“If some fool comes stumbling on to this plantation, it ain’t nothing to do with me. The way I see it, he can keep on stumbling till he gets to the next one.”

Red runs his hand over his face. The muscles in his neck twitch from pulling so tight. “I’m going with him.”

I open my mouth but nothing comes out. I know the yearning I see in him. But the danger. “If they catch you—”

“That’s why I need your help.”

I take a step toward the door. And then another. “Ask Maple,” I say. “Her husband ran. She’d help you.”

“I don’t trust Maple,” he says. “She’s woven in too tight and don’t know if she’s us, or if she’s them. It’s got to be you. One candle in the window. That’s all.”

I shake my head. “I can’t be lighting safe signals with Master Thomas in the room. I can’t be creeping around the house to see who’s asleep and who’s awake. I can’t.”

He paces the room and I see the tension in his back cramping his shoulders, stiffening his usual swagger.

“You can, but you won’t.”

“I can’t. And I won’t.”

He comes up towering over me. There’s a vibrating feeling to him, like he’s coming loose out of himself. “We’re going.”

“I ain’t trying to stop you. I just don’t want no part.”

His face shifts when I say that. Like a pond that freezes over in the winter with the same water that was there, but harder and colder.

“If you won’t watch out at the Big House for me, maybe you’ll just keep that blacksmith busy through the night. That’s more your kind of help.”

I haul off and slap his face and, when he don’t act like he felt it, I slap it again. I charge out of his cabin with him hollering my name after me.

“Hold on,” he calls out.

I keep marching.

Maple sticks her head out of the kitchen house to gawk at us. I stomp past her and pull out the carrots for tonight. Sitting down at the working table, I scrape them down with a knife in quick, jerky strokes.

“You’re about to scratch the orange right out of that carrot. Something happen in there with Red?”

I’m boiling so hard inside I can’t say a thing. Out of the corner of my eye I see Maple’s face pulling up stiff, taking it like something against her that I don’t talk.

The last thing I need is Red following me into the kitchen house, but that’s just what he does. I don’t pick my head up for him, but I can feel his eyes on my back. I hear his hand rubbing on his skin. The back of his neck, maybe. Or the cheek where I got him.

“I might shouldn’t have,” he starts to say, but then he stops. Sighs.

Maple leaves off greasing up a pan with bacon fat to listen in better, giving him all her nosiness.