And then I called out, “Thank you!” and “Whoever you are, thank you!” before I turned and went back toward the cabin again.

—

My church shoes weren’t big enough to hide more than the lamb and the snowdrop, so I had long since dusted off a high shelf in the woodshed and lined the carvings up at the back of it, where no one could see them without standing on a stool.

I couldn’t see them either as I traveled through my days, but I knew they were there, the way I knew the sun was in the sky. And I knew that the friend I had not yet met was close by, too.

If Maisie suddenly stood at attention and barked at the woods, I figured I was being watched, but all I ever saw was a shadow of a shadow. If she barked in the night, I lay in bed and thought about what I might find the next day when I searched the cowshed, the woodshed, the root cellar, the trail through the woods. All the places that anchored my days like the points of a compass.

I thought of those little gifts as clues because they told me things about the carver and myself, too. Whoever had made them was sweet and clever. And I was someone who noticed things that others missed. There was a reason I was the one who found the little creatures before anyone else did. Most eyes would have passed right over a little wooden treasure tucked among the leaves at the edge of the brook. But not mine.

And there was another clue, too. The most important one. Those gifts had been meant for me. I was sure of it. Which meant that whoever was making them knew me and understood that I was the kind of girl who would love finding them tucked in the corners of my world, all of them carved from good hardwood, all just short of alive: a milk cow with one ear up and one ear down; a hunchbacked inchworm; an acorn with a tiny feather in its cap; a chickadee as round and fat as a plum.

And then, soon after my father’s accident, I found another one.

This time, it was a carving of me.

I found it perched on the stump of the tree that had nearly killed him.

And I wondered whether there had been a witness to what had happened on that terrible day.

Whether I was not the only one who knew the truth of it.

Chapter Six

The months after my father’s accident were every kind of dark and cold, but on the morning of Quiet’s birth I felt three kinds of light, three kinds of warmth: from spring itself, from Quiet, and from the flame growing inside me.

But my mother still seemed as cold and dark as the January day when he’d been hurt.