I wished he’d just make up his mind to die and get it over with.

Standing beside the flowered chair, I felt a black and bitter anger. At Gran, at Mrs. Trent, at this room. A few stubborn tears pushed their way to my eyes. Mrs. Trent had left the room as soon as I had come, hobbling out, pitiful, a shadow of the elegant woman who had come to us weeks before.

Suddenly a voice creaked below me in the darkness. “You crying?”

“What?”

I turned toward Ezra, but my eyes, filmy with tears, couldn’t see him. Hands shaking, I switched on the dresser lamp.

Ezra groaned, reacting to the light. How long had it been since he’d reacted to light?

Switching the lamp back off, I quickly brushed the tears from my cheeks with the backs of my hands.

A long sigh from the bed.

“Ezra?”

“Hmmm?” More of a croak than a voice.

He was awake!

Ezra sighed and shut his eyes. Those drooping eyes.

Don’t leave again, I thought in a panic.

“Ezra!” Words tumbled out of me. “Wait. Don’t go.”

Ezra’s eyes stayed closed. “Nowhere to go,” he whispered. The last word trailed off.

“Ezra?” I came close, standing directly over the bed. “I know you need to rest. And I have a lot of homework waiting for me. But I’ll be back tomorrow.”

Ezra’s face looked the same as it had over the last few weeks. Empty.

“Ezra, will you wait till tomorrow?”

His tongue came out, ran lightly over his lips. “You bet, Shep.”

Nine

Muncie and I sat on her living-room rug, in front of a crackling fire. The storm outside darkened the room; Mrs. Harris put on lights. If I were a cat, I would have purred, it was so snug in that house.

I had brought along two sets of carding paddles from the shed. Muncie and I sat with a fistful of wool in each of our laps. We brushed the short hanks so all the strands of wool ran in one direction.

In the spring, before lambing, Gran and I spent days shearing all our sheep. We never carded or spun the wool ourselves. We sent our bags of raw wool to The Spinnery in Putney. I wondered what we’d do this spring, now that The Spinnery had closed.

When she was young, Gran used to wash and comb and spin the wool herself. But hardly anyone did it by hand anymore. Maybe that was another thing that would change because of the accident.

A log settled in the fireplace, sending sparks flying. I stopped carding long enough to flick a live coal back into the flames.

Gran had a fireplace in her bedroom and there was another in the dining room, but we never used either of them. Only the woodstove in the kitchen.

“It’s nice having a fire with the snow coming down,” I said.

Muncie’s face shifted into a grin under her mask, making her glasses raise up. ‘Yeah, thanks, Daddy.”