“Like an egg come out with no shell,” Curiosity had said. “A body got no way to give that egg what God saw fit to hold back. His ways are mysterious to behold.”

“Ma says weak shells come from not feeding the chickens right.”

Curiosity had put her head back and laughed. “That too.”

So now there was Callie, crouched down next to Nicholas, and he was smiling at her. For her part, Birdie didn’t like it when strangers came so close. You could smell what they had been eating on their skin, and sometimes worse. Clearly Nicholas wasn’t as fussy as she was, because his smile just got bigger.

From the corner of her eye Birdie saw the little people waiting on the porch, trying to gather the courage to come in and stand beside her so they could hear what was going on. It had to do with them too, now that Ethan and Callie were married.

Mariah slipped her hand into Birdie’s and leaned against her.

“Why does that boy have Daniel’s new puppy? Is it because he’s our cousin?” she whispered.

“No,” Birdie said. “He just likes dogs, and they like him.”

“Everybody likes him. Callie too, because he’s her brother.”

“It looks that way,” Birdie agreed.

“So she got a husband and a brother all at once. But does it mean that she’ll have to let Jemima be her ma again?”

A flush of gooseflesh ran up Birdie’s spine. “I don’t want to talk about Jemima,” she said. “And it’s time we went home.”

They trooped home up the hill together, and there was nothing Birdie could think to do to distract the boys from the one topic that interested them.

“You knew Callie’s father,” Adam said to her. “Does Nicholas take after him?”

“Nicholas Wilde went away before I was born. And anyway, not all children resemble their parents.”

“I sure don’t,” Adam said. Adam with his skin the color of burnt sugar and his dark eyes.

“You look like one of us,” Henry said. “You look like a Savard.”

“Well, why not?” Nathan said. “We’re cousins.”

The truth was, Adam had been raised to be as much a Bonner as any of them. She doubted he ever thought about the family he had been born into. It occurred to Birdie now that Adam knew exactly who he was and where he belonged, but someday he might be curious about what might have been. If he asked, no doubt Jennet would tell him, and how would he feel about that?

“Bonner is as Bonner does.” That was the way Curiosity always answered questions about Adam.

Birdie broke into a slow trot, and the others followed her lead.

Curiosity said, “Slow down and start from the beginning. What is it troubling you?”

Nathan cleared his throat. “I think I know what Birdie means. If Nicholas does stay here in Paradise, sooner or later he’s going to hear some stories about his ma he won’t much like.”

Curiosity looked at Birdie closely. “Is that it?”

That was it, or at least part of it. She didn’t know how to say the rest, and so she simply nodded.

“You little people, listen to me now. All of you, go on out in the sunshine, you going to turn pale as slugs if you stay in this kitchen much longer.” It was the tone Curiosity used when she wasn’t in the mood to argue and every child recognized it. When the door closed behind a scowling Amelie, Curiosity said, “Come on out with it, little girl. You got something else on your mind.”

Finally she said, “It’s about Callie. It’s about the way Callie looked at Nicholas. It wasn’t—it didn’t feel right.”

“She mad?”

“No.”

“Unhappy?”

“No, not unhappy at all. Eager, maybe. But not in a good way eager.”

Curiosity’s hands stilled. “Go on.”

“Like she had a fever on the mind,” Birdie said. “But that’s not right either.”

“But as close as anybody likely to come,” Curiosity said. She stared at nothing for a long moment, and then she sighed.

“Callie has had some hard times. Harder times than most twice her age. She strong, no doubt about that, but everybody got a breaking point. I think for right now we got to trust Ethan to help her come through.”

“Because he’s her husband now.”

“Because he her friend, mostly,” Curiosity said. “The two of them, they understand each other best. But we’ll keep an eye on her anyhow. Do that put your mind to rest?”

“I’m not sure,” Birdie said. She might have simply lied, but Curiosity would have seen it in her face.

“Lord have mercy,” Curiosity said. “Me neither.”

Martha said, “Callie, we have to let him go back to the Red Dog. Otherwise someone will come looking for him.”

They were standing in the hall, talking in low voices while Nicholas played with Hopper in the classroom. He was dragging a bit of string along the floor while the puppy stumbled all over himself trying to catch it. Young children often mishandled puppies out of pure excitement, but Nicholas seemed to have no such problems. Maybe he was slow when it came to some kinds of learning, but he was quick to understand other things.

Nicholas looked up and caught Daniel’s eye. When he laughed, he had a kind of beauty.

“Really, that would be the worst way to open up a conversation,” Martha was saying. “If you want to keep the boy here.”