Page 67 of Charlotte

“She thinks she is.”

“Does she realize she is not?”

“No.”

That small, shared truth eased them both. Lottie laid the drawings carefully on the table.

“May we put these in the field pages?”

“I think that’s a good idea.”

She smoothed the deer track with one finger. “Will you help me add more?”

His left thumb moved once along the spine of the botany book. “When I can.”

That was more than might.

She accepted it with a grateful smile.

“I found three problems with your eastern book,” he said.

“Only three? You are generous.”

“Likely more. I stopped counting because I had work to do.”

Lottie bit back a laugh. “Show me?”

He set the botany volume on the table and opened it with his left hand. The motion was becoming more familiar now, though still careful. He had marked two pages with narrow strips of scrap paper. One page showed a flowering plant he claimed was misnamed in the book. Another gave a habitat description that, according to Peterson, would mislead a person into standing knee-deep in a marsh for no Christian reason.

Lottie listened with growing delight.

Peterson’s voice changed when he spoke of the ridge. It did not grow soft exactly, but it lost some of its guarded edge. He knew which slopes dried first after rain, where the best huckleberries would ripen later in the summer, and which plants children ought to be warned away from, even if the blossoms looked harmless.

“How do you know all this?” she asked.

He looked down at the page. “By staying alive.”

“That cannot be the whole of it.”

“No.”

She waited. His fingers rested on the book’s margin, close to a printed flower that did not quite match the surrounding territory.

“My mother noticed growing things,” he said at last. “She had a habit of naming them aloud, whether a person asked or not.”

Questions arose in her at once—where his mother had learned the names, whether she had taken him walking, whether he had loved those lessons as a boy. Lottie didn’t pry. He had said, my mother, and his thumb had gone still on the page.

“She sounds lovely.”

“She was.”

He did not say more.

Lottie looked down at the book to give him somewhere else to rest his eyes.

“I remember my mother sang while she mended,” she said. “Not well. Delly would say not accurately either, but I loved it.”

Peterson’s gaze flicked to her face.