“Dammit!” Flexing his fingers and squeezing his hand, he then shakes the offending limb. “When will I learn that I need to hire more scribes?”

“Here. Not like that.” I reach over the span of our desks, situated to face one another. Perhaps he will never know the great joy it brings me to have him sitting just a few feet away each and every day I am in the valley. Perhaps he already does know and yet says nothing. “Allow me,” I say, my head bowed as I take hold of his aching hand and gently massage away the cramps he gets from writing too long.

“Thank you.” He sits patiently as I tend to him, giving each long lovely finger its due turn, and take extra care with his palm and wrist. Maybe they seem like nothing out of the ordinary, but his hands are simply the most amazing I have seen. With them he can write a book, or play an entire symphony upon his fiddle. He uses them to weave the braids that are in his hair and to shake warningly at a child he is scolding. They are attached to the most wonderful arms in the world, which have held me both in joy and in grief. Nothing out of the ordinary to everyone else, but something rather special to me.

I shake myself from my reverie and relinquish his hand back to him. “We do need another scribe,” I say, but what I really want to tell him is, “I love you.”