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I’d carve forty more hams for that smile.

I set little Lindsey on the stool next to her. Then Danielle is beside me with two cups of coffee from Marlene’s, holding one out to me.

“Steps,” she says. “Now. Before Bonnie comes back with seconds.”

I follow her out the front door. We sit on the top step in the cold sun, and she hands me a cup.

“You know what she said about you?” Danielle asks. “On the phone, that first night. When she was still in the hospital.”

“No.”

“She said, ‘He doesn’t talk, Danny. Like, at all. He talks with his eyebrows.’ ” Danielle looks at me sideways. “I didn’t believe her.”

“And now?”

Danielle looks at my eyebrows. I raise one. She bursts out laughing.

Through the front window, Lindsey is at her counter with little Lindsey on the stool beside her. The two of them are singing Dolly Parton to a bucket of sunflowers, badly and as loud as they can.

Danielle watches them and smiles.

“She’s exactly the same,” she says. “I was so afraid. Seventeen years. I thought she’d be—I don’t know. Hard. Sad. I thought I broke her. But she’s exactly the same. She still sings like a dying cat.”

“I know.”

“And you like it.”

I think about it for a second. Then I tell her the truth.

“I set an alarm for five-fourteen,” I say. “So I don’t miss the first verse.”

Danielle stares at me. Then she puts her coffee down on the step, wraps both arms around her knees and laughs into them.

“Oh my God,” she says. “You’re so gone. You’re so stupidly, fucking gone for her.”

“Yes.”

“You’re not even going to pretend?”

“No.”

She stops laughing and looks at me carefully, the way Lindsey does when she’s deciding something.

“Can I tell you something?” she asks.

I wait.

“The night I left,” Danielle says, “I sat in Hank’s truck in the parking lot behind this shop. Hank was driving. June was in the middle seat with me. I had a black eye and a garbage bag full of clothes and four hundred dollars. I’d already bought a bus ticket to Portland, but Hank said a ticket in my own name was the first place Brett would look. So it stayed in my glove box, and Hank drove me over the state line to a woman June knew from church in Evanston.” She looks up at the window above the shop. My window. “Lindsey’s light was on. Her grandma had her sleeping upstairs back then. Where you live now.”

I look up at my window. I didn’t know that. I’ve been sleeping in her old room, or I was, until I started sleeping in her bed.

“I watched that light for twenty minutes,” Danielle says. “And I prayed. I’m not a big praying person. But I sat in that truck and prayed that somebody would take care of her. That someday somebody would come along and see her the way I did. All of her. The singing and the nosiness and how she remembers everybody’s mother’s birthday. And take care of her, because she never lets anybody take care of her. And now, all these years later, I come home, and there’s a big, quiet Army Ranger living in her old room and bringing her coffee.”

I don’t know how to answer that, so I don’t try.

“Hank told me about the smoke,” Danielle says. “And the barn.”

“Hank talks a hell of a lot for a man who kept a secret for seventeen years.”