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She holds out her hand. There’s a long sliver of pine buried under the skin at the base of her thumb, the kind that goes in sideways and keeps going.

I sit down on the step beside her and take her hand in mine. It’s small and warm. It fits in my palm with room to spare.

I don’t have tweezers. I have a knife, which I’m not about to take out in this yard. So I use my fingernails, slowly, working the end of it up until I can get a grip.

She watches me do it and doesn’t flinch once.

“You’ve done this before,” she says quietly.

“Kira used to climb the trees in our father’s garden. She always came down full of splinters.” I ease the sliver free and hold it up. It’s nearly an inch long. “She wasn’t allowed to go to my mother with them. She’d get in trouble for climbing.”

“So she came to you.” The way she says it feels different than if anyone else had said it. Only I can’t figure out why.

Evaria takes her hand back and looks at the tiny red mark on her palm. Then she looks at me.

“That’s not an ugly truth,” she says. “That’s a nice one.”

“We’re not finished yet.”

We work through the morning.

She’s not much use with a post-hole digger, and she knows it, so she holds things. Panels, posts, the end of a tape measure. She holds them very seriously, with her tongue between her teeth, like the whole fence will collapse if her concentration slips.

After an hour, a small boy comes out of the back door and sits on the step and watches us.

He’s maybe six. Thin. Dark-haired, with a striped T-shirt on back to front. He doesn’t say anything. He just watches me dig.

Evaria glances at him, then at me, and I understand.

I don’t look at him. Not straight on. I keep digging, and after a while, I set the level down on the grass about halfway between us and leave it there.

Ten minutes later, he’s standing beside it.

“What’s that do?” he asks.

“It tells you if something’s straight or wonky,” I reply.

He picks it up and turns it over in his hands watching the bubble slide back and forth.

“My name is Noah, “ he declares. “Can I tell you if it’s straight?”

“Yeah,” I say. “I’d like that.”

So Noah tells me if the posts are straight. He takes the job very seriously. He makes me move one of them twice. When I ask him what he thinks of the second position, he squints at the bubble for a long time and says, “It’s fine, I guess.”

Halfway through the afternoon, I look up and see a woman standing at an upstairs window. Thin, dark-haired, her hand resting flat against the glass. Two of her fingers are still taped together.

She looks at me. Then at the boy beside me with the level in his hands.

She nods once. Then she steps back from the window, and the curtain falls.

I go back to digging.

***

“Your ugly truth,” Evaria says.

It’s after four. The posts are in, the concrete’s setting, and we’re sitting on the back step with fresh coffee made by Bernadette. Noah’s gone in for his dinner. The yard smells of wet earth and sawdust.