Grace's eyes widened.
“Like Mama?”
Caleb felt the question strike the room.
Adeline set down the ladle and pulled out the chair beside Grace.
“Yes,” she said gently. “Like your mama.”
“Did you cry?”
“Every day for a long while.”
“Do you still?”
Adeline took a moment before answering.
“Sometimes. But not every day.”
Grace looked down at her bowl.
“Pa says Mama's in heaven.”
“I believe your pa.”
“Then why does he look sad when we talk about her?”
Caleb's shoulders stiffened.
Samuel stared at his supper. Ruth had stopped moving her spoon altogether.
Adeline did not look at Caleb for permission to answer. She looked at Grace.
“Because loving someone doesn't end when they leave us. Sometimes it makes us miss them more when we remember the good things.”
Grace thought about that.
“Will we stop missing Mama?”
“No,” Adeline said. “But I think, little by little, you'll find that remembering her can bring you comfort as well as sadness.”
Grace was silent for a long time.
Then she asked, “Do you think she'd like you?”
The question was so innocent that Caleb could not bring himself to interrupt it.
Adeline's eyes flickered toward him. Something passed across her face—uncertainty, perhaps, or the awareness that she had stepped into a place where she had not been invited to stand.
“I hope she would,” she said at last. “But I don't think I could ever take your mama's place.”
Grace considered this carefully.
“Good.”
Adeline blinked.
“Good?”
“Mama's place is Mama's place.”
“That is true.”
“But you could have your own place.”
No one spoke.
Caleb looked at his daughter, then at the woman who had arrived on his doorstep with a nearly empty canteen and a face made pale by hunger. He wondered whether Grace understood what she had said. Perhaps she did. Children often recognized truths adults spent years avoiding.
Adeline reached for her spoon.
“I would be grateful for that.”
After supper, Caleb helped Samuel repair the wagon. Grace sat beside them with the rag doll, while Ruth brought every button in the house to the table and insisted that each one be examined for suitability as a wheel.
Adeline mended Caleb's coat.
She did it near the fire, bent over the torn sleeve with a needle between her fingers. Her stitches were small and neat, and she worked with the quiet concentration of someone who had spent much of her life repairing things that other people discarded.