Mornings are more difficult than usual. She sleeps like the dead, but only after the witching-hour. She can't help waking throughout the night, stiff and still, panicked, expecting an empty bed.
Instead she finds him, sleeping solemn and peaceful, occasionally snoring. When the moon is full, she parts curtains, stokes the fire and watches him, chin on her knees.
There was a time when it was painful to look at him this intimately — awash in moonbeams and firelight — when she felt so soiled she wasn't sure how she'd survive.
She thinks of those times and smiles. She survives because she has reason to, because she is stubborn and stronger than all of it — stronger even than he thinks she is.
Every so often she wakes to him watching her, roused by his own demons. She reaches for him and reminds him that they are more than the sum of their parts.