She wasn’t even against doctors. Neither of Mara’s parents were. They still brought her to the pediatrician, the dentist. She took antibiotics for strep throat, and got a tetanus shot when she scraped her knee on a rusty nail while jumping the fence from a cow pasture two miles away. Back then, at least, her parents didn’t deny the merits of modern life; they just liked a simpler world better, or the idea of a simpler world. Plant medicine and mutual aid. Community, they said, was the best resource a person could have, as long as your community shared your values. Mara wondered if Kyle and Bullfrog and Ashley shared her values. She wondered if her parents went to the doctor anymore.

Mara remembered some of the medicinal plants, of course. Plantain for stings and rashes, willow bark for fever, horsemint for toothaches, elderberry for colds. But she hadn’t seen them all here. The vegetation was different, the climate drier and colder. And there was no plant that would fix Kyle’s leg. They needed a doctor for that.

But maybe there was something to slow infection, if not treat it. Buy them the time they needed. Echinacea helped the immune system, but did that count for wounds? Mara hadn’t seen any. Ginseng had similar properties, and might grow around here. Balsam fir—what did balsam fir do again? Mara found a fir tree and broke off the tips with the freshest growth and gathered them in her basket. She couldn’t remember what else she needed. She began to look for other harmless plants, too, just in case they might help. Birch bark. Bundles of sumac berries, which stained her hands red. Buds and leaves of red clover. Fuzzy mullein.

She wandered toward the creek until something stopped her. It was a feeling more than anything else. Each tree was familiar, and she realized she was back in the birch grove, though she’d reached it from a different direction than usual. The grove where she met Tom. In just a few days, the leaves had thickened and changed.

Mara sat on a log, suddenly dizzy, and swatted mosquitos from her face.

All the mornings she’d come here, slipped away. The anticipation she felt each time. And there was something else she’d liked about the meetings, something hard to put a finger on—not the secrecy, exactly, but the control. The sense of being unowned. Not by Lenny, whose rules she only needed when they suited her. And not by Tom, either. He may have helped her, but she was the one who made that happen, wasn’t she? She made him want to help her. Eating the protein bars felt less like he was feeding her and more like she had found a way to feed herself.

She had respected Tom. She would not have spoken twice to him anywhere else, and she thought him incompetent with women, but she regarded his incompetence as she might the efforts of a slow but diligent child. So what if he never dated again? Everyone had their faults. He was judgmental, but he had never hurt her, and he paid her in food for her attention. If it was true that he risked his job to do so, then he was brave. There was a way, in fact, that she thought Tom really did care about her. It made his disappearance all the more confusing, more so than the rest of the crew’s.