He picked out the small, plump heart and held it up to Leni. Blood leaked between his fingers. “You’re the hunter. Eat the heart.”

“Ernt, please,” Mama said, “we’re not savages.”

“That’s exactly what we are,” he said in a voice as cold as the wind at their back. “Eat it.”

Leni’s gaze cut to Mama, who looked as horrified as Leni felt.

“Are you going to make me ask again?” Dad said.

The quiet of his voice was worse than yelling. Leni felt a ridge of fear poke up, spread along her spine. She reached out, took the tiny blue-red organ in her hand. (Was it still beating or was she trembling?)

With her father’s narrowed gaze steady on her, she put the heart in her mouth and forced her lips to close. Instantly, she wanted to gag. The heart was slippery and slimy; when she bit down it ruptured in her mouth, tasting metallic. She felt blood trickle out of the side of her mouth.

She swallowed, gagged, wiped the blood from her lips, felt its warmth smear across her cheek.

Her father looked up, just enough to make eye contact. He looked ruined, tired, but present; in his eyes, she saw more love and sadness than should be able to exist in one human being. Something was tearing him up inside, even now. It was the other man, the bad man, who lived inside of him and tried to break out in the darkness.

“I’m trying to make you self-sufficient.”

It sounded like an apology, but for what? For being crazy sometimes or teaching her to hunt? Or for making her eat the hare’s beating heart? Or for the nightmares that ruined all their sleep?

Or maybe he was apologizing for something he hadn’t done yet but was afraid he would.

*   *   *

DECEMBER.

Dad was edgy, tense; he drank too much and muttered under his breath. The nightmares became more frequent. Three a week, every week.

He was always moving, demanding, pushing. He ate, slept, breathed, and drank survival. He had become a soldier again, or that’s what Mama said, and Leni found herself tongue-tied around him, afraid of saying or doing the wrong thing.

With as hard as she worked after school and on the weekends, Leni should have slept like the dead, but she didn’t. Night after night she lay awake, worrying. Her fear and anxiety about the world had been sharpened to a knifepoint.