Her rebuke wasn’t about the Go player in the park, Margot knew. It was about her determination to discover if Maman had been felled by anthrax. Margot had seen her press her lips together today when she asked DID if she could speak with him.

It was statistically inevitable that she and this new friend of hers would disagree about something. Probable that the something would be important.

But she wished this hadn’t been their first disagreement. This, of all things.

If the numbers hadn’t told her to befriend Dot to begin with, perhaps she’d shrug it off and simply drift away. But the Lord meant for them to be friends. She wouldn’t forget that now, despite the fact that the numbers had gone silent.

And so Margot said quietly, “I realize you don’t think my questions about Maman’s death are worth asking. But I have to ask them. I have to know. I’m sorry if that bothers you.”

Dot touched her arm, then withdrew her fingers. “It doesn’t bother me, Margot. It worries me. Because I don’t want you obsessing over this instead of simply healing.”

Healing? Margot sucked in a long breath and scanned the distance ahead of them. She’d already lost one parent. It wasn’t a wound that healed per se. It was simply one she’d learned to live with. Like Red Holmes’s missing limb. Something that had once supported him, gone forever. He’d learned to walk again, and so would Margot. The flesh could be stitched, a prosthetic attached. It didn’t bleed forever.

But healing meant returning to a state of health, being restored to the original condition. Drake Elton’s gunshot wound would heal. Red Holmes’s amputation would not.

“Death isn’t a gunshot, Dot. It’s an amputation.”

Dot’s pace slowed. “I beg your pardon?”

“It doesn’t heal. We’re never restored fully, whole again, after we lose someone. We just learn to go on with the pieces missing.”

Holmes was there, coming even now from the park with that peculiar gait reserved for those using artificial feet with ankle joints—the ankle that released the foot all at once when he put down the heel, rather than rolling onto and back off the ball. She didn’t know how long he’d had the thing, but it must have been a few months, at least. From what she’d read on the subject, it took a considerable while for patients to adjust to the wearing of such a device, and he seemed to have mastered it as much as it allowed.

She would too. She’d learn how to walk without Maman, as she’d learned without Papa. But it would never be the same. She would never stop missing them.

Dot was frowning into the distance. “Who did you say you’re meeting?”

“I didn’t. But a young man named Redvers—”