He turned to look at her then. She had closed her eyes and leaned her head against the back of the rocker. Her face was bathed in the pink golden light of the rising sun.

There was a night he remembered, when they had first started courting. They had gone for a walk in the woods after church. Cedars breathing out their musk.

“We don’t see eye-to-eye anymore,” Asher said, suddenly so tired, so weary.

“We’ve got a partnership, Asher,” she said. She sprang up and went into the house, but he followed. In the kitchen she was scooping coffee into the filter with her back to him.

He had been a sensation back when they first met, the preacher who was burning through all of the churches round these parts with his Holy Ghost revivals. He had visited her church and she had set her sights on him. After church they had stood at the door talking long after the last car left the parking lot, then he’d asked her to go to the Dairy Dart for milkshakes. She’d worn a dress decorated with little yellow Easter flowers. He liked the way she brought her fingers up to her mouth when she laughed, the determined way she had strolled into the restaurant, her shoulders back as if she owned the place. The next week they had walked through the woods and down to the Cumberland. She slipped her arm into the crook of his. Her laugh was big and full. The prettiest girl he had ever known, full of life and a desire to be of service through the church. The perfect pastor’s wife. They had only dated a couple of months before he asked her to marry him and they had run off to Nashville without telling anyone. She used to take hold of his hand and make him feel safe. She used to touch him and he had wanted that so much, to have someone reach out and put their hand on the back of his neck, to put their head on his shoulder.

“I can’t get over the way you turned those men away,” he said. She sat down at the kitchen table. She was still so lovely, her long neck, chestnut curls on her forehead, those big brown eyes. She had the coloring of a whip-poor-will and was as small-boned as one, too. The most lonesome of birds. She had been a good wife to him in many ways. But this was too much. This thing he could not overlook. “Just sent them back out into the flood.”

“Asher, you’re—” She struggled to collect her words and latched her eyes to her hands. “You’re blowing that up into something—”

“That could have been my brother you turned away like that,” he said.

“We have to stand up for what’s right, Asher.”