“You’ll be sorry. I know more about it than you do.”

“Oh, now, look,” my mother said impatiently. “This is easy. My daughter is a kid. Your son is a kid. They are kids on a mountain that has very few kids. Is it really such a terrible thing that your son knows how to wash a bedsheet? That he has a friend in my Ellie, here?”

I liked that, but Larkin’s mother didn’t, and she said so.

“Friends now, and I hope that’s all they’ll be. But when things get better in town, you’ll all go back again. And she won’t be taking Larkin with her.” She looked at me. “So don’t think you will.”

I felt myself pink up.

Larkin looked like he had swallowed a bug.

His mother glared back at mine. “We know what we need to know, and we have what we need to have.” She turned and headed toward the path up-mountain. “Come on now, Larkin.”

Larkin sighed. “I’m sorry,” he said yet again.

“I’ll come up tomorrow,” I said softly.

Then I realized what I’d done.

“I’ll come up tomorrow,” I called after him—loud and clear—as he followed his mother out of the yard.

But only his mother looked back.

I didn’t like what I saw on her face.

And when we went inside the cabin again, I locked the door behind us.

Chapter Forty-Five

“Now, tell me what just happened,” my mother said when we were back in the kitchen.

Esther and Samuel sat waiting for us, clearly eager to know more about Larkin and his mother and Cate.

It had been a long time since Esther, especially, had seemed interested in anything I had to say.

Samuel was most curious—and alarmed—about the maggots. “What’s a maggot?” he said, his eyes big. “And, Ellie, what did you mean, they eat dead flesh? Do they eat alive flesh, too? How big are they? Do they eat boys? Have you ever seen a maggot?”

“Oh, for pity’s sake,” Esther said, looking a little green around the gills. “A maggot is just a worm, Samuel. About as big as an oat.”

“But how can a worm as big as an oat eat a boy?”

“Hush now,” my mother said. “Go on, Ellie.”

So I told them the story of what I’d done over the days since Quiet’s birth.

It took me a long time.

Samuel interrupted to ask why Cate had saved the tick from Captan’s ear.

The rest they listened to in silence.

I felt almost as good telling it as I had felt living it.

“So that poor woman lost her husband,” my mother said, clearing her throat. “And that poor boy lost his father.”

Esther got up from the table and went to the window.