Quiet had wrapped his soft legs around my hand and was trying to suck on my finger.

“How in the world am I going to give you up?” I whispered.

One more thing I didn’t know how to do. One more thing I would have to do in order to learn how to do it.

—

I didn’t see Captan on my climb.

I had thought to go straight down the other side of the mountain to find Larkin and, with him, the honey we might need if Cate’s leg festered again. But I went to check on Cate first, to see how she and Esther had fared while I was gone, hoping she was enough improved that we could leave the honey to the bees.

The yard was empty when I got there, but for its dead garden and its cold firepit and those empty clothes hanging limp on the line.

I pictured Cate as I’d first found her. Her long, ratty hair. Her thick yellow nails. The candle stubs burned out on her floor. The maggots and the blowflies. Such sad company.

And I felt tired just thinking about her life alone.

But when I went into the cabin this time, it was nothing like that.

Now, on the hearth that had been black and cold, there was an orange-and-yellow fire having a spirited conversation with a birch log.

A skillet bridging the hearth bricks sizzled with jerky and what smelled like pumpkin seeds browning.

The books on the desk stood in tidy stacks, the jars on the shelves were lined up from small to large, and Captan sat by the fire, his coat smooth. No burrs at all.

Cate lay propped up in her bed, in her clean nightdress, her blanket smooth and straight, her hair in a neat braid that wound its way over her shoulder to flaunt a bow fashioned from a strip of rag.

Her hands gleamed with oil in the firelight, their nails short again.

“Doesn’t she look better?” Esther said, going to sit on the edge of the bed.

“Civilized,” Cate said, smiling tiredly. “She’s made me tidy again.”

And for a moment, I felt stupid and small as I looked around at what Esther had managed while I was gone.

But then I looked more closely at Cate lying so still and calm and clean in her bed.

Her collarbone—the cleft in it just there, at the base of her neck—looked so fragile that I thought of songbirds and mice and rabbits, but old ones. Thin ones. The ones who, in fairy tales, always had important things to say.

Except she wasn’t saying anything as she lay there and gazed up at me.

Her cheeks were too rosy. Her eyes too bright.

And there was something about her smile that worried me. It looked like a lot of work, that smile.

I laid my hand on her cheek.