I looked at her for a long moment.

“Eat it while it’s hot,” she said, turning to add more venison to the skillet.

I did that. It took me about one minute. I could have eaten as much again with no trouble at all.

When she turned back and saw my empty plate, she stood still. Looked at my face. Back at the plate.

“Will you stop all that business about your father, please?” she said in a voice not much bigger than a whisper.

I put down my mug. “Is that why you gave me such a good breakfast? So I would stop trying to wake Daddy?”

She sighed. “Have you ever known me to bribe my children, Ellie?”

“No.”

“Then no, that’s not why I gave you a good breakfast.” She sat down next to me. “I know you mean well, but you’re not helping. You’re making things worse. Getting Samuel’s hopes up. Playing a wild game with your father when Esther is terrified that you’ll hurt him.”

Again. She didn’t say it, but I heard it anyway.

“And you think that, too?”

She looked at me intently. “I don’t know. I want him to wake up. I want him to get well. Of course I do. And I almost think you might be right to do what you’re doing. Almost. But I don’t.”

I was so sorry. I was so sad. But I had nothing to say to that except, “Doing something is more right than doing nothing.”

I thought she might cry.

“And what if you do wake him up and he’s still not well?”

I didn’t know what she meant. “But there’s nothing else wrong with him, except he won’t wake up.” It sounded more like a question than I’d intended.

“Nothing that we know of. But he wouldn’t still be sleeping if he weren’t hurt, Ellie.”

I considered what she was saying. I pictured my father . . . changed. I pictured him unlike the father I’d known. And my heart hurt in a brand-new way.

“Maybe he’ll be fine,” I said, and I heard, in my voice, another thing about hope.

She nodded. “Maybe he will. But jarring him and shocking him might be the worst thing for him. Can you not see that?”

I remembered what had happened when I’d fed him my brew. “He rolled his eyes,” I said, realizing, as I did, that I would now have to tell her about the other thing I’d done.

Chapter Thirty-Three

My mother sat up straighter. “What do you mean?”

“Yesterday,” I said, though it felt like long ago. “I fed him some”—I couldn’t say brew since it made me sound like a witch—“some broth. And after that his eyes rolled behind their lids.”