Isaac said, “She told me to come find you. She’d been looking for you. She needed to get a message to you. But we couldn’t figure out your address. She called your college and they said they’d never heard of you.”

I flushed. “I thought it was your decision to come see me.”

“Listen,” Isaac said. “I know that you don’t want a scolding, no matter how much you deserve one.” I liked him better when he was mean like this, because it was easier to remember why I’d left him.

“I’m my own person,” I said, in what I hoped was an even, rational tone. “I can decide my own life.”

He put his hands up. “She wanted me to give you this.” He took out from his kangaroo pocket a pink piglet flashlight, with two ultrabright blue LEDs in its snout. It made a little snorting noise when its lights turned on. “Might come in handy,” he said. The pig stood obediently in my palm. “Do you think we can talk more tonight?” he said.

“Maybe,” I said.

“I really missed you,” Isaac said. He smelled so strongly of a time before this one that it knocked the breath out of me.

“You didn’t,” I said. I thought back to our conversations, that insult, stagnating.

He said, “I’m lost without you.”

I laughed. It was easy to remember our compatibility. We’d liked to tease each other.

I told him what Sara had told me: this was state-of-the-art in the 1890s, the largest barn of its era in the Appalachians, and so rare—most of the old farming structures around were the windy, tilting ones for tobacco leaves, nigh impossible to convert for animals. I showed him the mattress for newcomers.

He set down his things, then lay on the mattress. He wore a Sherpa-lined denim hoodie, athletic shorts, and those Velcro shoes. He sat up and carefully plucked the bits of hay off his hoodie. Of course, he didn’t care for nature the way I did. I’d separated the bucks in the forest and wept into the mauve leaves, and he only wished he’d been there to take a photo.

“Come here,” he said.

I went. I always liked to be told what to do, though Dice knew how to make use of that much better than Isaac did. I sat down next to him on the mattress. I didn’t have much hair but he managed to tuck what hair I had behind my ear. I put my head on his shoulder. I didn’t feel like a girl who knew how to slaughter lambs, and I certainly didn’t feel like a girl who had seen her friend’s dead baby, a girl who had slammed an old woman to the floor and killed her.

“My girl,” he said.