Ezra dabbed his forehead once more before finishing his proposition.
“There is one potential conflict,” he said, “which I hope will not concern you, but the owner is Wade Webler himself.”
She raised an eyebrow but did not say a word.
“As you can imagine, he is under quite a bit of…financial duress. Most of the blaze touched land and property under his ownership. I fear he had not considered such a sweeping loss as a possibility. And then there is August. Do you know his new bride of less than a week was a victim of the fire? Natasha Beddenfeld. So young. August made it out of the house first and did not even deign to go back in to retrieve her. Others saw him standing idly, calling her name but failing to run in after her. Shameful for a man of his supposed courage. I hear he is moving to Savannah, in want of a change of scenery. A new start.”
He was waiting for her, now: waiting for an answer, an attack on the names he’d produced, on the family that had ruined her own, and yet she had nothing to give. No screed. No anger. She had seen the look on Wade’s face. His pain was no better than her own, and it was his that would suppurate over time, eating away at his soul while she strove to let hers go.
“The wagon,” she said. “You can have it to me today?”
“I’ll have my assistant get word to Webler immediately.”
Ezra called out to him with a severity that made her flinch. Once the boy was off, Ezra instructed Isabelle to fetch Ridley and return to the hospital, as though the deal was already done.
“The wagon will be there,” he said. “That one or another. Take my word.”
*
When she returned to the hospital, they had drained George’s wound at the site of the amputation and he would not stop howling until he was loaded into the wagon, safe from the doctor’s prodding. Mildred’s sons had come at their mother’s orders, and they hauled George into the wagon bed and sat beside him as Isabelle drove through town. Folks came to the side of the road, sensing a hidden curiosity, and even Ray Bittle gave her a nod as she came past the rubble of his home, knowing, perhaps, who lay in the wagon behind her.
Once George was home and in bed, she bade Mildred’s sons farewell, and, after a slight break to get George comfortable, set to following the doctor’s orders. She discovered immediately why they had shielded her from the wound, for the sight was ghastly. It took her entire being not to react at the foot of the bed. The sore upon his stump wept fluid the consistency of mucus, and the putrid scent punctured even the sharpness of the alcohol. Still she said nothing, offered George—still dazed, staring at the ceiling—a weak smile before she took off the gauze, applied a fresh wrap, and stood up beside him. She asked if there was anything she could do but he said nothing. Just stared off in endless silence, the last threads of his hair making wild patterns on his pillow.
She slept in Caleb’s room and in the morning George was lucid again, his eyes welcoming when she came in and helped him sit up.
“You’ve been fevered,” she said.
He looked at her quietly, as though he had no memory of the trials that had spanned the last few days.
“Well, I only needed to return home. I feel much better.”
Still, she worried. He hardly needed his bedpan, ate nothing, drank only water, and passed the hours listening to her read the classics from his library downstairs （Shakespeare and Plutarch, the letters of Voltaire）。 She watched him from the corner of her eye, wondering what passed through his mind, if he was all there, or if this was still the version of her husband she’d been met with in the hospital, a man she hardly knew.
More than once he would clench the sides of the bed, his knuckles white, and she would calmly put the book down upon her lap. These moments were of great exasperation. He refused any medication, and she assumed full responsibility due to some action of her own—a tone of judgment that she could not control, or perhaps the suggestion of weakness shown before one’s wife when offered relief—and she wished only to ask him to have some morphine in a manner so neutral, so discreet, that he might say yes. Yet he never did.
“I want to be awake,” was all he would say to her. “Please. Continue.”
The reading went on endlessly. When he fell asleep she would sit alone, staring blankly, waiting for him to wake again. When he failed to, she would head downstairs and tend to the home—or feed the chickens or Ridley or herself—then return to the bedroom, sick with boredom but unwilling to spend more time away from George than necessary. The second night home she made a beef stock, which the doctor had suggested, but George would have none of it. He simply took the bowl from her and set it down on the bedside table.