On his deathbed, he would remember this image: Nena’s long plaits gleaming in the firelight and shifting over the back of her sweat-stained white shirt—his shirt, and his trousers—as she turned to shoot him a look over her shoulder. Though he feared the claws of the darkness beyond the jacal, there was a boldness in her stance and in her firm grip on the machete. She would protect him. She was just as capable of watching his back as he was hers.
