Fourteen stitches left on the hem of the solstice coat, and my fingers were steady even though the rest of me was not.

Woodsmoke curled through camp, tangling with the smell of roasting rabbit and wet canvas. The fire popped, sending sparks into the black sky, and across the flames, Stellan Keir was building something. A shelf, maybe. Or a brace for the wheel that had been groaning since the last settlement. His hands moved with the certainty of someone who understood wood the way I understood thread, fingers finding the grain without looking, coaxing joints into place with the heel of his palm.

I pulled the needle through the fabric. Counted the stitch. Twenty.

Rune sat behind me, close enough that his knee pressed my lower back. He was running lines with Joss, his voice warm and rolling, the performer's voice that made strangers fall in love with stories they already knew. He laughed at something she said, and the sound was honey in tea, sweet and dissolving.

Nineteen stitches.

Stellan looked up.

Not at the fire. Not at the troupe. At me. And the way his attention landed, it had texture. Weight. Like a hand pressed flat between my shoulder blades.

I didn't look away fast enough. The thread went taut in my grip.

"Careful." Rune's hand covered mine, easing the needle free before it snapped. "You'll break your thread, love."

"Just caught on a knot." I smoothed the fabric across my thigh and repositioned the needle. My pulse had kicked up into my throat, which was ridiculous. Stellan had looked at me. People look at people. That is what fires are for, gathering faces into a circle, giving faces something warm to gather around.

Except his attention hadn't landed. It had arrived. Deliberate and unhurried, like he'd chosen this exact moment to let me know he was paying attention.

Eighteen stitches.

The troupe spread around the fire in the easy way of people who'd been sharing heat for years. Maren sat closest to the flames, her silver hair loose, her weathered hands wrapped around a cup of something that steamed. The Bonded couples leaned into each other without thought, bodies shaped by proximity into comfortable fits. Two of the Open members were laughing over a shared joke, legs outstretched, ankles crossed.

This was my family. Twelve people held together by the road, by performance, by the belief that intimacy was too essential to ration. I'd been with them since I was sixteen, since the violence after the collapse had chased me north until I couldn't run anymore and they found me on the roadside, half-starved and silent.

They taught me to sew. To eat again. To let someone touch me without flinching. Twenty years since the virus had emptied the cities. Twenty years since the coughing sickness had taken three-quarters of the world and left the rest to fight over what remained. The fighting had been worse than the dying, in some ways. At least the virus was impersonal. In twenty-one days, the solstice would come. Twelve of us would enter the Circle, the ritual that was the troupe's oldest tradition. Bodies speaking. Desire made visible. The last two standing would be Paired for the year. Rune and I had been those last two, twice now. His discipline had been extraordinary. His devotion, visible to everyone in the golden firelight.

Rune had been the first person whose touch I leaned into instead of endured.

Stellan set down a chisel and flexed his right hand. The firelight caught the tendons shifting under his skin. He'd been with us six months, and in that time he'd rebuilt the stage wagon's axle, rehung two tent frames, and replaced every rotting board in the prop cart. He worked the way some people prayed, quiet and complete. From across the fire, I caught a fragment of his voice directed at Tomas, who was sanding a plank nearby. "Take four. The glue's still setting." Low, practical. The kind of voice that assumed competence in its listener.

"It holds," he said, running his thumb along whatever joint he'd just set. His voice was low, directed at no one in particular, but his chin lifted toward me. "The brace. For your costume crates."

"I didn't ask for a brace."

"Your crates were splitting at the base." A pause. The fire cracked between us. "Seemed like they mattered."

Rune's knee shifted against my back. A small adjustment. Maybe nothing.

Seventeen stitches. I pulled the thread through and the silk caught the light, deep indigo, the color of a bruise just before it heals. I'd found this fabric in a ruin three settlements ago, folded inside a collapsed storefront like someone had been saving it for an occasion that never came.

"What's the count?" Maren's voice cut across the fire, directed at me. Her eyes, creased at the corners from decades of squinting into stage lights and campfires, were steady.

"Fourteen days."

"Mmm." She sipped her drink. "And the costumes?"

"They'll be ready."

"I know they will." She said it like she was talking about more than fabric.

The fire settled. Rune pressed a kiss to the back of my head and stood, stretching, heading toward the supply tent to check the morning inventory. He did this every night. Reliable as weather.

Stellan was still looking at me. Not staring. Just present, the way a river is present, there whether you watch it or not.

"The silk," he said. "Where'd you find it?"

"Collapsed storefront. Three towns back."

"It's a good color." He picked up the chisel again. Then, quieter, the words slipping out like they'd been sitting behind his teeth all evening: "It matches what your hands do. Makes something out of nothing."

The needle went still in my grip.

He turned back to his work. The conversation was over. He hadn't moved closer, hadn't changed his voice, hadn't done anything except say a sentence that landed in the center of my chest and refused to leave.

I pulled the thread through. Sixteen stitches. Twenty-one days.

And somewhere beneath the stitch count and the firelight and the comfortable weight of Rune's absence, a thought I'd been drowning for weeks surfaced and stayed: I don't know if I'll choose him again.

Not poetic. Not complicated. Just the flat, terrible truth of a woman who loved a good man and wanted someone else.

The fire burned low. I finished the hem with steady hands and a decision I hadn't made yet sitting in my stomach like a stone.