Chapter 9:

Edric left before sunrise.

Hayato heard him from Quinn's room. Boots on the stairs, Mara's voice too low to make out, the door shutting slow and careful so it wouldn't wake anyone. Then the gate. Then the house had that emptied-out quiet houses get right after someone leaves them.

He lay there a while, watching the light crawl across the ceiling.

[He'll be back by evening,] Quinn's memory offered. [The mill in the next valley. Timber.]

He turned onto his side and didn't get up yet.

                              • • •

Mara had been awake an hour by the time he came down. You could tell from the kitchen. Bread proving by the hearth, something on the stove, three things going at once — that was just how she got when the house was hers and nobody was around yet to talk to. She heard him on the stairs and her face brightened, small and automatic, the way it did every morning whether she noticed it or not.

"You're up early."

"Couldn't sleep."

"Sit. There's porridge."

He sat.

She talked while she worked — Edric's trip, the bread, whether the roots were ready to pull, the Aldren fence that the whole valley apparently had opinions about and nobody had actually fixed. Hayato ate. Answered where an answer was expected.

[Two weeks ago I was counting every word,] he thought. [Now it's just breakfast.]

He wasn't sure if that was good.

                             • • •

The morning went the way mornings did here.

Mara baked. Hayato held things and fetched things — the parts of baking that didn't need skill so much as attention — while she narrated, mostly to herself, the way she narrated everything.

"You used to sit right there," she said, nodding at the stool by the worktable, "when you were small. Never wanted to help. Just watched." A small smile at the dough. "I'd ask if you wanted to try and you'd shake your head, dead serious, and go back to watching. Like you were studying for an exam."

[Quinn did that,] Hayato thought — and the memory was right there, waiting: the stool, the warmth, the exact smell of this bread. [She liked knowing how something worked before she touched it.]

"She sounds patient," he said. Then, too late — "I sound patient."

Mara glanced up, amused. "You were. You are." Her palms went into the dough. "Not me. I want to do everything at once and fix it after." A short laugh. "Still do."

[I know,] he thought, and didn't say it.

                              • • •

Midmorning, bread in, kitchen gone quiet, Mara sat across from him with two cups of something warm and the look of a woman who'd finally stopped moving.

She wasn't doing the breakfast glance this time. Something slower.

"Can I ask you something."

[Careful.] "Yes."

"Are you happy?"

He looked at her. The question was simple on top and not simple underneath. Her eyes had that mix she did so well, warm but not letting him off easy.

"Why are you asking?"

"Because you're different lately." Both hands around the cup. "Not bad different. Just — quieter than you used to be. More careful." A pause. "You've always been serious for your age, but this is something else. Like you're carrying a thought I can't see."

[You have no idea.]

"I'm fine, Mama."

"That's not what I asked."

He looked down at his tea.

[Am I happy.] He turned the question over the way he turned most things over. [I help people and I feel it, the aliveness of it. Dinner's warm. Liora makes me laugh without trying. Sable watches me like I'm a page she hasn't gotten to yet. Edric puts a hand on my head and something in me still doesn't know what to do with that.]

Is that happy. Or is it just full. Maybe there's no difference.

"I think so," he said finally. "I think I'm happy."

She studied him a second — not fully convinced, but choosing to let it go, the way mothers sometimes do.

"Good."

She drank her tea.

                              • • •

It was the bread that did it.

Mara pulled the loaves out around noon, set them on the rack, stood back with her hands on her hips, pleased with herself. Cut two slices without ceremony. Set one down in front of him.

"Quinn."

He looked up.

"You know," she said, leaning against the table with her own slice, "when you were born, the midwife said you didn't cry."

He blinked. "What?"

"Most babies cry right off. You didn't." She looked at the bread in her hand, somewhere far away. "You just looked around. Very serious about it. Edric said you were deciding whether it was worth staying."

"Was he worried?"

"Edric? No. Said if you'd decided it wasn't worth it, you'd have let him know." She laughed, real and warm. "Turned out he was right."

Hayato looked at the bread.

[She looked around,] he thought. [At this kitchen. At Mara. At all of it. And she stayed.]

And then I—

He stopped that thought before it went anywhere.

"And you?" he asked instead. "Were you worried?"

Something old moved through her face, hard to name.

"I was terrified. I'm always terrified, that's just — what it is." She sat back down across from him. "You love someone that much and it's fear wearing a different coat, most days."

The kitchen went quiet for a while. Wind moving through the trees out back, the bread cooling, the fire doing what fires do.

He thought of a sticky note on a refrigerator, two lives ago. *Don't forget your umbrella.*

Yeah. That sounded about right.

                              • • •

After lunch Mara went to pull the roots and Hayato went with her.

The garden sat behind the house, a long narrow strip she ran with the same busy competence she brought to everything. She knelt in the dirt without any fuss and started pulling, and Hayato knelt next to her and did the same, following her lead down the row.

It was the calmest he'd felt since waking up in this body.

Not happy, exactly. Not settled. Just there — hands in dirt, the smell of turned earth, Mara occasionally holding something up and commenting on its size, satisfied with a patience that had paid off.

[Quinn did this every season,] he thought. [Knees in the dirt next to her mother.]

He tried to picture her here. Really here — eleven, serious, patient, watching things before touching them.

[I wonder what she would have made of this day,] he thought. [This specific one. The bread and the garden and Mara's hands in the dirt.]  

He kept his hands moving. Didn't say anything.

                              • • •

Edric came home as the light went gold.

Hayato heard the gate first. Mara heard it a half-second later and looked up from the pot fast, the way she did whenever the house was about to be whole again. She didn't say anything. Just turned back to the pot. But her shoulders came down a little.

Edric came in, set something down in the hall, filled the kitchen doorway.

"Good day?" To both of them.

"We pulled the roots," Mara said.

"All of them?"

"The ready ones."

He nodded. Looked at Hayato. "She make you do the whole row?"

"I offered."

Edric's mouth did something that wasn't quite a smile. He washed at the basin and dropped into his chair with the ease of a man who fit the shape of his own kitchen.

The room filled back up. Mara talking, the pot going, the three of them at the table while the light outside slid from gold into grey.

Hayato ate his dinner in the middle of it. Didn't think about Quinn. Didn't think about a note in his mother's handwriting.

I don't deserve this, he thought.

Took another bite anyway.