I still didn’t know whether I’d be invited to the next action. I planned to ask when the moment was right. In the meantime, I devoted myself to work. The leeks sent forth their feathery pastel-purple flowers. I found an arrowhead or perhaps a spear point in the peas. So many green beans per plant, hiding. To harvest them, I sat cross-legged and scooted through the rows. The beans we missed grew monstrously long. Sometimes I forgot that it was Dice who had brought us together. I thought that it was just our love of nature that grew the family, like plums from a bough.

The black beans in maroon pods grew up among the sunflowers. We’d harvest beans in the fall, split the pods, and dry the beans inside, to eat all winter. Beans like those, Cherokee Trail of Tears black beans, needed a hundred days without a frost to reach maturity.

We found melons lurking among their giant velvety leaves. Moon and Stars melons, dark green with pale spots of varying sizes.

The corn was tall. We could already dig up the first potatoes.

In the dairy, Queen made cheese every day. We worked side by side, but we hadn’t spoken since that day in the hayloft. I wished I could ask her about how Cassie died. I wished I could ask her why they tried to run away. But I couldn’t get the words out. I kept seeing her car crashing into her mother. I wondered how she felt about it now, almost a mother herself.

I helped with the milking, pouring foamy sheep milk from stainless pails through a filter into the big milk jugs that we stored overnight in the trough.

We ate ricotta at every breakfast, and primo sale, and the shelves in the cellar groaned under the heavy new wheels. On very hot days, I volunteered to spend all eight hours in the cool, musty cellar, in the dim, washing rinds with skin-pricklingly salty water. I’d emerge dizzy at lunch and at dusk.

Instead of Queen, I placed my care on the little owl. Every day Dice would invite me to his room after breakfast and we’d pin down worms for the owl to eat. But his wing still jutted out; he didn’t seem to be healing.

One day, a little while after our trip to town, Dice said, “Open the window. See if he wants to leave.”

“I’m sure he can’t fly,” I said.

“Can’t heal something that doesn’t want to heal,” Dice said.

So I pushed up the sash. I picked up the owl’s box and set him on the windowsill so he could step out if he wanted, but he just gazed into the greenery, holding his broken wing stiffly away from his body.