and kept this one back. She cut it open to let the heat out. She sprinkled it with the last of the sugar.

She stood over it with a pencil and a scrap of paper for nearly three minutes.

She wrote, Thank you. She looked at it. She crossed it out. She wrote, I'm sorry about the roof. She crossed that out too. She wrote, Your hinge work is very good, and then tore the paper in half and half again and put the pieces into the stove.

In the end she carried the plate upstairs without any note at all.

The upper hall was dark. Moonlight lay in a long pale bar across the boards, and the house hummed around her, deep and slow, with Umber's steady walking. She went on tiptoe past Fenn's door, and Brammer's, and Oda's, where a thread of light still showed under the sill, and stopped at last at the narrow door at the end, the one that faced north.

There was no light beneath it. She could not tell whether he slept.

She crouched, and set the plate down on the boards by the threshold, square to the wall, where he would see it if he opened the door. The steam curled up in the dark. She straightened.

For a moment she stood with her hand lifted, as if to knock. Then she lowered it, and turned, and went away down the hall, and did not look back.

Behind her, a long way off, she heard a floorboard creak.

She did not stop. She went down the stairs, past the third step that no longer clicked, and into the kitchen, where the fire was low and the oven door stood closed with its handle bound in leather. She put her hand on it again, lightly, for no reason, and stood a while in the quiet.

In the morning, the plate was gone from the threshold. In its place stood the brown mug, washed, and turned upside down on a folded cloth, as neat as a soldier. She did not know what it meant.

She decided, for the sake of her own peace of mind, that it meant nothing at all.