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Off-limits.

Only he had still felt desire for Cindy today. It had taken willpower - not a lot, but some - to keep from trying to reopen that closed door.

It didn't matter. Sylvie was coming down the stairs and he'd have to deal with her now whether she was in a daughter role in his unconscious mind or not. Painfully, slowly, he rose to a sitting position.

She emerged from the shadow of the entryway into the light slanting in from the streetlamp. Her hair hung straight and wet, with just a hint of curl in it where a few strands had dried. She had apparently decided against the bathrobe he bought for her - she was back in the same faded blue dress. But in this light, cleaned up, the hair no longer stringing across her face, she was almost pretty in a forlorn, dreamy sort of way.

"You're still awake?" she asked softly.

"Don't you mean still alive?" he asked.

"What?" she said. "I just thought I heard you upstairs when I was showering. Did you want something?"

"You were gone when I got back with dinner," he said. "Nuggets from Chick-Fil-A. I called through the house but you didn't answer so what can I say. We don't have a fridge or a microwave and they're nasty when they're cold. So I ate them."

"That's OK."

No, it wasn't OK. That wasn't what he meant to say to her at all. He was going to chew her out about her carelessness. It was the headache. He couldn't think straight.

He reached down and held out the pillow. Not that she could see it in the dark.

"What is it?" she asked.

"Nothing much. Just my blood."

"You hurt yourself?"

"No," said Don. "You hurt me. By moving my workbench right up against my cot."

"No," she murmured.

"Smacked my head on it when I sat down to take off my socks. Almost knocked me out."

"You should go to the hospital."

"No, I've decided to die at home," he said nastily.

"Concussions can be dangerous."

"So why didn't you think of that when you moved things around down here? I thought I asked you not to touch my tools."

"I didn't," she said.

"Who else, the tooth fairy?" he asked. "Come on, you can't move the workbench halfway across the room and then forget you did it. It's heavy."

"I didn't move your workbench," she said. "I'm sorry you were hurt."

She turned abruptly and left, pattering up the stairs.

He had no sympathy for her. Imagine denying it. How stupid did she think he was?

Couldn't deal with it now. Thinking about her only made him angry, and that made his head hurt worse, and he didn't need that. Had to sleep this off so he could get to work the next morning.

At the top of the stairs, Sylvie slapped the newel post. Without a sound she formed words and spoke them. "Stupid, nasty... what are you doing? What are you thinking of?"

She walked into the room Don Lark had stripped and opened up. "How many times do I have to tell you, he's not hurting you?"

She strode to a bare timber, a thick vertical post, one of the ancient bones of the house, and pressed her head against it. "No more of this. No more hurting him. Ever." The house seemed to her like a little child going to the doctor. Lashing out in terror of the needle. You couldn't get angry, you just had to explain. "Don't you see he's going to make you whole again? It hurts now, but soon he'll make you stronger. You have to trust me."

Chapter 13 Daughters

Tearing out walls, ripping up carpets, stripping lath and plaster off the old timbers, those were the dramatic changes, requiring hard labor and little skill. But those jobs were soon done, for the moment at least, for that first upstairs room. Don paid to have the junkpile hauled away; then he settled in to the routine of turning that upstairs room back into the graceful, comforting space it was meant to be.

He went back and forth over whether to add another bathroom upstairs. Now was the time to do it, or at least to rough it in between the back bedroom and the front one. On the one hand, plumbing it would be expensive and difficult, since no pipes ran to that region of the house. And it would cut into the nice proportions of one room or the other - or both, if he made it into a huge, two-window bathroom. So his inclination was to leave