My third day at the farm came, cold and bright. The family rested. Tomorrow they were going to chain themselves together in Tennessee. I led the sheep out, then worked with three other women to make pemmican for the voyage, grinding salted venison into brick-colored powder, mixing it with warm fat and raisins and honey, and pressing it into little balls. We wrapped each ball in a waxed bedsheet. The men tied together the PVC pipes like bales and stacked them in the back of a pickup.

After lunch, I searched for Bay. He’d been ignoring me at meals, and I was tired of acting like I didn’t mind. I was going to say, “Did you miss me?” I wanted to ask if they really meant it, three days or the rest of your life, and if he’d noticed I’d been here three days. I searched the cold bedrooms, and around the hickory, down to its last leaves now, and the stables, and the dairy.

I found Bay in the storage house. The walls were stacked with Dumpstered food—cans of corn, condensed soup, oatmeal. The worker reaps the best rewards, Bay had said. Bay was sorting through crates of carrots half-buried in sand. I stood on the threshold, suddenly afraid to call him, to seem too eager. Isaac and I had moved through this phase—the phase of unequal affections—so speedily that I couldn’t even remember who had been in charge.

I was turning to leave when he noticed me. “Sister,” he said. “So what’s it going to be? You need me to bring you back to Asheville?”

“I have to decide today?” I said, disingenuously, just to get his response.

“We’d miss you,” he said. “I, personally, would miss you.”

“I like being missed,” I said.

“Stay,” he said. He leaned onto me. I could feel the cool intake of his breath as he smelled the part of my hair. “You’ll stink like a real Asher in no time,” he said.

Isaac said that even a hypocrite could be an agent of change because that was what interested him—the lifestyle, the feeling of being different. But he also wanted all the normal things, buying things and earning things, a house and kids. We’d gone to marches and then what had we done? I’d never been to an action with water cannons and rubber bullets. But Dice had, and Bay had, and the family had. Dice had said they had another solution, a real solution. I’d always known there was something more.

And here was Bay, asking me to stay.

“All right,” I said. I was hoping for a kiss on the mouth, but he only kissed my forehead.

CHAPTER 6