Nathan sat at the small kitchen table, and Marcus set a plate in front of him. Eggs, toast, a slice of tomato, simple food, but prepared with care. Nathan ate slowly, partly because his stomach was still unsettled from the concussion, and partly because he was trying to figure out what to say, how to begin apologizing for the damage he’d caused.
Before he could speak, the front door opened, and a young woman walked in carrying a backpack and a stack of library books. She was seventeen or eighteen, tall and pretty with her father’s eyes and her mother’s smile, and she stopped short when she saw Nathan at the kitchen table. “Dad, who’s this?”
“This is Nathan Cole,” Marcus said. “He’s the one who crashed into the South Field yesterday. He’s going to be staying with us for a few days while he recovers. Nathan, this is my daughter, Alicia.” “Hi,” Alicia said cautiously, setting her books on the counter. Then processing what her father had said, “Wait, the crash. How bad is the field?”
Marcus’s expression didn’t change, but Nathan saw something flicker in his eyes. “About a third of it burned, maybe a little more.” Alicia’s face went pale. She looked at her father, then at Nathan, then back at her father. “Dad?” “We’ll figure it out,” Marcus said firmly, the kind of tone that meant the conversation was over.
But Nathan had seen the look that passed between them, had seen Alicia’s stricken expression before she got it under control, and he understood immediately that the damage he’d caused wasn’t just to crops, it was to plans, to futures, to careful calculations that didn’t have room for error.
Over the next three days, as Nathan recovered under Dr. Patterson’s cautious supervision, he observed the Hill household with growing fascination and something that felt uncomfortably like envy. They were poor. That was obvious from the patched furniture and the careful way they managed every resource, but they had something Nathan hadn’t experienced since he was very young, maybe not even then. They had warmth.
Marcus and Alicia moved around each other with easy affection, communicating in shorthand developed over years of being the only family each other had. They made dinner together, washed dishes while talking about Alicia’s college plans, sat on the porch in the evening listening to crickets and not needing to fill the silence with empty words. Nathan found himself drawn to it the way a person who’d been in the cold too long was drawn to fire.
He learned that Alicia had gotten into Columbia University on her own merit, had taught herself advanced calculus from YouTube videos, and wanted to study biomedical engineering so she could design affordable prosthetics for people who couldn’t pay for expensive medical devices. He learned that Marcus woke at five every morning and didn’t stop working until after sunset, that he’d been running this farm alone since his wife died, and that he had the kind of quiet strength that came from surviving things that would have broken most people.