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conscience was clear. If she wanted to think I was doing her a favor, that was up to her. “All right, Heather. If you’re really sure you want to stay, I’ll be more than happy to have you here. I have to admit that the thought of you leaving was pretty hard. But I had to—you know.”
    She reached over and touched my arm. “Yes. Thank you for being honest. And for letting me stay.”
    â€œSure. Look, it’s getting late, and we’ve got to get up by dawn. Let’s get some rest.”
    â€œOkay.” She paused. “Neil, were you ever married?”
    I blinked at the abrupt change of subject. “Once, for a couple of years, when I was twenty-one. It ended in divorce. Why?”
    She turned her head half away from me as if she didn’t want me to see her face. “I was just wondering why you were still … sleeping on the couch instead of … with me.”
    The evening was rapidly taking on a feeling of unreality for me. I hadn’t felt this strangely nervous since my first date in high school, and I opened my mouth twice before I got any words to come out. “I didn’t want to impose on you.” Damn, that sounded stupid! I tried again. “I mean, it wouldn’t be fair for me to take advantage of you like that. You might just do it because you felt you owed it to me. I don’t want it that way. I figured that if you ever wanted me like that you’d let me know somehow.”
    She nodded, her face still averted, and swallowed. “Neil … will you come to bed with me?”
    I looked at her, my eyes sweeping her body, and for the first time I noticed that her hands were trembling. And suddenly I realized that she was not just offering an altruistic favor to a lonely hermit. In many ways Heather was an outcast, too, and she needed this as much as I did.
    Never having been the romantic type, I didn’t know the right words to say. So, instead, I blew out the candles, took Heather by the arm, and led her to the bedroom.
    Afterwards she fell asleep next to me, one arm across my chest with her hand resting against my good right cheek. I watched the moonlight throwing shadows on the bedroom wall for a few minutes longer before drifting off myself, and I slept more restfully that night than I had in months.
    The weeks went by, spring turning into summer with astonishing speed. Heather continued to take on a good deal of the day-to-day work of running our cabin, leaving me free to hunt, trap, and carry out repairs and maintenance that I’d been putting off for lack of time. We had our share of disagreements and misunderstandings, but as we got to know each other’s moods and thoughts we began to mesh together, to the point where it sometimes seemed to me that we were becoming two parts of a single, well-oiled machine. Within the first four months I felt I knew this woman better than I’d known anyone else in my entire life. And, although I refused to use the word even to myself, I was quickly learning to love her.
    And yet, there was something about Heather that bothered me, something so subtle that it was a long time before I could even put my finger on it. It wasn’t anything big, and it didn’t happen with any regularity, but sometimes Heather just seemed to know too much about what was going on around her.
    I brooded about it off and on for several weeks, trying to remember everything Heather had ever said about her blindness. From her explanation I assumed her eyes and optic nerves were still healthy, that only the sight center of her brain had been affected, and for a while I wondered if her blindness was either incomplete or possibly intermittent. But neither explanation was satisfactory: if she was blind enough that she couldn’t make out my face, she was too blind for any practical purpose; and if she occasionally regained her vision, her first reaction to my appearance would have been impossible for me to miss.