“My mother thought . . . well, she didn’t see how my grandmother, who had so much learning and had been a nurse and lived with a doctor for all those years, could be so . . . useless.”

I thought about Esther. How much she needed someone to blame for what had happened to our father. I looked around the little cabin. “And Cate ended up here, by herself?”

Larkin nodded. “It was just awful after my daddy died. My mother was like a wild woman.” He shook his head. “Three years it’s been, and she’s still not right.”

I thought about that—how Larkin had lost his father just weeks before he stood in the trees and watched us come to live on the mountain. Watched our pitiful start. Listened to Samuel bleating like a lamb in the cold, gray time before the wilderness greened again.

“You carved that little lamb for Samuel when your father had just died,” I said, wanting to touch his wonderful hair, his battered face.

“I did,” he said. “But for me as much as him.”

“And treasures for her, too,” I said, nodding at the tiny fawn on the windowsill. The little squirrel. The perfect mouse.

When he looked at Cate, his face softened. “I think about how my grandmother lived before she came to us. In a fine, big house in town. And now . . .” He looked around the sad little cabin. “But she won’t leave me.”

I looked at his black eye. The sadness in it. “And your own mother doesn’t want you coming up here?”

He shook his head.

“Just because your grandma is teaching you to read?”

“That.” He sighed. “And other things, too.”

I tried to put myself in his mother’s shoes. They were far too small. But I knew more than I had before. “She’s worried you’ll go off to school and become a doctor and she’ll never see you again.”

He chewed his lip. “I think so.”

We looked at each other.

“And be useless,” I said.

“Hard to know how she can feel that way.” Larkin wiped a clot of muck from the corner of his eye. Cleared his throat. “I keep hoping she’ll get better. But I don’t know what to do about that.”

At which Cate turned from the wall.

I wondered how much she’d heard.

She reached for Larkin, who went to her.

“None of that is your fault,” she said, and I knew she’d heard it all.

Thoughts of my own father, my own mother, rose up like bread. “I should be getting home.”

Cate nodded. “You’ll do your father good, being there.”

I turned to go.

She said, “You never said how he ended up in a coma.”

And I didn’t much want to tell the story now. But after what Larkin had just told me . . .