I was deeply afraid he was right, but I had to start somewhere. I could see that one leg of his breeks was sodden with blood. No arterial spurting, though, that was good … I started feeling my way down his thigh.

“Dinna … fash, Sass …” He wheezed deeply. With tremendous effort, he opened his eyes and turned his head enough to look up at me.

“I’m … no … afraid,” he whispered. “I’m not.” A bout of coughing seized him. It was nearly silent, but the violence of it shook his whole body. He wasn’t coughing up blood …

Why is he coughing? Pneumothorax? Cardiac asthma? His shirt was sodden. If a ball had touched his heart but not penetrated …

“Well, I’m bloody afraid!” I snapped, and tightened my hold on his thigh, digging my fingers into his unresisting flesh. “Do you think I’m just going to sit here and watch you die by inches?”

“Aye.” His eyes closed, and the word was no more than a whisper. His lips were white.

He sounded completely certain about it, and the fear that was swarming over my skin burrowed suddenly inward and seized my heart with its claws.

His blood was spreading slowly, dark and venous. I was kneeling in the blood-soaked mud and there were huge splotches of it on my apron, black-red; it felt warm on my skin, though that must only be the heat of the day.

“You can’t,” I said, helpless. “Jamie—you can’t.”

His eyes opened and I saw them look past and through me, as though fixed on something far, far away.

“For … give me …” he said, his voice no more than a thread, and I didn’t know whether he spoke to me or to God.

“Oh, Jesus,” I said, tasting cold iron on my tongue. “Jamie—please. Please don’t go.”

His eyelids fluttered, and closed.

I COULDN’T SPEAK. I couldn’t move. Grief overwhelmed me and I curled into a ball, still grasping his arm, holding it with both hands, hard, to keep him from drowning, from going down into the bloody earth, away from me forever.

Beneath the grief was fury, and the sort of desperation that lets a woman lift an automobile off her child. And with the thought of a child and the reek of blood, I was for a split second not kneeling in Jamie’s blood on a blistering plain of surrender but on splintered floorboards by a sputtering fire, hearing screams and smelling blood, with nothing to hold on to but a wet scrap of life and that one phrase: Don’t let go.

I didn’t let go. I seized him by the shoulder and managed to roll him onto his back, shoved the soaked coat back, and ripped his shirt down the middle. The bullet wound in his chest was evident, slightly left of center, welling blood. Welling, not spurting. And I didn’t hear the distinctive sound of a sucking chest wound; wherever the ball was, it hadn’t—yet—penetrated a lung.