I didn’t go back inside then but walked into the woods at the back of the farm, only letting the hot tears spill when I was well out of sight of the house and fields. There was a creek which cut through banks of rhododendron bushes and I sat on a rock there, watching the water carry sticks and clumps of leaf litter past. My breath came in broken heaves. Water bugs skated on the surface in the eddies where fallen trees had blocked the flow and created small pools. The water was clear to the bottom, and when I put my hand in, the cold was enough to make my finger bones ache. The pain steadied me. I breathed in skunk, rotten leaves, distant wood smoke.

Walking back to the house in time to help make supper, I saw a truck from the slaughterhouse pulling out of the farm gates. The stiff, blood-heavy bodies of Him ’n Her lay in the bed of that truck, I was certain. At supper Roy avoided my gaze and no one spoke of anything except the crop and what the preacher had said the past Sunday and how the McAlisters were planting sorghum this year on half of their acreage.

He was already in bed with his back turned when I came from the bathroom that night, his light out, pretending to be sleeping.

‘Did you know?’ I asked, sitting on the edge of the bed, cradling my sharp elbows in my palms. My voice was hoarse.

‘I was the one who pulled the trigger.’

I shut my eyes tight.

‘Did you try and talk him out of it?’

‘There’s no use, Sarah,’ he said, turning over. His face was blank. ‘I told you in the beginning it was too much cost and work. And I was right. I tried to go along with what you wanted, but that ain’t going to work. If you want to fit in here, you’re the one who’s got to change.’

He fell asleep a quarter of an hour later without speaking another word, and I sat there in the dark, listening to the rasp of his breath, thinking of what he’d said. The curtains let in the pale glow of a half-moon, and I thought of all the animals that would be out at night: the owls hunting mice, the raccoons and foxes searching for cracks in the henhouse, for warm bodies of sleeping birds in their nests. There is a point at which one fear can outweigh another. I made up my mind that night, lying in bed beneath the quilt his mother had sewn, on the bedframe his father had built, the mattress which Roy had slept on since he was a boy. Running away from my own family’s problems, I’d ended up with his. Which were worse I wasn’t certain, but I was determined not to find out.