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IV

“Are you ever lonely?”

It is late autumn now, and they are sitting together at the wooden table in the shop, María straining long-steeped herbs under Sabine’s unblinking gaze.

She has grown used to the widow’s company these past few months, to her startling beauty and her cool touch, to the heat it stirs beneath María’s skin, even to the strange way the world tips when she is near.

To her own freedom, the loosening of her restraints, when she is in the woman’s company.

But the widow’s stillness is unnerving.

María herself has always been restless, some piece of her perpetually in motion.

A bobbing thigh, a rolling wrist, her hands, her head.

But when the widow is not crossing the shop, or making a tonic, she is a statue, only her blue eyes marked by life.

And even those sometimes seem fixed on something far away, miles beyond the darkened shop.

But when María asks if she is lonely, Sabine blinks, and returns to herself.

“What a strange question.”

“Is it?” she asks. “You are a widow. You are alone.”

Sabine sits forward, elbows on the table. She laces her fingers and rests her chin on top, a small gesture that transforms her entire face, makes her seem suddenly girlish, young.

“One can be alone without feeling lonely,” she muses. “One can feel lonely without being alone.”

María twists a cloth bundle over a bowl, watches the tinted oil drip.

“Have you never thought of remarrying?” she asks. “Or taking a companion?”

Sabine cocks her head, a coy smile tugging at the corner of her mouth. “Who says I have not?”

Jealousy runs like gooseflesh over María’s skin. She forces out a brittle laugh and says, “I envy your freedom.”

Sabine doesn’t laugh, only holds María’s gaze. “There’s no need for envy, when you could have it, too.”

“I doubt my husband would agree.”

Husband. A word bitten like a loose thread between her teeth. As the days have grown shorter, Andrés has returned, and this time it seems he means to stay the winter, in her room. In her bed. But something has shifted.

Her beauty has begun to make him angry, her figure now an insult. Where before he looked at María with hope, now he eyes her with impatience, as if she’s nothing but an empty vessel he has not yet managed to fill.

And he is nothing if not determined.

His efforts have taken on a painful frequency. María occupies herself by silently reciting the ingredients in her tonic, spells them in her mind, letter by letter, until he’s done.

“You could give him a child,” Sabine suggested thoughtfully, several weeks before, “one, to put his mind at ease.”

But María’s stomach clenched at the suggestion. She fought the urge to scream, and simply shook her head. “It would not be enough,” she said, and she knew it was the truth. “They are hungry people. They will breed me until I die. In the childbed or otherwise wrung dry.”

Now she shifts in her chair, wincing at the steady ache between her legs, and across the narrow table the widow’s girlish demeanor drops away, replaced suddenly by something older, ancient. It is uncanny, how little Sabine changes, and how much.

“Have you heard?” she says, a hollow in her voice. “There is a sickness sweeping through, a few days north. A plague, they say. Perhaps it will make its way to León.”

María has often glimpsed the morbid streak buried in the other woman’s humor. Still, it takes her by surprise. Talking of plagues as if they are poor weather.

“Who knows?” adds Sabine with an airy shrug. “Tragedy could yet befall your husband.”

“As it did yours?” counters María.

Months spent in each other’s company, and yet Sabine has told her nothing of her life before. María is hungry to know more, but sure enough, the question is met only by that enigmatic smile.

Sabine sits up a little straighter. “Of course,” she says, scanning her shop. “There are other ways to make one’s self a widow. Not all of them rely on chance.”

Her blue eyes burn when she says it, and María thinks of the day the widow left Santo Domingo, all those years ago. The day after senor Baltierra died in his sleep.

It would be a lie to say she’s never dreamed of killing Andrés.

At night, when he sleeps and she cannot, she has taken to letting her mind wander, her imagination conjuring the ways in lurid detail. Knives buried in soft skin, bodies thudding down the eight short steps, fire catching on the curtains, spreading room by room.

No, it is not a question of whether she is capable ; María has never doubted that.

But what would it gain her? What would she be left?

Humor dances like light again across Sabine’s face, and María realizes—she is joking. Of course she is joking. And why not? There is no harm in jest.

“I would make an attractive widow,” she muses.

“Without a doubt,” says Sabine.

“But gray has never been my color. An emerald green, perhaps, or plum.”

“The shade of mourning doesn’t matter,” says Sabine, rising from her chair. “What matters is that you would be free.”

“Free,” echoes María, the word heavy on her tongue. “To do what?”

Sabine strolls to the wall, runs her fingertips along the jars. “Free to live as you please. Be who you please. Take what you please.”

Her hand stops at a vase filled with dried flowers, petals the soft white of eggshells.

“That is the best thing,” Sabine says softly, lifting a flower from the bunch. “There is no one to stay your hand. No one to tell you no. If you see a thing you want . . .”

Her fingers vise shut, crushing the fragile bloom.

“It is yours.”

She dusts off her palms, and when she turns back to face the table, María sees the look on her face and understands. This is not a game. The widow is not joking. A shadow has crossed her cloudless eyes, drawn hollows in her cheeks.

“I am growing tired of León,” she says. “I do not think I’ll stay much longer.”

María feels the ground beneath her tremble.

No, she wants to say. I won’t allow it. You cannot leave me here, with him.

She catches the words before they spill out, but Sabine seems to hear them all the same.

“You could come with me, when I go.”

Something lurches inside María. The way Sabine says those words, as if it’s all so very simple, only a matter of saying yes, makes anger rise like bile in her throat, bitter and hot.

“That isn’t funny,” she snaps.

Sabine eyes her levelly. “It isn’t meant to be.”

María grits her teeth. It is all well and good to play, to dream, but she has let it carry her too far. What was the point, of her imprisonment, her suffering, if only to shed it, run away, with nothing?

“Tell me,” she seethes, “is this before or after we murder my husband?”

Sabine gives her a pitying look, and María cannot stand it anymore. She rises to her feet, decides that she has stayed too long. Andrés will be waiting.

She heads toward the door, but for once, Sabine follows in her wake. “You are too young to be so discontent.”

Just as María reaches for the handle, she feels the other woman’s touch, one cold hand coming to rest on her shoulder, the other sliding around her waist. Sabine’s body, flush with hers, her smooth cheek against María’s own. The two of them momentarily tangled, bound.

Her hand comes to her stomach, finds Sabine’s fingers, splayed against her front, questing. Laying claim. So many nights, María has dreamed of this touch, hungered for it. Now, she fights the urge to lean back. To let the gray fabric swallow her.

If you see a thing you want . . .

“All you have to do is ask,” whispers the widow.

And then her hand is gone, and María feels herself being nudged forward, over the threshold, and back into the street.