The mountain doesn't care if you live or die. Wyatt knew this the way a man knows the weather — not from study, but from exposure. He'd been exposed long enough.

His house sat on a ridge between Two Mile and Three Mile forks of the Little Laurel Creek, which meant it was accessible in dry weather and impossible in wet, which was most of the year. The house had three rooms and a porch that sagged on the south side because the supports were rotting and Wyatt had never gotten around to replacing them. He meant to. He always meant to.

Leah came in a truck owned by her brother, who didn't trust her to drive after the incident in Hazard that she never talked about. The truck kicked up dust on the gravel road, and Wyatt was outside chopping wood when it pulled up, and he looked at the woman standing in the dust with a small suitcase and a expression that was not quite exhaustion but was close to it.

"Leah," her brother said. "This is Wyatt Holloway. He knows about herbs. I don't."

Leah nodded. She was thirty-one, with hair pulled back in a way that suggested she was tired of pulling it back. Her face was the kind of face that had been squinting at hard things for a long time and was beginning to look like that permanently.

"I have fibromyalgia," she said.

"I heard you have pain," Wyatt's mother said from the porch. She was a small woman, sharp and efficient, with a garden that survived because it had to. "Come in. We'll talk."

The interior of Wyatt's house was simple. A table, four chairs, a stove that worked most of the time, shelves with jars of dried herbs that his mother had prepared and he had organized by purpose rather than by name. He knew what each jar was for. He didn't always know the Latin names. He knew what worked.

Leah sat at the table and told him about her pain. It was everywhere, she said. Her back, her shoulders, her hands, her hips, the places between places where nothing should hurt and did anyway. She'd tried gabapentin. She'd tried physical therapy. She'd tried a psychiatrist who prescribed something that made her dream in colors she didn't have names for. She'd tried everything the doctors in Hazard and Lexington and Louisville told her to try.

"It never goes away," she said. "It gets better for a while. Then it comes back."

Wyatt listened. He didn't nod a lot, but he listened. He poured her a cup of tea — willow bark and willow bark and lavender, a combination his mother had taught him, not because it cured anything, but because it made the waiting bearable.

"I can't promise anything," he said.

"I don't expect promises."

"You should. People make promises all the time. They just don't keep them."

She looked at him. He looked back. Neither of them said anything for a while. The tea steamed in its chipped mug. Outside, a crow called from the ridge. The mountain held its breath.

He started with white willow bark. He made a tincture from fresh bark he'd harvested in spring, dried and stored and ground to powder. He told her the dose. He told her to take it with food. He told her to keep a journal, write down the pain levels, write down when it helped and when it didn't.

"I don't have pen and paper," she said.

"My mother has paper."

His mother produced a notebook from somewhere behind the stove. It had been in the house for twenty years, filled with recipes and weather observations and the occasional grocery list. She handed it to Leah like a judge handing down a sentence.

Leah wrote in the notebook for six weeks. She wrote down the willow bark and the pain levels and the days when the pain was barely there and the days when she couldn't get out of bed. Wyatt came by twice a week, checked on her, adjusted the dose, added lavender for the sleep, added chamomile for the anxiety that came when the pain didn't sleep either.

It helped. Not much. But enough that Leah started walking to the end of the driveway and back, which was maybe fifty feet and felt like a mile on bad days and manageable on good ones.

"I can cook," she said one morning, watching Wyatt chop wood. "I'm tired of cereal."

"That'd be nice," he said. He wasn't flirt. He wasn't unflirt. He was just Wyatt, and Wyatt didn't think about those things much.

She made stew. It was good. Wyatt ate it standing up because the table was full of herb jars and he didn't move them for anyone. Leah sat at the table and watched him eat and thought about the last time someone had made her food and didn't expect anything in return. It might have been her mother. It might have been longer ago than that.

The third week of October, the rain came and didn't stop. The gravel road became a creek, and Leah's brother didn't come to pick up the truck, and Leah stayed because there was nowhere else to go and the house was dry and Wyatt's mother didn't ask questions.

They fell into a rhythm. Leah cooked. Wyatt chopped wood. They didn't talk much, but the silence between them was not empty. It was the kind of silence that comes when two people are both tired and both honest about it.

"I can't give you a life," she said one evening, sitting on the porch while he mended a fence post that had been leaning since summer.

"I don't need a life," he said. "I have one. It's not fancy."

"It's not nothing."

"That's more than I can say for most things."

She smiled. It was a small smile, the kind that arrives and leaves before you notice it, but she noticed it.

In November, the pain came back. It didn't creep in. It arrived, like a person you weren't expecting, standing in your doorway with a coat full of rain and no invitation to come in. Leah woke up and couldn't move. The pain was in her shoulders and her hips and the backs of her thighs, a deep, aching throb that made the idea of getting out of bed feel like a negotiation with someone who wasn't going to budge.

Wyatt came on his usual schedule — Tuesday and Friday — and found her in bed. He sat on the edge of the mattress, which was a bad idea because beds in houses like this were low and Wyatt was tall and the angle made his knees crack, and he looked at her.

"How bad is it?" he asked.

"Bad."

"Bad how?"

"Bad enough that I don't think the willow is working anymore."

He sat there for a while. His mother's voice came through the floor from the kitchen, where she was grinding something in a mortar. It was a sound he'd known all his life. It was the sound of people trying to make things better even when they knew the things wouldn't stay better.

"I'll adjust the dose," he said.

"Will it help?"

"It might."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the truest one I've got."

He adjusted the dose. He added something new — a preparation of devil's claw that he'd read about in a journal his mother kept, a brittle thing with pages held together by hope and tape. The devil's claw bought Leah three days of less pain. On the fourth day, the pain was back. On the fifth day, it was worse.

He tried another herb. Then another. Each one helped a little, for a little while, then stopped. It was like pushing a stone up a hill, and the stone was her body, and the hill was whatever it was that bodies do when they decide to hurt, and at the top of the hill the stone always rolled back down.

In December, the snow came. It was thin snow, the kind that melts as soon as it hits the ground, but it was enough to make the ridge road impassable for a week. Wyatt's firewood was low. His mother's garden was buried. The herbs on the shelf were running low.

Leah got out of bed on the third day of the snow and made coffee and sat at the table and opened the notebook and looked at the entries she'd written over the past three months. Most of them were numbers. Pain levels. Dosages. Days. Numbers that went up and down and mostly went up.

She showed the notebook to Wyatt when he came in from chopping wood, his hands red and cracked and steady.

"This is all I have," she said. "This and the pain. This and the days when the pain is less."

He looked at the notebook. He didn't say anything for a long time. Then he said: "That's more than most people have."

She looked at him. "You believe that?"

"I believe you wrote all this down. You kept track. You didn't stop. That's something."

"It's just a notebook."

"It's proof you tried."

She closed the notebook. She put it on the shelf next to the herbs. She went back to bed. She slept.

The snow melted. The road cleared. Her brother came in the truck. He looked at the house, at the sagging porch, at Wyatt standing on the ridge with an axe in his hand and a sweater that had holes in the elbows.

"How is she?" he asked.

"Same," Wyatt said.

"Same bad?"

"Same."

Her brother nodded. He went inside to pack Leah's things. She didn't argue. She dressed the way she dressed when she was tired — quickly, without looking in the mirror, the way a person does when they know the mirror won't tell them anything new.

On the porch, before she got in the truck, she turned to Wyatt.

"Will I come back?" she asked.

"I don't know."

"Do you want me to?"

He thought about this. He was not good at the kind of talking that involved want. But he was honest. "Yes."

She nodded. She got in the truck. The truck drove down the ridge and disappeared into the trees.

Wyatt went back to chopping wood. The wood needed chopping. The fire needed feeding. The mountain didn't care if he lived or died, and he didn't care either, not in the way that people meant when they said it with despair. He cared in the way that a stone cares — quietly, without announcement, without expectation, just by existing in the place where it was put.

He chopped wood. He went inside. He made tea from the last of the willow bark and the last of the lavender. He drank it alone at the table that his mother had set for one and always would, because that was what the table was for.

Outside, the mountain held its breath.

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