Mrs. Venn was waiting in the kitchen with the kettle on and a face like granite.

She had put on a quilted dressing gown over her nightdress, and her gray hair hung down her back in a long braid that Sienna had never seen. She stood at the range with her arms folded, as she must have stood for forty-one years at the end of a great many bad nights, and when the three of them came in through the back passage, black with smoke and smelling like a forge, she did not exclaim. She did not ask a single question. She looked at Matteo's hand, and at Marco's torn jacket, and at the borrowed overcoat dragging at Sienna's heels, and she said, "Sit."

Nobody argued. Marco lowered himself onto the bench by the door like a man whose bones had turned to water. Matteo stood swaying slightly in the middle of the red tiles. Sienna pulled out a chair and put a hand on his sleeve.

"Tea," said Mrs. Venn. "Sweet, and I'll hear no complaints. Then bed, the pair of you. I've warmed the bath in the east wing, and Tomas has put a brick in your sheets."

"Mrs. Venn," said Matteo. His voice was a dry rasp. "The men at Four. Anselm, and the boy..."

"I've had the hospital on the telephone twice, sir, and they're both alive and cross. The boy's mother is with him. Anselm's asked for his pipe, and been told no." Her mouth twitched. "You'll find that very satisfactory, I expect."

He closed his eyes. His whole body seemed to loosen by a degree. "Yes," he said. "I do."

Sienna tested the tea. She did it without thinking, a strip from her cardigan pocket, a dip, a flick. Mrs. Venn watched her do it with an expression of grave approval, and then, as though that settled something, she took Marco by the elbow and said, "You, I'll see to in the pantry, and I'll thank you not to argue." She drew him out through the arched door and into the passage, and in a moment the rattle of cups and the low murmur of a stern voice faded away behind the wall.

The kitchen was very quiet.

The lamps were low. Gray dawn showed in the high windows and lay across the pine table in long pale bars. The great black range ticked as it cooled. A clock on the shelf said ten to six, and the smell of woodsmoke and hot copper and scorched wool hung in the air like the ghost of the night.

Matteo was looking at his hand.

He held it a little away from his body, palm down, as though it belonged to someone else. The cloth the paramedic had wound around it had dried and stuck. Beneath it she could see the edge of the burn, a raw and shining red that ran from the knuckles halfway up the back of the wrist, and in the middle of it a large pale blister, swollen and tight, with a ragged tear at one side.

"It's nothing," he said. "I'll have Dr. Roux look at it in the morning."

"No."

He glanced up.

"No," Sienna said again. "You won't." She heard her own voice, level and flat and quite unlike the voice that had shouted on the quay. It was the voice she used on a patient who had decided to be brave. "It needs treating now. Every minute it stays hot, it goes deeper. You've been standing there for an hour with that cloth stuck to it, and if you leave it any longer, you'll lose the skin when it comes off."

"Sienna."

"I'm not asking." She crossed to the long stone sink under the window and turned the tap. Cold water rushed into the basin, loud in the quiet. "Clause seven. We don't decide for each other. You are not deciding this for me. I'm going to treat your hand, and you are going to let me, and then you can go to bed."

He did not answer. She turned from the sink. He was standing quite still on the red tiles, with the dawn behind him, and the expression on his face was not anger. It was something much more difficult. It was the look of a man who has spent thirty-three years being the one who held the door, and has just been told, kindly and with perfect certainty, that he is to sit down.

She put out her hand.

He looked at it for a long moment. Then, slowly, with a care that made her chest ache, he put his burned hand into hers.

The contact was the lightest she could manage. She held it by the fingertips and wrist, underneath, away from the wound. She led him to the sink and turned his hand palm down under the running water, and heard the quick sharp hiss of his breath as it struck.

"Cold," she said. "I know. It's supposed to hurt."

"I assumed so."

"Twenty minutes. Don't pull away."

"I wouldn't dream of it."

He did not look at the water. He looked at her. She felt it on the side of her face like a hand, and she kept her eyes on the basin, and held his wrist steady under the stream. The cloth had come loose at the edges. She lifted it with her thumbnail, very carefully, and let the water float it away, and a little stain of rust and soot ran down the white stone and vanished into the drain.

She worked in silence. It was the first thing in the whole long night that she knew exactly how to do. She had taken a first aid course at twenty, in a freezing hall with a plastic dummy, and had been the only student to finish the written paper early. She remembered it all. Cool running water, not ice. Remove nothing that was stuck. Do not break the blister. Cover it loosely, with something that would not shed. She had not once in her life done it for a man she had married.

"You're good at this," Matteo said at last, very low.

"I'm a technician. It's all chemistry, in the end." She turned his hand gently under the stream to rinse the heel of it. "Burns, poisons. Same family. Something gets into the tissue where it shouldn't, and you try to wash it out before it settles."

"Does it work?"

"Sometimes."

The water ran. The clock ticked. Outside, a gull called once over the garden, and the high windows turned from gray to the color of pearl. Sienna kept her hand under his wrist and counted the minutes against the second hand. Eleven. Twelve. At fourteen, she noticed that he was not shaking.

It was a small thing. She had not seen it at first, because she had been so intent on the burn. But the hand in hers was perfectly steady. The tremor she had watched for so many weeks, in the long room above the quay, at the registry table, over a freight ledger with the gold sunlight on it, had gone. His fingers lay quiet under the water, long and calm, and the fine sinews at the back of the wrist stood out like cords in the cold.

She did not say anything. She only looked, and her throat tightened.

At twenty minutes, she turned off the tap.

"Sit," she said.

He sat at the end of the pine table. She pulled a stool up opposite him, and spread a clean dish towel across her knee, and laid his hand upon it, palm down. In a drawer by the range she found a box of sterile gauze that Mrs. Venn, forty-one years in service, had plainly kept stocked against exactly such a night. She tore a square. She laid it over the burn without pressing. Her fingers moved over his, light and sure, and as she bent to smooth the edge she saw something she had not seen before.

His sleeve had ridden up. The wet cuff had slid back almost to the elbow, and along the inside of his forearm, pale against the brown, ran a long white scar.

It was old. It had gone silvery and flat with age, a thin, straight, vicious line that began just below the wrist and ran nearly the length of the bone. At one end it split into three small pale ridges, like the roots of a tree. She looked at it for a long moment. She did not touch it.

"That's a clean cut," she said, in her neutral lab voice. "It's been stitched."

"Badly."

"What was it?"

He was quiet for a moment. He did not pull his sleeve down. "A winch cable," he said. "I was fifteen. A bad day on the quay, a bad rope, and a crane driver who was drunk before noon. It took me across the arm and I fell nine feet to the deck." His voice was almost expressionless. "My father came down from the office. He looked at it. He said, a Bellandi doesn't cry out in front of the men. Then he had it stitched by the dock carpenter with a sailmaker's needle, because the doctor was forty minutes away."

She did not move.

"I have not told anyone that," Matteo said. "I have never told it to anyone in my life. Not Marco. He was there. He doesn't count." The ghost of a smile touched his mouth. "I don't know why I'm telling you."

"Because I asked."

"You didn't ask."

"I looked at it." She picked up the roll of bandage. "It's the same thing, with me."

He laughed. It was a short, startled, cracked sound, and she felt it go through the arm in her lap. He put his head back and shut his eyes, and she saw the tears at the corners of them, bright and unashamed, and she pretended she had not.

She began to wind the bandage. It went round the heel of his hand and across the palm and back, in neat slow turns, and she was careful of the blister and careful of the gauze. He watched her do it. She felt his gaze on the top of her bent head, steady and warm, and she wondered, with a distant flicker of alarm, whether he could hear her pulse.

"You asked me once," Matteo said, "what it felt like when I woke. In the first minute."

"No. I never did."

"Then I'd like to tell you anyway." He opened his eyes. They were dark and very tired and perfectly open. "The first thing I noticed was that my hand was shaking. It had never done it before, not in thirty-one years. I have always been steady. I was proud of it. My father taught me that a man who trembles is a man who can be read, and I was never read by anyone." He turned his fingers a little in her palm. "In the other life it only shook afterwards, when the work was done. A man to be dealt with. A shipment that went wrong. Something I'd have preferred not to do. This time it started on the afternoon I read your name. And it has not once been quite still since."

She tied the end of the bandage with a small, firm knot.

"Until tonight," she said.

"Until tonight," he agreed. "I noticed it too. At the sink." A pause. "I think it is the first time since I woke that I knew exactly where you were."

The room had gone very quiet. The range ticked. A bar of pale gold had begun to creep across the tiles toward their feet, and it caught the dust in the air and made it shine.

She did not let go of his hand.

She knew she should. The bandage was finished. The treatment was done. There was no clinical reason on earth for her to go on sitting on a kitchen stool at six in the morning, holding a man's bandaged hand on a dish towel in her lap, and looking at the long white scar on the inside of his arm. But her fingers would not open. They lay curled around his, light and unmoving, and she heard herself say, in a voice she did not entirely recognize, "Can I ask you something?"

"Anything."

"Don't say that."

"I'll say it again, if you like."

She drew a breath. She had not planned this. It had been sitting at the back of her mind since the library, since the half second in the cold green light when she had looked at his mouth and thought, he is the only person in the world who knows. And it came out now, in the quiet kitchen, as simple as a pulse.

"Did it hurt?" she said. "Dying?"

He did not answer at once.

She watched the question go in. She watched it travel across his face, slowly, past the mask and the courtesy and the thirty-three years of careful control, and settle somewhere a long way down. His hand, in hers, went very still. The pale gold bar of the morning lay across the table between them. A faint, haunted, terrible stillness came into his eyes.

He nodded.

It was a small movement. It was barely a movement at all. His chin dropped a quarter of an inch, and rose again, and he looked at her with an expression of such naked, helpless candor that she felt it in her ribs. It did not hurt in the body, that look said. The body was quick, and gentle. It hurt in the other place. It hurt in the place where a man lies on a ruined rug with a cold hand in his and cannot say the one thing he means.

She understood. She understood it entirely, in the same instant that she understood she was going to cry.

She took her hand away.

It was a plain, abrupt, clumsy movement, like a girl pulling back from a hot stove. She stood up so fast that the stool rocked behind her, and turned away, and found herself standing in front of the sink with both hands braced on the cold stone and her eyes fixed on the window. The garden lay outside, gray and wet and quite ordinary. A blackbird was hopping on the lawn.

Behind her, the chair scraped. He had stood.

She did not turn around. She could not. If she turned, she knew exactly what would happen, and she knew it with the terrible calm of a woman looking at a result she has read before. She would look at his face. His face would be open. And she would say something she could not take back, and she did not yet know, not for certain, whether she could trust the thing that was trying to come out.

"Thank you," said Matteo, very quietly, "for the hand."

"It's what I do."

"No." A pause. "It isn't."

She heard him walk to the arched door. She heard it stop. She heard the long slow breath he drew, and the low careful voice that came after it, as gentle as a hand laid on a sleeping child.

"I'm sorry," he said. "For asking you to forgive me for a thing you did not yet know I had done. I should not have let you hold my hand."

She closed her eyes.

Something in the sentence snagged. It was a small catch, like a thread on a nail. She turned it over, once, and then again, and found it quite smooth. He might have meant the fire. He might have meant the night at Pier Four. He might have meant anything at all. She was so tired that her thoughts had begun to run together like wet paint.

"Go to bed, Matteo," she said.

"Yes."

The door closed softly. His footsteps went away up the stone passage, and she stood at the sink with her forehead against the cold glass of the window and listened to them fade. A blackbird sang. Somewhere in the pantry, Mrs. Venn's voice rose in a long low scolding. The sun climbed over the edge of the garden wall and fell across the kitchen, bright and ordinary, as though nothing whatsoever had happened.

She was still standing there when the pantry door opened.

Marco came in alone. He had washed his face. There was a clean white shirt under his ruined jacket, and a mug of tea in his fist, and the soot had left two faint gray hollows under his eyes. He stopped just inside the arch, and she saw him take in the empty chair and the dish towel on the stool and her own rigid back, and decide, with the bottomless tact of long practice, not to mention any of it.

"Miss Hale," he said. "I'm sorry to trouble you. I wanted to tell you before I woke him."

She turned. "Tell me what?"

He set down the mug. He took from his breast pocket a small notebook with a black cloth cover, and opened it to a page covered in his neat square handwriting. He did not look at it. He did not need to.

"Gavin's report," said Marco. "From the roof of the bonded shed, the night of the warehouse. I asked him to go back over his own notes, once the fire was out, for anything he'd thought too small to mention." He drew a breath. "There was a car. A dark gray saloon, with no plates, parked at the end of the lane that runs behind the pines. Behind this house, miss. It was there at two on the night of the warehouse. It was there three nights before that. Gavin saw it from the roof, because the road bends and the headlights swing across the water."

Sienna did not move.

"He says it never had its lights on," Marco said. "It was only ever a darker shape. But he thinks, by the way the grass was flattened under the hedge, that someone has been standing at the end of the garden wall."

"Watching the house."

"Watching the east wing."

The sun lay across the floor of the kitchen in a wide bright bar. A bird sang in the garden. She looked at the long window above the sink, and at the green lawn beyond it, and at the long gray wall at the bottom of the garden, with a row of old cypresses black against the sky. Nothing moved. A little wind stirred the grass.

"How long?" she said.

"At the least, since before the fire." His broad calm face did not change. "Possibly since before the wedding."

She put her hand flat against the cool stone of the sink, and held on.