Sadako smoothed her hands over her knees, worrying the fabric of her skirt as she and Arrietty looked at each other over the living room coffee table. She wasn't nervous, exactly - at her age, there was little she was afraid of - but there was a kind of fierceness in Arrietty's bearing now that made one consider one's words. The girl's dark eyes snapped and her hair was fluffed like an angry cat's or a mother hen's. Sadako didn't want to be misunderstood.

Upstairs, she heard the creak of a window sliding open. That Sho - he'd gotten out of bed. Sadako realized that the French doors, still open, were directly beneath Sho's window. Well, no matter.

"Listen, Arrietty, I know you haven't known me for very long, but I have a feeling that you're a trustworthy person, and after all these years I've learned to trust my feelings."

Sadako paused. Arrietty wasn't sure what was wanted of her, but she nodded and tried to look like she understood; at least Sadako wasn't calling her Harriet any more. This seemed to work, as Sadako brightened and went on. "I know you're happy to be around Sho out of the goodness of your heart, but I've just recently - ehm, been authorized to hire a companion for him until he recovers fully, and I would like it to be you."

Arrietty stared. "You want to pay me? For being friends with Sho?"

"Not for being friends with Sho," Sadako said quickly. "But for staying here with him. With me. In this house. At least until school starts."

Arrietty found that she was tearing up. She'd thought that she was going to be sent away after all, in spite of what Sadako had said to calm Sho down. It wouldn't be the first time she'd been punished for being friends with Sho; it wouldn't be the first time she'd had to suffer not for doing wrong, but for making things inconvenient for the people around her. "That's too good to be true."

Sadako, too, was dabbing at her eyes. "Now, now, sometimes good things do happen, you know. Not often, maybe, but sometimes! Let this be one of those times, and maybe we can all be happy for a little while, hm?"

Everybody except her parents and Spiller. But Arrietty accepted those negatives quickly. They merely meant that Sadako's offer was real; there were always negatives to make you pay for the good in any situation. Last time, it had been Arrietty and Sho who had taken the brunt of that. Let someone else be unhappy this time.

"And one more thing, Arrietty," Sadako added with embarassment. "It's time to do something I've been putting off for decades. I promise we'll clean up that room for you."

X X X

Sadako thought it would be better to tell Sho the good news in a day or two, after he'd had time to recover. Arrietty agreed readily as she was pretty sure that Sho had eavesdropped and knew everything anyway. She hugged the comfort of that thought to hersef; the thought that she wouldn't have to go, at least not for a few weeks yet. Borrowers did not look farther ahead than that. There was no point. It was unnecessary; it was unhelpful; everything could change in that amount of time. A few weeks was an eternity.

They made Sho stay in bed for the rest of the day; Sadako because she was worried about him, Arrietty partly because she worried and partly because she was mad at what he'd done to himself, and Haru because she didn't want him underfoot while she cleaned up (and looked for more little people, though she'd had no luck with that thus far).

So he was forced to read and recover while Arrietty hung up her clothes and Sadako poked through the spare room and said things like donate and garage sale, and then Arrietty listened while he read out loud. He offered to read in Italian - it turned out he could read in one or two other languages - but Arrietty didn't see the point when she wouldn't understand. After he got bored of reading she brought up the game they had bought, and they played a few rounds and argued about the rules. He asked more about living under the house, and Arrietty told him about rats and cockaroaches in a whisper; his eyes went wide and he whispered back, so that Sadako smiled and pretended not to be there every time she passed his open door, though she popped in to scold when Sho got out of bed - over Arrietty's protests - to look at something on the wallpaper by the dollhouse. He jumped when Sadako spoke and crawled obediently back into bed.

How nice, Sadako thought, that he had someone to share secrets with at last.

Haru served dinner in his room, since Sadako wouldn't let him get up, and Arrietty ate with him because he fussed when she got up to go downstairs, so Haru had to serve her too and then grumbled about climbing up the stairs with an extra tray. But she did it.

Sho slept through the night. Arrietty slept lightly, listening for any disturbances, but there was nothing. Once, on her way back from the bathroom, she slipped into his room and stood by the door to listen to his breathing. Everything was dark except for the starlight, and she could see one of his hands relaxed across the cover, rounds spots of pale that were his knuckles, and the soft pale curve of his cheek against the dark indistinctness of his hair. His breathing was even; peaceful. He was fine.

X X X

She woke early, earlier than anyone else in the house. The sky out her window was gray with a kiss of pink; the pink was leaking in under the sills, licking the edges of the square of plywood in the broken pane. Birdsongs were starting up, as though the birds were rehearsing for the day. She lay on the cot for a moment, thinking that... she was back home, in her family's dugout burrow. For a moment she thought the touch of the wind in the trees was the rustle of her thistledown mattress, the pit-pit-pit of dew dripping from the eaves was her mother stirring a pot in the kitchen.

She pushed herself up, slowly, sitting back on her haunches, leaving the blankets to bunch around her feet and keep them warm. Her window was open a crack, the way she'd left it. The gray light outside showed her where all the junk in the room was, though dimly; she felt quite safe in dancing through to the door and padding over to check on Sho.

His window was down all the way, but the same rose-tinged grey light filtered through over everything. She smiled at the checker pieces helter-skelter all over the nightstand. What fun that had been.

The sun glinted through the trees in the garden, throwing red and pink and yellow everywhere; a tissue box, in particular, glowed, suffused with gold. Arrietty touched the tissue. It felt soft under her fingers, feathery. She remembered when it had been rough against her skin, wood fibers and pulp and clearish patches and opaque blobs. Now it was all an indistinct softness, and the pattern on the box was almost as fine as the lines in her skin.

She looked up, and there he was, just as he'd been that first night; only now the sun was throwing a gold haze over his hair, his skin, the reflections in his eyes. And she didn't have to be ashamed of being Seen.

"Morning." He smiled and stretched out a hand. She came around the table to touch his fingertips.

"Morning. How you feeling?"

"Better." He sat up slowly. "For a minute, I thought..."

"Hm?"

"Well, I thought I'd gone back in time." He tilted his head, embarrassed. "That it was the first time I'd seen you - really seen you, not just a glimpse - but it was morning instead of night and I thought maybe I hadn't done anything stupid so you wouldn't have to leave and then... well."

"I'm not going anywhere for a while."

"I know." He grinned. "I heard you and Sadako talking."

"Aw, you rat." But she wasn't surprised. She'd heard the window too. She ruffled his hair. "Are you hungry?"

His answer was interrupted by a knock downstairs. The front door, Arrietty thought. She held up a finger. Sho nodded and watched as she slipped out of the room and cocked his head to listen to the whispers of her footsteps as she crept down the stairwell. She'd lost none of her animal grace.

She stopped just short of the front landing and peered around the corner in time to see a sleepy, yawning Haru shuffle to the front door and open it. Haru had her day clothes on and was tying her apron strings as though she'd been putting it on on the way over from her apartment by the garage, but she obviously hadn't quite woken up yet.

"Good mor-YAWN-ning, how can I help y- AIIIIIIIIIIIIIII!"

All Arrietty's hairs stood up at the sound of Haru's ear-piercing shriek. The door slammed so hard that the frame must have bent - Sissy would have been proud. Arrietty instinctively flattened herself against the landing wall as Haru went shrieking below her into the kitchen.

"That is IT! I have HAD IT with this house! First vermin then sick kids then the boss always on that brat's side then wild things and - and -"

Sadako appeared from the direction of her room in her bathrobe and slippers. She groped for a wall switch with a sleepy hand; Arrietty, seeing her, felt safe enough to come down. "My goodness, whatever's the matter?"

"I'm not sure," Arrietty stammered, but she had her suspicions, and edged to the front door. She didn't want Sadako to have a heart attack too.

Haru beat her to it, charging back from the laundry room with a basket of damp clothes - hers - that she had put in the washing machine last night. Arrietty shrank back against the wall lest she be dripped on or bludgeoned to death, and watched Haru stagger down over the shoes-off area step.

"I quit!" Haru announced and, forgetting herself, opened the front door again. "AIIIIIIII!"

She slammed it - again - and went scurrying out toward the living room, bumping Arrietty and Sadako aside. They heard a French door open and shut, and the fainter sound of Haru's car trunk opening and closing, and then the put-put-put of her car as she roared away.

Sho was hanging over the railing by now. Even in the faint light of dawn, he looked better than he had yesterday. His skin was flushed with excitement. "What happened? Did Haru just give notice?"

"I - I think so," said a baffled Sadako. "I'll call her. She'll come back once she calms down. But I can't imagine why -"

Arrietty rather thought Haru had enjoyed making a scene and was in fact quite likely to come back, eventually, so she could make another. No matter. She marched down the shoes-off area and opened the door. There, as she'd suspected, stood Spiller, in all his nut-brown fuzzy glory. He blinked silently. Over his shoulder she saw a chunky farm horse that looked familiar, one she'd seen in a pasture perhaps. He was eating Sadako's pansies.

"That's what Ma did too," Sissy said, popping out from behind him. Her fair hair was half in, half out of a frizzy ponytail. "Only she didn't say she was quitting. You can't quit being a mom."

So it is touch that does it, Arrietty thought frantically. She wondered what kind of dream Spiller had had.