“News travels fast here,” she said. She gestured in the direction of the door and the stretch of fields beyond. “Nothing here to slow it down.”

“I’m worried about Mazie.” He kept his eyes on the hen’s wary back.

The muscles in his forearms twisted with subtle strength. Where had they come from? Milly had never seen him hitch a horse or rake blueberries, sift spheres of midnight blue from the brambles.

He was quiet, yes, but sinewy and soft. At least Milly imagined he’d be soft if she reached out and brushed the errant lock of hair from his forehead. And it wasn’t so hard to believe, after all, that he’d stolen somewhere quiet with Mazie Pinkerton, and that Mazie had seen something in him that she wanted to touch. Something different than her own hardness and unbreakable ties to this place and her father. Ernst was an outsider with the scent of the city still on him.

Standing there, with Ernst’s quietness for her to contemplate, Milly pictured Dan’s exhausted body. His collapse into their bed and his mumbled good night. The graying at his temples and his own muscles softening, so that she was the stronger one, the one who still held youth tightly in her calloused hands.

She was the one who, like the farm itself, insisted on life. Like these penned animals and the plants that grew despite themselves. This was a place dependent on procreation. Of so much fertility that sometimes it had to be squelched by a sack and the depth of Jones Pond. But there was also slaughter and death and animals that tucked themselves into the long grass, so they could be alone with their last breaths. Whose lives had been whittled down smaller and smaller, until they had no choice but to give up their hold.

“Seems you’re right to be worried.” Milly folded her skirt into a basket. Stole three eggs and slipped them inside.

Ernst’s shoulders sagged just a bit. He ducked his head. It made him look young and naïve again.

“Mazie’s just a child.” It came out with more venom that Milly had intended. “How can she have a child?” She reached for another egg. “Is she at home now?” It was the longest conversation they’d shared.

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. I can’t go there and check.” He rubbed the back of his neck with his slender hand and its long musician’s fingers. “She says her dad will her kill her. And me, too.” He looked right at Milly then, an animal startled by fear. “He’s not good to her, you know. She’s told me things. I’ve seen . . .” His voice went even softer. “Can you go? Just to make sure she’s okay?”

“How are you going to be a daddy if you can’t even go check on her?” Pain dug into Milly, somewhere deep. Not because were Mrs. Pinkerton still alive, Mazie would have had a different ending. But because she was the one with an empty womb that needed filling. Because she’d tended animals long enough to be an expert at nurturing.

“She’s not keeping it.” Ernst sank smaller still. “We’re not.”

Milly’s head snapped up. She sucked her teeth before she could stop herself. “What do you mean, not keeping it?”

“I have to finish school. And Mazie—she’s just so young.” He looked down. “It was an accident.”

The air was too close. Suffocating. Milly forgot about the eggs stowed in the threadbare linen of her skirt and let go. Reached out to push her way past Ernst. The eggs dropped before she could get to the door, four quick explosions. So much less satisfying than if she’d hurled them herself, all this wasted fertility.

Ernst’s voice followed her, though she didn’t turn around to accept it. Still, his words got in front of her, and though she pushed through them, they caught her like spider web silk. “I can’t find her.”

Mazie wasn’t her responsibility. She had no one to be responsible for. And wasn’t that part of her problem? Her loneliness. That her own parents had left too soon, taken by work they loved. And she was still alone. No children of her own to press close to.

The strip of trees had been waiting for her, a hollow of shadow she could slip beneath. Time had started to erase the path she’d worn years ago, the loyalty of her feet there and back, there and back, unfaithful in her dawn-to-dusk work. Plants she couldn’t name, because they were not crops she had to plant and water and weed around, had shaken out their skirts and spread themselves over the rutted dirt. Her feet knew the way and ripped through the tangled cords.

The slap of leaves against her skin was the only sound to challenge the cicadas’ insistent, soprano buzz. She did not cry or scream. She was good at burying, planting seeds deep, in a place the sun would never reach to coax them into feminine folds of green that would, one day, unexpectedly unfurl. And then there was the rock, the one with the divot at its apex, a smoothed away basin she could still fit inside, with her hips that had never widened. She could see the stretch of Jones Pond from her perch, the largeness of it.

She’d watched until she was no longer there, until even the animals had decided she was just part of the rock. Until the sun turtles climbed back on their perches. Until the turkey vultures rocked overhead, air thermals carrying them on their search for death. A loon slipped past shore. It dove and resurfaced somewhere farther off, then dove again, an expert at the inevitable letting go and moving on.