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It takes a while. Trees aren’t in a hurry.

We sit there, stuck together in a pile of flour, while the market packs up outside. Carts rattle past. Somebody’s goat bleats right outside the wall. At one point, we hear the miller out front asking his wife if she’s seen his good sack, and Hattie has to bury her face in my chest so she doesn’t scream laughing.

We finally walk out almost an hour later, still dusted in flour, and Auntie Bess and Auntie Marigold are standing right outside the storehouse door. Arm in arm. Waiting.

They look at Hattie. They look at me. They look at the flour.

“Mm-hm,” Auntie Bess says.

“Mm-hm,” says Auntie Marigold.

Hattie grabs my hand and drags me home without a word.

* * *

That evening, I build her a new bed.

I drag the broken one out to the yard and pick through it for good pieces, and I go to the edge of the forest and bring back a fallen oak. A big one. It came down in the same storm I did. I don’t know if that means anything. Probably not. It’s still good wood.

I work out in the yard while the sun goes down, shirtless because Hattie took my shirt away from me and won’t give it back. She sits on the back step with her knees pulled up, eating bread and honey and watching me. She doesn’t pretend not to.

I don’t need tools for most of it. My hands are strong enough to split the wood along the grain, and I know wood. I know it better than I know anything else in this world, except maybe her. I can feel where it wants to bend and where it wants to hold.

I make the legs twice as thick as her grandpa did. Then I make them thicker.

It’s full dark by the time I’m done carving the headboard. I carry the whole thing inside in pieces and put it together in the corner where the old one was, and then I step back and let her see it.

She comes in with a candle and stops in the doorway.

The headboard is covered in bees. Dozens of little carved bees, flying across the wood between carved honeycomb and carved rowan blossoms. I put one on the corner post, right where she’ll see it when she wakes up.

She doesn’t say anything for a long time. She just walks over and runs her fingers across the bees, one by one.

Then she turns around, and her eyes are wet.

“Rowan,” she says. “Nobody’s ever made me anything.”

I don’t tell her that she made me. In a way. That she walked into a toy shop and said what she wanted out loud, and that’s why I’m here. She’d cry harder, and I don’t know what to do with her crying yet.

So I just pick her up and lay her down on her new bed, and climb in after her.

It doesn’t even creak.

We’ll see how long that lasts.

Seven

Chapter Seven: Hattie

I don’t know how to be taken care of.

I figure that out on day four, when I wake up and my boots are sitting by the bed, cleaned and oiled, with the laces fixed. The ones that broke last winter. The ones I’ve been tying in a knot ever since.

I stare at them for a long time. What the fuck.

Then I go into the kitchen, and there’s porridge on the stove. Real porridge. Not burnt, not runny, with honey swirled in the top and a little pinch of salt, exactly how I make it myself.

“How did you know how I take my porridge?” I ask.