Our mother loved them. Not more than she loved us girls, of course.

Our mother, Abigail March, could birth a goat and kill a copperhead. She could find anything—toys, shoes, missing homework. Fix anything, except a broken heart. She made sure we got our shots and permission slips on time, taught Meg to cook and me to sew, and came to all our school performances. But her time and attention were always rationed between us and the farm.

Meg said things were different before Daddy quit his job as a minister and went to Iraq as an army chaplain. I remember I cried when we left the parsonage and all my friends in town. But I was only ten when our mother moved us girls out to the farm. Most of my memories were of her working.

It wasn’t like her to be gone in the middle of the day.

I didn’t expect to see our dad. Mom had asked him to move out almost three years ago. But I felt his absence like poking at a missing tooth with your tongue.

Stupid. All my sisters were grown and gone while I was still in high school. I should be used to coming home to an empty house by now.

I leaned against the front fender as I called Momma’s cell. She didn’t pick up. Typical. “Why would I ignore somebody standing right in front of me to answer the phone?” she liked to say. But I could call Meg, my oldest sister. Meg was busy, too—her twins were about to turn five, and she kept the books for several farms and businesses in town. But she always found time for me.

A guy walked around the corner of the barn. A tall, older guy, his face creased with hard living behind a don’t-mess-with-me beard.

I kept a hand on my phone just in case he turned out to be, oh, a serial killer or something. Living in New York had taught me caution. And out here in the country, nobody was around to hear me scream. “Hi.”

He nodded in greeting. The strong, silent type, obviously. Beneath the beard, he looked vaguely familiar. Well. Everybody looked familiar in Bunyan. Because of inbreeding, Jo said. But it was more that everybody had a cousin who used to go to your daddy’s church or went to school with your sister, strands of connection twined and knotted like macramé.

I tried again. “Do I know you?”

He looked at me, no expression at all. “Sam Harkins.”

I smiled encouragingly, waiting.

“I work for your ma.”

So he knew who I was. Or at least that Momma was expecting me. I relaxed my grip on the phone.

Our mother came from tough Scottish stock, too proud—or too cheap—to pay somebody else to do her work. But after she was hospitalized a couple years ago, she’d hired one of Dad’s vets to do the heavy lifting. (Literally. Those full-grown milking goats weighed a ton.) Mom was better now, but as her herd and business grew, she’d kept on some of her new hires to help around the farm.