Victoria looked down at her muddy sleeve. "Not at the moment, I'm afraid."
"Are you here to buy our farm?" Lily asked.
The question struck with the peculiar force of something a child shouldn't have had reason to consider. Ethan saw Victoria register it, and he wished he could gather the words out of the air and put them somewhere safer. He crouched beside his daughter.
"No one's buying our farm, sweetheart. This is Ms. Hayes. She came to talk to me about some business."
"We don't have much business," Lily observed. "Except eggs. And the tractor keeps being rude."
Victoria lowered herself a little so they were closer to eye level. "I've heard the tractor is difficult."
"It makes a noise like a sick dinosaur." Lily considered her. "Do you like dinosaurs?"
"Very much."
"Then you're okay." Lily took her father's free hand and began pulling him toward the house. "We have to feed Biscuit before he eats the flowerpots again."
Biscuit was a goat, not a dog, as Victoria discovered when a broad-headed animal with astonishingly innocent eyes emerged from behind the barn and immediately attempted to chew the corner of her discarded jacket. Ethan rescued it and gave her an apologetic look. Victoria laughed again, and Lily looked delighted by the sound. It was a small moment, no bigger than a breath, but it felt unexpectedly real.
Ethan had not always lived in a world measured by the number of things that could go wrong before breakfast. Four years earlier he had been married to Claire, a woman who could make an argument with a broken irrigation pump sound like a joke and could grow marigolds in soil other people described as hopeless. They had married young, worked hard, made mistakes, and imagined they had years to correct them. Their daughter was three when Claire died after an aggressive illness that lasted just long enough to convince the family it might last much longer.
The months afterward had blurred together. Ethan remembered the hospital invoices, the heavy casserole dishes neighbors brought to the porch, and the terrible effort of learning which hairbrush Lily preferred. He remembered waking in the night because his body still expected to hear Claire moving in the kitchen. Most of all, he remembered his daughter standing in the bedroom doorway one morning, clutching a stuffed rabbit, asking why Daddy looked sad even when he wasn't crying.
From then on, he tried to give Lily a life in which sadness existed but did not swallow everything else. He fed the chickens before dawn, packed her lunch in a dented metal box, and left little notes beneath her sandwiches. Sometimes they were jokes. Sometimes they were drawings of a lopsided sun. When money was scarce, he made pancakes for dinner and called it a special occasion.
The farm was sixty-eight acres of mixed pasture, hay ground, a neglected but still productive apple orchard, and vegetable plots that brought in money only when weather and buyers happened to agree. It belonged to Ethan's family through three generations, although belonging and being paid for were not the same thing. There was an equipment note secured against the property, a mortgage from the years of Claire's treatment, and a running account at June Ellis's feed store that Ethan tried not to think about whenever June said she could give him another month.