She came back across the yard at a skip, which was not the word most people would have chosen for someone with blood drying on both hands and forearms, but it was the right one.
The particular lightness of her movement toward him, now that the world had decided to behave itself again, was something he had noticed and shrugged away without meaning to. It was not a gait she ever used in the opposite direction.
She reached him and had her hands on his face before he had quite finished adjusting for her arrival.
"I'm fine," he said.
"I know," she said. "I'm just looking."
She checked his jaw, tilted his head left and then right, and ran through the check-up she always ran.
Then her hands left his face and went to his collar, then to his jacket, and stopped at the left hip, where the shotgun graze had hit.
Her expression did not change.
"That is fine?"
"It's not serious," he said.
"I'll decide that," she said.
