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This Much, I Can Give


II. Little Things

She managed to duck away from the chest-high stack of boxes just before they collapsed onto the tent's dirt floor with a tremendous, clattering racket. Laura sighed inwardly when she saw that several of the boxes had burst. School supplies weren't indestructible.

She righted a mostly-intact box and picked her way over to the far side of the tent to begin retrieving spilled items. It was tedious work; pencils and erasers might be small, but they were too valuable to overlook even one.

When she returned to the aisle with her first box, she set it down and saw Tom Zarek gathering spilled supplies into another box. "Mr. Zarek. I never imagined I'd see you on your hands and knees."

He stood and joined her in the middle of the tent to switch a filled box for another half-empty one. "I heard the crash. It seems like you could use a little help. For the children, of course."

Her lips quirked into a sardonic smile. "Of course. Well, I'm not going to turn the help away." She bent over to reach for another box, not realizing that her foot had come down onto a half-dozen pencils until they rolled out from underneath her weight, spoiling her balance. "Oh –"

Strong, gentle hands caught her before she could finish the nose-dive into the dirt. "Easy there."

Flustered, she shifted her weight and eased into a kneeling position. "Oh, no."

The pencils were broken.

He reached behind her to pick them up. "They can be salvaged. They'll just be shorter than usual. Better the pencils than you anyway."

"I suppose that's true." She took them and put them into a box, looking up to meet his eyes. "Thank you."

He returned her sardonic smile from a few moments before. "Of course."