I kept her hand in mine, rubbing her skin to keep the circulation going.

The boy sat in the corner. He did not say a word. He just watched me with these huge, terrified blue eyes.

By three in the morning, Martha’s breathing slowed. The gray color in her cheeks turned back to a faint, dry pink.

She opened her eyes and looked at me.

“You’re a good girl, Clara,” she whispered.

I left before dawn. The temperature had started to rise, and the ice was turning to slush.

I walked back down the hill. Squeak, slide, squeak.

I looked at Arthur.

He was standing behind his table of tomatoes, his faded cap still in his hands.

He has a small, faint scar right above his left eyebrow. It is shaped like a tiny crescent moon.

My mind did a strange, sudden back-flip.

I remembered that freezing living room. I remembered the thin boy in the three coats.

He had a small cut on his forehead from where he had tripped over a firewood log in the dark. I had cleaned it with an alcohol wipe from my pocket.

“Arthur?” I whispered.

He gave a small, dry nod.

“My mother was crying in the kitchen that night,” he said. His voice was very quiet now. The busy farmers market seemed to fade away around us.

“We had no phone. The heat was gone. We genuinely thought she was going to die in that room.”

He looked down at his tomato crates.

“We heard the squeaking first,” he said. “We thought it was the wind. But then you came through the door. You had ice frozen to your eyelashes.”

He wiped his hands on his apron again. It was a nervous habit, I realized.

“I told myself that night,” he said, “that if I ever grew up and became a man, and if I ever saw you again, I would make sure you never wanted for anything. Even if it was just tomatoes.”

I stood there. My throat felt very tight, like I had swallowed a dry piece of bread.

“Martha was your grandmother?” I asked.

“She was,” Arthur said. “She lived another nine years after that night. She got to see me graduate high school. She got to see me buy my first acre of land.”

He reached out and picked up my bag of tomatoes. He set it firmly in my hands.

“Your money is no good here, Clara,” he said. He smiled, but it was a sad, quiet sort of smile. “It never will be.”

I looked down at the creased five-dollar bill in my hand.

The blue ink stain seemed so small now. So unimportant.

I had spent three years being angry at this man. I had spent three years thinking he was looking down on me, or that he saw me as some poor, old retired lady who needed a handout.

But he wasn’t looking down on me at all.