Nora bounced. “I can help? Really?”
I looked at Ella for confirmation, but she just gave a weary nod.
Scout wouldn’t be left behind either, so when I led them all out to the truck, he bounded in the back with Nora while Ella sat in the front with me.
We didn’t talk much while feeding the barn animals, but Nora did enough chattering for all of us. “This cow is smaller than my school principal,” she announced, pointing at a shaggy steer who barely reached her shoulder. “Does he have a name?”
“He’s just ‘Number Twenty-Three,’” I said. “I try not to get attached, unless they earn it.”
Scout ran figure-eights between us, then took upa post at the edge of the stall, as if fending off coyotes from the feed. Nora followed me, so I let her hold the hay rake as I dropped flakes into the trough. She handled it like a baseball bat, and I had to warn her once about the sharp tines before she figured it out.
The barn was warmer than outside, though my breath still fogged. When I finished with the cattle, I took them to check the horse stalls. Hourglass snorted at the intrusion, but her ears went soft when Nora whispered her name.
As we were closing the door to the tack room, Nora froze and pointed. “Look!” she whispered.
A calico barn cat was curled up on a pile of old saddle blankets, three tiny kittens squirming at her belly. I’d seen the cat a half dozen times that winter, always after setting out cat food and always in passing, but I hadn’t known she’d had a new litter.
Nora dropped to her knees as if drawn by gravity. “Mom!” she shouted. “There are babies!”
Ella appeared in the doorway, still wearing the same tired smile as earlier, but the kittens seemed to push her over some invisible edge. “Are you finished up here?” she asked me, which was the closest she’d get to admitting she wanted to stay.
“I could stay longer,” I said.
Nora was all in. “Can we keep one, Jake? Please?”
Scout barked, just once, like he was asking too.
“That’s up to your mom,” I said, making a pointright off the bat that it wasn’t up to me.
Ella scooped a kitten carefully, cradling it in her palm. She looked like she was weighing the whole world. “We’ll see. They have to stay with their mother for now.”
Nora beamed, which made me happier than I had any business being. The air in the barn felt normal for the first time in a year.
Ella tucked the kitten back beside its siblings and straightened up, giving me a look that I wasn’t supposed to interpret. “Thank you,” she said quietly, brushing shavings off her knees. “For tonight.”
I nodded, and we started the process of locking up the barn, making sure the latches were set, that no water trough had frozen over, and double-checking to make sure every animal had feed.
By the time we got back to their house, Nora’s enthusiasm had faded into the pre-bedtime fog, and she headed off to bed. Caleb left shortly after, heading back to my house, and I stood at the window watching him go.
I was about to ask Ella where she wanted me to sleep when I heard her voice, low in the kitchen. “You want tea or something stronger?”
“Whatever warms me up,” I said, and she poured two mugs.
We sat across the table, arms folded, silence stretching out until it snapped.
“I know who sent that package,” she said.
I waited.
“I mean, I know who would do something like that,” she clarified. “It’s Nora’s father.”
She looked at me from under her lashes, as if waiting for a punchline or a test.
I cleared my throat, debating on telling her that I knew about her ex. “Before he left to go back home, Declan mentioned that he had died. Killed in a boat accident.”
“I don’t think he was killed, I thought I saw him the night of the tree lighting ceremony,” she said, and her hands closed around the mug so tight I thought it’d shatter. “But his father—God, I shouldn’t even be telling you this, it’s all so complicated.” She let the steam from her mug wash over her face. “He’s the Russian mob, and when Mikhail ‘died’, he blamed me.”
“You think he’s here then, the grandfather?”
