He trusts her. He continues to work silently over blueprints scattered across the living room rug as she presses her lotion-chilled fingers into the welts, all the angry red patches on his back. She works to cover all the places his skin has betrayed him.

His body seems, in all its solidity, horribly frail. He is an unbalanced chemical equation tipping forward on his haunches, always threatening to tumble away from her. Away and down into the dark valleys where she can't find a path to follow.

She tries to hold on with her slippery hands. Her palms linger on his shoulders, much longer than needed to set the medicine into his skin.

She resists the urge to shake him roughly, shake him back into the man he was.

He trusts her not to do this, not to stomp and wail and disrupt the little bit of foothold he has left. He trusts her to hold on, keep an anchor, keep him steady. He trusts her to trust that he will come back.