“Or thrice,” Esther said. Every hair on her head was in place. Her shirt was buttoned at the cuffs. She was only three years older than me, but she acted like she lived in an older world. A smarter world. One where everything followed the rules, though I knew there was no such place.

So I ate my gruel in silence, and I washed the dishes without complaint. If that was the price for heeding the flame in my chest, it was a small one.

Then I took the table scraps—which we’d all left deliberately on our plates, hungry as we were—out to Maisie and fed them to her bit by bit while she lay in the straw, the puppies again at her milk. She was as thirsty and hungry as they were, and she licked my hand over and over until every trace of the food was gone. And then she drank the milk I’d brought her, as they drank hers.

Slowly, slowly, I reached out toward the puppies, and she did not object as I touched their tiny heads, lingering over Quiet, who pressed back briefly against my hand as if to say, I’m busy now but just wait. I’ll be along soon enough.

Then I left the shed and walked up the path and, after a bit, into the woods, through a hemlock grove so full of shadows that almost nothing grew between the trunks of the old trees, the deep layer of dead needles underfoot like the soft coat of a great, sprawling animal that didn’t mind the weight of me. The feel of my boots on its brown back.

And before long I came to the spot where I did my best thinking.

It was an old place, left behind by people who’d come long before us, built a cabin, and abandoned it, so now nothing remained but a big hole lined with granite blocks and boulders, a caved-in well, and wood rotten and pocked by bugs and birds, weather and wear.

When I put my hand on those boulders, I could feel how much they missed the steady weight of a cabin above them. The idea that they had been of use.

And when I touched the soft timbers that had once stood firm against blizzards and hail, I could feel them dreaming of the time when they were stronger than storms.

That place made me sad and lonely, but when I climbed down to sit in the bowl of that ruined home, cupped in that granite hand, sheltered by the trees growing up in it, I felt strong and able, too. A mountain girl. Smart. Quick. On my way to wise.

I sometimes found old bottles there. Shards of rusted metal. Once, the head of a doll, its eyes forever open, still blue. Signs of life long gone. All of them wistful for what had been.