missing some vital piece. Even Charley was listless, pacing backward and forward along the rail, or just standing, his huge ears at half mast, his pale muzzle lowered halfway to the ground.
Sometimes Alice waited until she was alone on the long ride back to the cabin and, shielded by the trees and the silence, cried huge sobs of fear and frustration. Tears she knew Margery would not cry for herself. Nobody spoke of what would happen when the baby came. Nobody spoke of what would happen to Margery afterward. The whole situation was so surreal and the child was still an abstraction, a thing that few of them could imagine into existence.
* * *
• • •
Alice rose at 4:30 a.m. every day, slung herself across Spirit and disappeared into the densely forested mountainside laden with saddlebags so that she’d done the first mile before she’d had a chance to wake fully. She greeted everyone she passed by name, usually with some piece of information that might be pertinent to them—“Did you get that tractor repair book, Jim? And did your wife like the short stories?”—and would place her horse in front of Van Cleve’s car whenever she saw it, so that he was forced to stop, engine idling in the road, while she stared him down. “Sleep well at night, do you?” she would call, her voice piercing the still air. “Feeling pleased with yourself?” His cheeks blown out and purple, he would wrench his car around her.
She was not afraid to be in the cabin alone, but Fred had helped her set more traps to alert her should anyone come close. She was reading one night when she heard the jingle of the bell string they had strung between the trees. With lightning reflexes, she reached back to the fireplace and pulled down the rifle, standing and cocking it on her shoulder in one fluid movement, placing the two barrels against the narrow gap in the door.
She squinted, trying to make out whether there was any movement outside and remained preternaturally still, scanning the darkness a moment or two longer, before she let her shoulders drop.
“Just deer,” she muttered to herself and lowered the rifle.
It was only as she left the next morning that she found the note that had been slipped under the door overnight with its heavy black scrawl.
You do not belong here. Go home.
It wasn’t the first, and she bit down hard on the feelings the notes provoked. Margery would have laughed at them, so that was what she did. She screwed the paper into a ball, threw it into the fire, and cursed under her breath. And tried not to think about where home might be, these days.
* * *
• • •
Fred stood beside the barn in the dimming light chopping wood—one of the few tasks that still defeated Alice. She found the weight and heft of the old ax unnerving, and rarely managed to split the logs along the grain, usually leaving the blade wedged at an awkward angle, stuck fast, until Fred returned. He, in contrast, hit each piece with a clean, rhythmic motion, his arms circling in a great sweep, the ax slicing each into halves and then quarters, pausing each three strikes, to hold it loosely in one hand while with the other he tossed the new logs onto the pile. She watched him for a moment, waiting until he stopped again, drew a forearm across his brow, and looked up at where she stood in the doorway, glass in hand.
“That for me?”
She took a few steps forward and handed it to him.
“Thank you. There’s more here than I thought.”
“Good of you to do it.”
He took a long swig of the water and let out a breath before he handed back the glass. “Well. Can’t have you getting cold in winter. And they dry out quicker if you cut them smaller. Sure you don’t want to have another go?”
Something in her expression seemed to stop him.
“You okay, Alice?”
She smiled and nodded but even as she did so she barely convinced herself. So she told him the thing she had put off telling for a full week. “My parents have written. To say I can come home.”
Fred’s smile evaporated.
“They’re not happy, but they say I can’t stay here alone and they’re prepared to chalk the marriage up to youthful error. My aunt Jean has invited me to stay with her in Lowestoft. She needs help with her children and everyone agrees that