I nodded. “I know. But hearing Esther afraid like that . . . I thought he would come back. To protect her.”

Samuel thought about that. “Did he?”

I realized I didn’t know the answer, though surely Esther and my mother would have told me if there’d been any change. Surely, they would have greeted me with such news.

“Let’s go find out,” I said.

I didn’t want Samuel to get his hopes up, but I was pretty sure that amazing things happened all the time, partly because someone hoped they would.

—

Maisie was glad to have Quiet back. I didn’t tell her how badly I had wanted to keep him. To take him back up the mountain to a place where he would be safe. I knew he was too young to leave his mother. And I knew I could not be the kind of mother he needed right now. But I was tempted to do as Samuel had done.

“Here he is,” I said as I laid Quiet in the nest again. “Safe and sound.”

Maisie licked him and pushed him around with her nose until she was sure he was all right, and then she looked up at me sternly, as if to say Don’t let that happen again.

I didn’t want to think about the look she would give me when Mr. Anderson came in a few weeks to take Quiet and all of her babies for his own.

Chapter Twenty-Six

“Samuel wouldn’t tell us where he was,” Esther said when I went into the cabin and found my mother flouring the fish for frying while my sister cut the whiskers off some wilted carrots from the root cellar.

I pictured Samuel huddled in the straw with Quiet in his arms, his face hot with sleep and crying. And I pictured Cate as well; remembered how it had felt to feed her bits of rabbit, how she had opened her mouth and waited for each bite like a child. And my father, lying so still in his bed. All of them waiting for me to do something.

“He was in the cowshed,” I said.

“What was he doing in there?” my mother said.

I didn’t tell her about Quiet. “He fell asleep.”

Samuel came out of my father’s room and joined us in the kitchen. “He’s just the same,” he whispered to me. To Esther, he said, “I’m hungry.”

“You’ll have supper in a couple of hours.”

“But I had no lunch.”

“Which is your own fault, for disappearing like you did. You worried Mother, and me, too.”

“But I’m hungry, Esther!”

“Oh, then sit down,” my sister said, cutting him a wedge of corn bread.

She put it on a plate for him, the plate on the table. But when she saw me cutting some bread for myself, she snatched the pan away.