When I got back home, I stopped in at the woodshed and found the puppies all back in their nest and sleeping alongside Maisie, who scrambled to her feet when she saw me.

“Are you a very fine girl?” I said, rubbing her ears and kissing her on the head. “Are you my very fine girl?” She answered with a whimper, her tongue just kissing the tip of my nose before she returned to the nest and curled up again with her litter.

“Wake up soon, Quiet,” I whispered. “We don’t have much time left.”

But with my father awake again, I found myself hoping that other things might have changed as well.

Chapter Forty-Three

I expected the cabin to be as I’d left it.

My mother smiling again. Singing again as she worked. Esther on her way back to kindness. Samuel that much farther from the boy who had chased a rabbit into such long, sad trouble.

But when I went through the door, I found the kitchen empty, the cabin quiet but for the sound of Esther’s voice.

I followed it to find everyone clustered around my father as he lay sleeping.

Samuel was curled up beside him, my mother by the window, watching. Both of them listening as Esther read a book out loud.

Which was when I began to be afraid again.

My mother wasn’t hushing anyone.

She wasn’t telling them to let my father get his rest.

And the look on her face had no song in it.

“‘Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off,’” Esther read, “‘and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.’”

I knew that book. I knew that story. The Velveteen Rabbit. One of my favorites. It brought to mind the little doll clutched in Cate’s hand.

When my mother saw me standing in the doorway, she let out a breath and said, “It’s high time you came in.” Esther stopped reading, and everyone turned to look at me. “No reason on earth why you should want to be anywhere but here.”

And it was, truly, at first glance, a scene from a storybook, my family all together, their cheeks rosy with the warmth they’d breathed into the little room. All except my father, who was still as pale and thin as a parsnip.

And he was still sleeping.

I wanted to tell them about where I’d been and how much Cate had liked the stew and how she was Larkin’s grandmother and all the rest, but I wanted to be part of this story, too. The one right here in this room.