It was late afternoon when he asked the question that I should have seen coming and hadn't, because I'd been busy not paying attention to him, which was becoming increasingly difficult on account of his refusal to be ignorable.

  The light had gone golden. That particular shade that arrives when the sun drops below the canopy line and fires the air sideways, turning dust into fireflies and making even the ugliest patch of forest look like something a painter would ruin by trying to capture it. We were on the clearing — the one with the flat rock where he sorted his herbs, the grass cropped short by deer, the stream murmuring its way through the southern edge. He'd been at it for an hour, separating his latest collection into piles. The piles had improved. Three weeks ago, every pile was wrong. Now, one in four was right and he'd developed the habit of glancing at me before placing each specimen, reading my face for the micro-expressions I didn't know I was giving.

  "Foxglove?" He held up a stem with purple flowers.

  I looked at it. Looked away.

  He set it in the discard pile. "Foxglove," he confirmed to himself, with the tone of a man crossing an item off a list.

  The clearing was quiet. The kind of quiet that accumulates when two people have spent enough time together that silence stops being an absence and starts being a shared space. He sorted. I sat. The stream talked to the stones. Insects orbited a patch of clover.

  He stopped sorting.

  I noticed because his hands stopped moving and his hands always moved. When they weren't sorting herbs, they were stripping reeds, or stacking stones, or braiding grass into shapes that didn't resemble anything but kept his fingers occupied. Stillness, for him, was an event.

  He looked at me. Not sidelong, not from the corner of his eye, but directly. Square. With the unguarded focus of a child who hasn't yet learned that directness makes adults uncomfortable.

  "What's your name?"

  The question landed in the clearing like a bird alighting on a branch — small, precise, surprisingly heavy. He'd asked before, back in those first frantic hours when questions poured out of him like water from a cracked jug. I'd said no. He'd moved on. He was not moving on now.

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  I said nothing. It wasn't a strategy. Not even a refusal. The silence was the sound of a door that I had kept locked for so long that I'd forgotten which side the keyhole was on.

  The stream murmured. A leaf detached from a maple overhead and drifted down in the slow, spiral descent that leaves perform when there is no wind to interrupt their choreography. It landed on the flat rock, between his discard pile and his keep pile, as if undecided about its own classification.

  He started to shift. I could see the discomfort creeping in — the tightening of his jaw, the slight withdrawal of his shoulders. He was going to take the question back. Apologize, or change the subject, or fill the silence with something less dangerous.

  I looked up.

  There was a cloud overhead. A single one, white and shapeless, drifting through a sky that was otherwise empty. It moved with the unhurried patience of something that had nowhere to be and no one waiting for it.

  "Yun."

  One syllable. No family name, no title, no qualifier. I gave it the way you give a stone to a child — here, hold this, it doesn't mean anything. Except stones meant everything when you were twelve and someone trusted you with one.

  The word hung in the air for a moment. The clearing held it. The stream polished it.

  "Yun," he repeated. Testing the sound. Rolling it around in his mouth the way he'd roll a new herb between his fingers — turning it, examining it, deciding where it fit.

  He nodded. Once.

  "I'm Wei."

  I knew that. The village knew that. The fisherman who distrusted me knew that. Even the goat probably knew that. I'd heard his mother say it three weeks ago, sharp and exasperated, from across the village square while I watched from the tree line. But he offered it as an exchange — name for name, weight for weight — as if the economy of the interaction demanded balance.

  "In case you were wondering," he added.

  "I wasn't."

  He grinned. I saw it without looking — the way you see the sun moving without watching it, through the shift in shadows, the change in warmth. His grin altered the quality of the clearing's light by a fraction too small to measure and too large to ignore.

  He went back to sorting herbs. Foxglove in the discard pile. Silverleaf in the keep pile. His hands moved with their usual restless energy, but something in his posture had changed. A settling. As if a question that had been open for weeks had finally found its answer and the answer — one syllable, unadorned, offered without ceremony — was enough.

  I sat with the sound of my name in a stranger's mouth and thought: I had no reason to tell him. I had no reason not to. That was the problem.

  The cloud drifted on. By the time I looked up again, it was gone.