I drew out the sopping camera, its lens glossy with milk fat. I wondered if the film was ruined. I dropped it onto the cement floor and stepped on it with my heavy boot, to make sure. The plastic cracked like bones. Now the light would get in.

“Berie,” he said.

“Harmony,” I said.

“You didn’t have to do that,” he said.

I picked up the broken camera and put it in my chore coat’s pocket. We let the first fifteen ewes go, brought on the next fifteen. We poured our pails into jugs, and then poured the jugs into the copper cauldron, to start the cheese-making for the day. The air smelled sour, like turned milk. I lit the big bare gas burner. It produced a thrush of blue flames.

Isaac stirred the huge mass of milk in the cauldron—the cauldron large enough to boil a man in. I had the feeling he was still gathering his weapons, finding a way to convince me to change my mind.

“Sabotage,” Isaac said. I ignored him, and he pressed on. “How can I do more sabotage in Durham?”

“You could put glue in the ATMs of the bad banks,” I said. Knowledge from Dice. “But you only like peaceful protest, remember?” He shook his head.

We measured the milk’s temperature. I added the little spoonful of rennet, taken from the stomach of a baby calf Queen had slaughtered. This used to be her job. In a few hours all that milk would congeal into white custard. Then I’d cut the curds, scoop them into molds, steam out the liquid. When the cheese was ready, Isaac would be gone.

“Let’s set a time for me to come back to Asheville, then,” said Isaac. “You’re allowed to go out whenever you want, right?”

“Of course,” I lied. Allowed to. I hoped the racket from the generator was loud enough to prevent my voice from carrying.

“All right, well how about Valentine’s Day, then? I’ll bring your mom up. I promised her I’d set a time.”

It was wrong to think he was deliberately hurting me. I was the one hurting him, I thought—yet I felt powerless.

“She’d never take off work and come all the way out here, just to . . .”

“Just to what, Berie?” I cringed when he said my old name. “Just to see her only daughter?”

“Keep it down.”

“You keep telling me to be quiet,” Isaac said.

I tried to think of a rebuttal. “Well, respect—awareness—”

“You used to be very loud, Berie,” he said.

“Call me Harmony,” I hissed.

“Marry me,” Isaac said. “Come back to the real world.”

“You know nothing about the real world,” I said.

And there things ended. Josiah came in with the milk from the cows, and we took the pitchers in for breakfast.

The broken camera weighed in my pocket.

* * *