“Your father left all this,” I said.

Larkin sighed a sigh too big for a boy, even one like Larkin. “He did.”

Some of the cut wood had warped from years of cold and hot and the steam from Cate’s bath, but I knew that wood was both forgiving and eager to please.

“You’ll make the doctor’s mandolin here,” I said.

Larkin nodded. “And another for you, too, if you want.”

Which I did, of course.

“Will you teach me how to carve things?” I said.

He ducked his head. “Anyone could do that.”

“No, anyone could not. And I’m pretty sure I won’t be any good at it. But I’d like to try.”

Which was something I could do. So I would.

—

Larkin’s mother had been so happy and relieved to have him back and likely to stay, at least for a while, that she’d made some promises and vowed to keep them.

“When I told her I was going to try to make mandolins like my daddy did, she started to cry,” he said as we made up Cate’s bed in clean sheets.

I didn’t blame her one bit for that. “Maybe now she won’t mind you learning to read or how to make a poultice.”

“I just hope I remember enough from watching my father,” he said as he scooped cold ashes from the hearth. “Otherwise, there’s no one to teach me how to make a mandolin.”

“You’ll remember,” I said. “And you’ll learn as you go.”

“You sound like Cate,” he said.

“And my father.”

“And mine, too,” Larkin said, while his father’s tools watched us, their heavy, black hearts beating a little more quickly at the idea that they would soon be put to use again.

Chapter Seventy-Three

As I helped my mother grind corn the next day, she said, “I’ve changed my mind, Ellie.”

I thought she was talking about making corn bread instead of corn cakes, or when it would be best to help Cate move back up-mountain, or almost anything except what she said next.

She gave me a small, sad smile. “Quiet can stay.”

I let out a breath I’d been holding for a long time. Since even before Quiet had been born. “And the others?”

She turned back to her work. “We’ll see.”

And I knew what she meant. If my father got well enough, fast enough, to manage a passel of dogs. To do without Mr. Anderson’s milk cow.

We couldn’t know any of those things. Not yet.

But there were some things I did know.