While it simmered, I took Amzil’s pan outside, cleaned it, and then returned it to her. When I tapped on her door, she opened it a crack. She took the pan from me with a quiet “thank you.” She didn’t invite me in and I didn’t try to intrude.

When I returned to Hitch, he was pouring some of the re-brewed coffee into his mug. He hunched near the fire on his blanket, looking miserable but alive. “Well, that was quick,” he said.

“I was just returning her pan.”

He smiled knowingly. “She’s a difficult one, isn’t she? Sometimes she will, sometimes she won’t.”

Dismay mingled with anger and churned in me. I tried to keep anything from showing on my face. “Meaning?” I asked him.

He shifted slightly, his brow furrowing deeper. Obviously the move hadn’t eased his pain. He rubbed at his face. “Meaning only that, for a whore, she’s an odd one. Sometimes a man can buy a night inside and a bit of comfort from her. Other times, she’s either boarded the door up tight or there’s no one there. She’s moody. But good when you can get her, is what I heard.” “Then you’ve never had her?”

A small smile crooked his mouth. “Old son, I never pay for it. Not Buel. I don’t have to.” He drank the last of the coffee in his mug and tossed the dregs into the fire. He grinned. “Guess that means you ain’t had much luck with her.”

“I didn’t try,” I said. “Didn’t think she was that sort of a woman, with three children around her and all.”

He gave a choked laugh. “What? You think whores don’t have kids? Well, I suppose they don’t, if they can help it, but most can’t. That woman there, she’s been there, oh, a year I guess. Used to have a husband, but he’s gone now. Probably up and left. But it’s known a man can buy her. Not for coin; she’s got no use for that. No, she only barters it for food, and only when she’s in the mood for it.”

I could not begin to sort the emotions running through me. I felt stupid and used; Amzil was only a whore, and even though I’d paid her fee in food, day after day, she’d never allowed me to so much as touch her hand.

That wasn’t a fair judgment and I knew it. She’d as much as told me that she’d sold herself for food when she’d had to. Doing what she must to feed her children; did that make her a whore? I didn’t know. I only knew that hearing another man talk of it so bluntly made me intensely unhappy. I’d known what she was, I admitted. But until Buel Hitch had come here, I hadn’t had to face that a lot of other men knew it, too, and far more intimately than I did. I had pretended she was something else, and pretended all sorts of other things about her as well. That she had a heart I could win. That she would be worth winning. That my protecting her and hunting food for her might make her something other than what she really was.