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Rafe leaned against Elsa, placing a gentle, long-fingered hand on her thigh “I’m sorry, Els,” he said in his soft-spoken, what-have-I-done voice

“It’s okay,” she said,as he was beside her, it was okay She would always forgive hiave her, as frayed as his affection for her so hihter’s love

Lately, that fear had grown al to handle

Loreda had turned twelve and iht were the days of ht, when they’d discussed Heathcliff’s nature and Jane Eyre’s strength Loreda had always been a daddy’s girl, but as a child she’d had room in her heart for both of her parents For everyone, really Loreda had been the happiest of children, always laughing and clapping and de attention For years, she had only been able to sleep if Elsa was in bed with her, stroking her hair

Gone, all of it

Elsa grieved daily for the loss of that closeness with her firstborn At first she’d tried to scale the walls of her daughter’s adolescent, irrational anger; she’d volleyed back ords of love, but Loreda’s continuing, thriving irind her down It had resurrected all the insecurities of childhood Soun to withdraw frorow out of herthat Loreda had finally seen the lack in Elsa that her own family had seen

Elsa felt

a deeply rooted shahter’s rejection In her hurt, she did what she’d always done: she disappeared But all the while, she waited, prayed, that both her husband and her daughter would someday see how much she loved them and they would love her in return Until then, she dared not push too hard or deh

There was soe and became a mother that she kne: it was only possible to live without love when you’d never known it

ON THIS FIRST DAY of school, the town’s only re teacher, Nicole Buslik, stood at the chalkboard, chalk in hand Her auburn hair had worked free from its constraints and become a fuzzy nimbus around her heat-flushed face Sweat turned the lace at her throat a shade darker and Loreda was pretty sure Mrs Buslik was afraid to lift her arms and shoeat stains

Twelve-year-old Loreda sat at her desk, slu attention to today’s lesson It was justThe Great Depression, the drought, blah, blah, blah

It had been “hard ti as Loreda could remember Oh, in the early years, the time before memory, she knew rains had fallen, season after season, nourishing the land Pretty ht of her grandfather’s wheat, golden stalks dancing beneath an enore of tractors rolling over the ground twenty-four hours a day, plowing the earth, churning upup the ground

When had the bad years begun, exactly? It was hard to pinpoint There were so many choices The stock market crash of 1929, some would say, but not the folks around here Loreda had been seven years old then, and she res and loan Grandpa co candles and keeping the prayers with her rosary

That had been bad, the crash, but most of the hardship landed in cities Loreda had never been to Nineteen twenty-nine had been a good rain year, which h for the Martinellis

Grandpa kept riding his tractor, kept planting wheat, even as the prices pluht a brand-new Ford Model AA stake-bed farm truck Daddy had smiled often then and told her stories of faraway lands while Mom did chores