“The corncrake,” he said, so low I barely heard him. It sounded again, like a raspy quack, but I knew how happy he was to hear it and to be able to name it.

Now, as I walked toward Sage’s, I listened to the click of crickets at the woods’ edge, the slight whisper of trees, the sounds of the mountain, as if there were another frequency to hear and to be moved by. I wondered if one day I would have that same wrenching longing for this place that my father had for the sounds he’d heard growing up.

I hadn’t seen Sage since she walked us to Wanamaker’s glass doors for the bus. Her lie still hung between us, but I needed and missed her. I started to run toward her house. At the top of her driveway a pile of bikes had been dropped on the ground. A group of boys were playing basketball outside with Sage’s brothers. The boys barely noticed me as I walked through their game to the back door. Grady and Charlotte were inside, watching TV.

“Hey, Libby—stranger.” Charlotte stood and gave me a hug with one arm, the other holding her cigarette away from me.

“Hi, Mrs. Adams. Hi, Dr. Adams.”

Grady glanced up. “Hey there, Libby.” He turned back to the television. The news was on: Charles and Diana and the upcoming royal wedding at the end of July.

“Bless her,” said Charlotte, gesturing at Diana on the television, all bashful, looking at the camera from under her hair. “So sweet. But him . . . Prince or no prince, he’s got a face only a mother could love.”

It was the kind of thing I’d have repeated to my father. He loved to hear Charlotte’s irreverence and her Southern sayings. “I’m as full as a tick,” she’d say, leaning back after a dinner she’d hardly touched, or “She’s so stuck-up she’d drown in a rainstorm,” turns of phrase he thought weren’t that different from the Irish—“He’s enough neck for two heads.” And he loved anything said against the British monarchy. When talking about the royal family, he referred to them as “a bad clique,” which made me and Marie laugh, the monarchy reduced to a petty in-group.

“I feel like we haven’t seen you in so long,” Charlotte said. “Where’ve you been all this summer?”

I was about to say “Oh, I saw Dr. Adams the other night,” but something stopped me, and I didn’t want to ask Grady about the deer either. He was sitting there, focused on the TV, not looking at me. Sage hadn’t mentioned it on the phone either. Maybe he didn’t want them to know he’d killed something beautiful, or that he had been so rattled by it.

“Sage is in her room,” Charlotte said. “Go on ahead down.”