“It must still hurt awful bad for ya. And Mamma, too,” Britta said quietly. “Such heartache.”

Susie bobbed her head but didn’t speak. At times, the events of the accident still seemed crystal clear. At other times, downright hazy. But she’d never forgotten how devastated she’d felt.

As Britta turned to make her way back across the yard to the little shop, Susie heard the clear song of a bird somewhere high in the oak tree behind the potting shed, not far from the bird feeder. Does God see me like He sees that bird? she wondered, her mouth suddenly dry. Does He see deep into my heart?

Susie didn’t bump into Obie or his mother, Kate, at the weekend market, nor did she run into him at the General Store as she sometimes did. She felt emotionally numb and wondered if this was how she would feel once he left Hickory Hollow.

On the morning of Tuesday, April twenty-sixth, Susie wrote Eli’s initials on her bedroom calendar as she had done every year since his death. Doing this felt essential to her: one small way to honor his precious memory. That, and visiting and redding up the accident site. She assumed Mamma had her own way of marking the day. Everyone grieved differently and in their own time, Ella Mae had once shared with her.

Mamma had seemed especially weary following breakfast, and Susie had encouraged her to rest after Britta left for school. As far as she could tell, Mamma hadn’t had an asthma flare-up today, but her mother was tuckered out, nonetheless. Such a day for us both . . .

After school, while they were walking ahead of the other girls, Britta tentatively asked Hazel, “Say, this might seem strange, but I’ve been wonderin’ . . . do ya happen to know anything ’bout my adoption?”

Hazel looked at Britta and frowned. “What would I know that you wouldn’t?” She sounded baffled.

Britta shrugged. “People talk, you know—just not usually around the person they’re talkin’ about. I just thought maybe you might’ve heard something.”

“What would ya like to know?”

“Ach, near everything. What my first mother looked like, for starters. And was she Plain or fancy?”

Hazel glanced over her shoulder. “I was only a year old back then.” She slowed her pace and was quiet for the longest time.

“So you’re saying you’ve never heard anyone talk about it?”

“All I know is that your Mamma and her husband were foster parents for some years before he passed. Then you arrived,” Hazel told her.

They walked a bit farther without saying anything at all.

When Britta could scarcely keep her thoughts to herself any longer, she said, “I just wish I knew more, like why my first family didn’t keep me.”

Hazel was still, as if thinking. “Why don’t ya ask your Mamma?”