“Not with your father’s last mandolin!” I gasped, remembering what his mother had said.

“Not that,” Cate said in a small voice. “Not for me.”

Larkin shook his head. “With my first one. Though I have yet to make it.”

The doctor cleared his throat and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “He doesn’t know how to make one yet. And I don’t know how to play one yet. So we both have some work to do.”

Yet. Another word I’d hold on to.

And I promised myself, right then and there, in that moment that will always be, for me, an else worth trying, that I would never again make up my mind about anything too quickly. Not ever again.

Including doctors.

Chapter Seventy-Two

I didn’t blame Esther for sending Larkin in search of better help than I could give. Or better than she had thought I could give.

Cate had scared us all with her sad goodbye on the day she’d come to stay with us.

But, had I not been so scared, maybe I would not have been what she needed me to be.

No more lullabies, I had said.

Not for my father.

And not for me.

Until they were what we needed most.

—

Nor did I blame Larkin, for leaving as he had.

He’d done a brave thing, to face his sad and angry mother. To go to town despite her wrath. To make the long trip, ride in a rubbish truck, sleep under a bridge. All the while thinking that Cate might be leaving him, as his father had, though more slowly.

—

And I didn’t blame myself, either, for being in the way when that tree fell. As Cate had said, I’d been trying to help, which was never a bad thing.

I’d been in the way quite a lot since then.

Saving Quiet.

Helping Larkin treat his black eye, which the doctor had said was healing nicely, though he had his doubts about a medicine made from potato.

Trying to wake my father, bit by bit.

Looking after Cate.

Picking up that lonely mandolin and handing it to my lonely mother.

—

I knew a thing or two about loneliness.

And so did Larkin, who climbed the mountain with me on the fourth day after my father woke up, to get Cate’s cabin ready for her again.

“Does she have a broom?” I asked when we got there and found the floor littered with dead flies.

“Of course. In the shed behind the cabin.”

He led me around there, opened the door.

I’d expected a washtub. And, of course, a broom.

But I hadn’t expected a great pile of wood in chunks too big for a hearth. Or walls and rafters hung with wood cut rough and raw but clearly meant to be mandolins someday. Necks and bodies. Coiled strings hung from nails. A bowl of turning keys.