“Made you?” I said. Queen had said Dice never made anyone do what they didn’t want to do. At that time I still thought there was a demarcation between wanting and not wanting. I hadn’t yet realized that in our world—a world with no definite selves, where the family’s needs came before everything else—Dice could tell you what you wanted.

She was crying. “I don’t need any more help, Harmony,” she said.

As I returned to the long house, I glanced through the window. She was kneeling on the floor, staring at her hands. I thought that she was trying to keep the dirt from falling out. Later I realized she might have been praying.

* * *

Roger had decided to stay. He became family. Dice introduced him at breakfast. “Rainer is a good one,” Dice said, with his hand on Roger’s shoulder. Roger gazed up at him, mouth open. Then, with all of us watching, he lifted Dice’s hand and kissed it. The family murmured in approval. I wished I’d thought to kiss Dice’s hand when I’d arrived.

So Roger was Rainer. I thought about Queen climbing the ladder to the hayloft, her lantern’s light coursing over the beams. I wondered if she pretended to be willing.

Was it clear that she was not there on her own account? Maybe she was silent, maybe her urgency took him by surprise. Maybe he didn’t notice anything was wrong, maybe he ignored how wrong it felt.

* * *

It was almost May, so we dug in the fields, the whole family together, as Dice requested. We dug because tilling killed the salamanders.

Dice was the strongest. He didn’t take breaks like we did. He said he’d done this kind of work long enough that he didn’t need to. He pulled up ten times the amount of earth I could in one shovelful. When we went in to prepare dinner, he stayed out in the field. I was proud of him for his relentlessness.

We transplanted the kale and onions and peas and cauliflower and tiny lettuces from the hoop house, and once Dice was sure there would be no frost, we moved the tomatoes and sweet potatoes. We seeded the beans and pumpkins and melons directly into the soil. We planted blood-red corn.

Soon milkweed sprouted everywhere. We weeded with knives, stabbing deep into the ground and pulling out roots.

Spring was all-consuming, spring was desperate. I didn’t have time to worry about Lindsay; I almost forgot she had ever visited the Ash Family farm. The weather changed, so warm the carrot tops rocketed up in two days. The Clark’s Heavenly Blue morning glories on the fences around the orchard bloomed, large ultramarine blossoms with white throats.