She stared at me. “Is that why you cut yours off?”

I nodded. “The trees kept trying to comb it.”

My mother reached out to touch my hair for a moment. Then she put on a cap and gathered her things.

Captan was still waiting, but as soon as we joined him he dropped the doll at my feet and then loped off across the yard toward the path up.

—

It wasn’t quite dusk yet, though the woods were full of shadows and I was glad to have my mother close beside me, better than a knife in my hand.

But before we had gone very far, I heard Esther calling, “Wait, Mother! Wait!”

We stopped. Captan stopped.

Up the path Esther ran, panting.

“Let me,” she said. “Mother, if something happens and you’re not back soon . . . I don’t know . . . I won’t know what to do with Daddy and Samuel. Let me go instead.”

She looked very young standing there.

“But we’re already on our way,” my mother said, and I heard, in her voice, something just as young. A thread pulling her back toward a time when she was a girl on an adventure. The same thread pulling her forward. “And we’ll be back before you know it.”

But Esther was pulling on a similar thread, and she was much closer to the spool than my mother was, the thread less likely to break. “Please,” she said. “I’ll help Ellie. I promise I will. And I’ll look after her.”

As if I needed her to look after me. The idea was just plain silly. And it made me mad. But I stood still and waited for the two of them to sort themselves out. Captan did likewise, though his whole body yearned to be gone, uphill, to home.

My mother looked past Esther, toward the cabin. “You left Samuel alone.”

“I did,” Esther said, nodding. “I told him you’d be down soon.”

Which seemed to decide things.

My mother sighed. Pulled the cap from her head and handed it to Esther. Handed her the bag with the bread and jerky.

She gave me a long look. “Take care of your sister,” she said.

And I loved her more than ever.

I had wanted her with me. To meet Cate. To look into those blue eyes and realize everything I’d realized, and maybe more.

But I wanted Esther to know just as much.

As it turned out, I had plenty more to learn, too.

Chapter Forty-Nine

The climb was easy for me, but Esther had a hard time with the pace, the rocky path, the darkness as it deepened, and the way the branches batted at her face as she struggled up the deer trail.

To her credit, she didn’t say a word.

Not even when she fell. Once. Twice.