Deirdre slowly unlaces and removes her boots with numb fingers. She has spent more of this day entirely drenched than feels at all necessary. The wet laces resist removal.

The deputy had offered to help more than once, but she is pretending he does not exist. And he has agreed to her unstated desire for privacy. His raincoat hangs across a branch like a curtain between them. That it cuts him off from access to the warm fire has not gone without her notice.

She flexes her stiff fingers and tries again.

The waterlogged laces are difficult to untie, but she gets them undone, eventually. She places the boots upside down to drain, making sure that their puddle does not douse the fire. She peels off her woolen socks and lays them beside the fire as well.

The hidden knives in her left boot and the case for the lock picks in her right boot have spared her legs some damage. The lock pick case is badly dented, and there are bruises in the exact shape and size of her knives’ handles on her calf.

Deirdre wiggles her toes and determines that everything is still functional, if terribly stiff. She disrobes further to dry out as much as possible.

The hole through her coat, her shirt, her vest, and the damage in her stays gives her distinct pause. Had the apple not been in her sack. Had she not grabbed it from the house. Had any single piece of clothing not been in the exact right place, the broken arrow would have absolutely been her death for certain. There is no avoiding how closely she brushed against the Reaper.

The vicious arrowhead peeks just out through the side of the damaged apple. Deirdre pushes the broken shaft through the rest of the way. There is no way for her to tell if it the poison still lingers, but the little grooves along its inner edges suggest it is. It horrifies her.

Mostly nude, she huddles by the fire and shivers while turning the broken arrow over in her hand.

A rustling noise from the other side of the tarp reminds Deirdre that she is not alone.

And she doesn’t want to think about her other brush with death, freezing and struggling for air while being tossed carelessly by the brutal water of that icy river. She doesn’t want to think about it because she doesn’t want to think about how, if not for Derek, she would have surely drowned.

The hem of the makeshift curtain lifts and she sees the sunburned back of his pale hand push white cloth across the barrier.

“My shirt is dry,” the deputy says in a low, quiet voice. Without being able to see him, Deirdre hears something that could be a hint of quivering shyness. It feels misplaced. “I’ll be fine without it.”

He won’t. Deirdre can tell this is a lie. The quivering shyness is his teeth rattling together as he tries not to shiver in the increasingly frigid evening air.

She pulls off her damp shift and changes into his much more dry shirt. It smells like sweat, cedar, and dirt, but it is not sopping wet like her clothing. It is, however, very much impinged with brown and white dog hairs.

The rustling continues on the opposite side of the curtain, and she can hear that he’s muttering soft kindnesses to the hound.

Deirdre briefly takes off her breeches, wrings them out as best as she can, and puts them right back on. The hanging curtain helps keep the fire’s warmth close and aids in drying out her things.

She eats the least damaged of her apples.

The deputy makes no other move to cross the barrier of his own creation.

And it gnaws at her somewhat atrophied conscience.

Her heart defrosts before the rest of her.

“You don’t have to stay over there,” Deirdre says, blurting the words out before she can over-think the phrasing or change her mind. “It’s cold. You should be by the fire you built.”

“Are you sure?” Deirdre can hear the deputy’s teeth chattering together as he asks the question. It’s a kindness with a question mark.

“There’s room,” she answers, and scoots over to make sure he will not feel crowded in the small space between the fire and his hanging raincoat.

Her extra layers of clothing steam between them as he carefully scoots around the coat. His gaze remains averted, and Deirdre does not catch him taking even the most surreptitious of peeks.

It confuses her. He’s seen her in the questioner’s room in less clothing than even this before. Something about the context is unsettling the deputy enough that he is trying as hard as a person can try not to act inappropriately.

The two sit in awkward silence. Bootsie’s tail thumps happily against the ground as she munches a treat.

The deputy wears a woolen vest without his shirt. Though also damp, it looks much warmer than leaving his skin exposed entirely. Deirdre notes his arms have colorful lines between where his arms have had terrible sunburns and where his shirt normally protects. His unburned skin is as pale as milk and covered in freckles.

“Why did you-” Deirdre starts the question. She can’t finish it with “save me,” so she chooses not to finish it at all. She doesn’t feel very saved at the moment.

It takes the deputy a few heartbeats to answer, and if that’s because he didn’t know himself or because he couldn’t phrase it delicately enough, Deirdre does not know.

“It hurts my pride that you think I wouldn’t.”

Deirdre looks from his arms to search his face. What she can see from this bad angle as he stares into the flames lines his visage with sorrow and confusion.

“But you’re still going to take me in, right?” Deirdre knows that is still a death sentence.

“I have to,” Derek answers. “I need you to tell the justice about how Sheriff Burrows assaulted you.”

Deirdre is even more confused about this answer than the last.

“What makes you think I’ll be believed?” she demands, angry, “I’ve been convicted. I’m a Burrows. And I was running from a crime when he caught me. I was apprehended.”

“The sheriff’s a Burrows too,” he retorts. “And I saw the whole thing. I’d have stopped him if I could have gotten there in time. I’m sure I could have.”

“Sure you could.” Deirdre doesn’t roll her eyes. She has just enough self-control to avoid being so incredibly rude.

“And there’s no cause for murder.” Derek shakes his head.

Deirdre wonders when she stopped thinking of him as the deputy and as an actual person.

“You’ve seen men hanged for their crimes,” Deirdre counters. “How is this different?”

“That wasn’t the same.” Derek rubs his neck with sympathetic pain. “There was nothing right about that. You weren’t running away from him.”

“No,” Deirdre admits.

“I know it’s him,” Derek also admits, “he’s the one who keeps asking you to steal for him.”

“Usually I plant evidence,” she confesses, and she’s not even sure why she’s admitting this. “He’s used it for his extortion racket. He only started asking for me to take things recently. Every time he let me out early I owed him more for the favor.”

“You helped put innocent people in prison?” Derek finally looks at her. And it’s her face he’s searching. His own looks mildly green in horror.

“So did you,” she says, spinning the broken arrow between two fingers. “So do all of you.”

“Do you really believe that?” His eyebrows knit together and he scratches at the sunburns on his neck. Flakes of dead skin fall like snow down his back.

“Isn’t it obvious?” The heat of Deirdre’s anger flushes her cheeks and drives back the lingering ice in her spine. “I’m a Burrows. I never had time to be innocent. Not even before I’d done a thing wrong at all. They took my dad’s hand. Granddad hung on that damned old tree. How were any of us supposed to get the chance to be anything else?”

“I thought the sheriff did.” Derek looks back down into the fire, daring not to look at the accuser. “I thought he was proof that anyone could change their circumstances.”

“Who do you round up any time there’s something gone wrong?” Deirdre spits into the fire. It hisses with anger at the insult. “It’s the same crowd every time. And once you’re in the questioner’s chair, it’s hard not to admit to whatever they want whether you’re guilty or not.”

Derek’s face is leaking. Deirdre can see the firelight sparkle off of the silent tears that run down his face.

“Will you come with me?” he asks, with a sniffle that Deirdre chooses not to acknowledge but cannot actually ignore.

“I don’t want to die,” is all she says.

“If I can make sure of that,” Derek starts, picking his words carefully. “If I can keep you alive, will you give back what you stole? Will you confess what you told me about planting evidence and make the people you hurt whole?”

Deirdre would do almost anything to just stay alive.

She’s already choked nearly to death once and does not want to hang for her crimes.

“You can have the documents and the minting plates,” she says. And she even tells him where to find both. He has nothing to write her directions on, but they are fairly simple and are not in the part of the woods that seems to change based on the whims and moods of the trees themselves.

“Does this mean you will come with me?” he asks again, sounding hopeful.

“I don’t care about the money,” she answers. “I just want to live. Do you even need me? I know where you can find better proof than my words.” And it’s true.

Money was always just means to an end. And it never got her there, anyway.

“Can you forgive me?” says the lawman to the thief.

“You really didn’t see it?” Deirdre pulls her knees to her chest.

Derek shakes his head.

“Will you make it right?” she asks him softly.

“I will.” He crosses his heart with a thumb. “I swear it. Take this vow: I will make this right or die in the attempt.”

“I can forgive you.” Deirdre buries her face in her hands. “Forgive me for making it worse.”