Reed nodded. He understood choices that weren’t choices. He’d lived inside them since his wife died and the world kept asking him to pretend it mattered.
“What is it?” he asked again, more firmly. “What did you bring?”
Nalin hesitated, then reached under her blanket and pulled out a cloth bundle. Her hands moved carefully, like the bundle could bite.
She unwrapped it and revealed a small leather book, water-stained but intact, tied with twine. The kind of thing men keep close to their bodies.
Reed leaned in, recognizing the shape. A ledger. A list. Proof. The ugly heart of a lie always beats on paper.
Nalin’s voice dropped. “It names the men,” she said. “It names the payments. It names the villages they claimed were threats.”
Reed felt his pulse slow into something cold. A ledger like that could destroy men who had friends in offices and guns in wagons.
It could also destroy anyone holding it.
Reed looked at the sleeping women again and realized why they walked into his life in the dark. They wanted shelter, yes.
But more than shelter, they wanted someone to carry the burden with them, because burden shared feels lighter, even when it kills you.
“You want me to take it,” Reed said quietly.
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