Small Things Like These

by Claire Keegan

but women, with their canny intuitions, were so much deeper: they could predict what was to come long before it came, dream it overnight, and read your mind.

Eileen was fast asleep, and for a while he watched over her, feeling the need of her, letting his gaze idle over her bare shoulder, her open, sleeping hands, the soot-black

In an earlier time, it could have been his own mother he was saving – if saving was what this could be called.