I left her to her work.

Went into my father’s room.

Found Esther in the rocking chair alongside his bed, reading aloud from the book in her lap.

Found Samuel sitting on the floor in the corner by the window, playing with a wooden top. Setting it on its pointed foot. Pulling the string to send it into a wobbly spin.

He looked up at me. Said, “Hi, Ellie.” Slid under the bed to fetch his toy.

While I stood in the doorway, barely breathing, and looked at my father’s thin, pale face.

And he looked calmly back at me.

Chapter Thirty-Five

I wasn’t the one to call out for my mother to see that Daddy had awakened.

I was the one who went quietly to his bed, sat down on the edge of it, took his face in my hands, and cried the tears I’d been saving.

Esther looked up from her book and must have thought he’d died.

“Oh no!” she said at the sound of my sobbing. “Mother! Come quick!”

Which brought Samuel out from under the bed, pushing up alongside me to see what was going on. “Did you bring another snake, Ellie?”

And then my mother arrived like a summer storm in time to see my father’s eyes, still open.

I didn’t see her fall to her knees, though I heard her cry out.

I didn’t see Esther’s face when she realized that our father had not died after all, that he had come back to us. But I felt her put her arms around me from behind, so she was holding both me and him, too, and then my mother scrambled across the bed to kneel beside him, crying like a child, while Samuel said, “You’re supposed to cry when you’re sad, Mother.”

I slipped aside so Esther could cling to his arm, smiling and crying, and Samuel could climb onto the bed and bounce into the happy fray like a puppy.

Through all of it, my father lay quietly.

“He might need us to calm down a little,” I said, sounding a lot older than I was.

Esther turned to look at me and I thought she’d be angry, but she wasn’t.

She let go of my father’s arm, and she came to me all in a rush and hugged me like she hadn’t hugged me since before the accident, back when she still loved me.

“Oh, Ellie,” she whispered. “You were right. You were right.”

But as I watched my father’s slack face, I was afraid that my mother had been right, too.

He hadn’t said a word. Hadn’t smiled. And there was no light in those open eyes.

My mother pulled back from him, smiling, wiping the tears from her cheeks, and gave a long sigh. “You scared me,” she said to him.

“Ellie put a snake in your bed,” Samuel said.