I watched her for signs that she was lying, but she was looking right at me. No fidgeting, no looking off to the side, no shaking her head, no covering her throat or her heart. Even her blush was gone.

“Okay then,” I said. “Let me know if you need anything, okay?”

“You, too,” Polly said.

Morning took on its usual hum as the students trickled in. Jackets on hooks, backpacks in cubbies. Wooden puzzles and matching games spread across a table or on a mat rolled out on the floor. Some of the kids jumping right in to work, others wandering around as they finished waking up.

After circle time, Polly and I made leaf people with the kids. We used slotted wooden clothespins for the bodies, the original old-fashioned clothespins without any springs, the kind my grandmothers used to use to hang their laundry out to dry.

We squirted dabs of acrylic paint in paper cups and let the kids dip Q-tips in the paint to make faces on the top end of the clothespins. We made hats out of tiny acorn caps. Created bright autumn clothing from the leaves and glued the clothes to the clothespins with paste made from flour and water. Wrapped jute string around and around the leaf clothing to make belts. Glued on yarn, and more jute, for hair. Twisted pipe cleaners around the clothespins for arms. Snipped smaller pieces of a pipe cleaner to make crowns. Turned tiny bits of cotton balls into beards.

Polly looked up from the leaf person she was making.

“I could do this all day,” she said.

“I know, right?” I cut a tiny piece of jute, knotted the ends together to make a necklace. “Wouldn’t it be awesome to just stay in the land of the leaf people, where the biggest thing you have to worry about is whether or not you look good in fall colors?”

Chapter Twenty-Four

After our students went home for the day, Ethan and I sat across from each other in the teachers’ room, going over our notes for the holiday performance.

“I can’t believe how fast we have to pull this thing together,” he said. “It feels like it was just Thanksgiving five minutes ago.”

“I know,” I said. “But the good news is that the performance is the kickoff to vacation, so we wouldn’t want it to happen any later, because this way we’re off from mid-December until the Monday after New Year’s Day. And the other good news is that preschoolers are always cute when they perform, even when they screw things up. Sometimes especially when they screw things up.”

“Okay, let me make sure I’ve got this right. Essentially, there are two dogs and two cats—”