One morning she was working in the garden when she felt his absence; she went into the house, then into the woods, calling his name. It was high summer, the air fresh and bright, falling over the leaves like drizzled sunlight. He had chosen a place where the trees were thin and the sky was all above; from here he could see the valley and, beyond it, like a great becalmed sea, the wavelike mountains receding to a blue horizon. He was leaning on a shovel, panting for breath. He was an old man now, gray and frail, and yet here he was, digging a hole in the earth. What is that hole, she asked him, and he told her, It’s for me. So that when I’m gone you won’t have to dig it yourself. It wouldn’t do in summer to have to wait to dig a hole. All that day and into the evening he dug, moving small shovels of earth, pausing after each for breath. She watched from the edge of the clearing, for he would have no help from her. And when he was done, the hole having reached a satisfactory dimension, he returned to the house where they had lived so many years together, to the bed he had built with his own hands from heavy joined timbers and lengths of fibrous rope that sagged with the shape of the two of them, and in the morning was dead.

How long ago? Lacey paused in her telling, Amy’s and the young man’s eyes—Peter’s eyes—watching her from across the room. How strange, after so much time, to tell these stories: of Jonas, and that terrible night, and all that had happened in this place. She had stoked the fire and set a pot in the cradle to warm. The air of the house, two low-ceilinged rooms separated by a curtain, was warm and fragrant, lit by the glow of the fire.

“Fifty-four years,” she said, answering the question she herself had posed. She said it again, to herself. Fifty-four years since Jonas had left her alone. She stirred the pot, which contained a stew of this and that, the meat of a fat possum from her trapline and hearty vegetables, the durable tubers, which she had put away for winter. Sitting in jars upon the shelves were the seeds she used each year, the descendents of the ones Jonas had brought in the packets. Zucchini and tomatoes, potatoes and squash, onions and turnips and lettuce. Her needs were small, the cold did not affect her, and she sometimes barely ate for days or even weeks; but Peter would be hungry. He was just as she’d imagined, young and strong, with a determined face, though she’d thought, somehow, that he would be taller.

She became aware that he was frowning at her.

“You’ve been by yourself … for fifty years?”