Chapter 1

The power had been out for thirty minutes when Luke came into the sugarhouse with ice in his beard and accusation already set in his jaw.

I’d left Walter in his downstairs sickroom with the woodstove ticking and his emergency pendant on the blanket beside him. Maribel had arrived at four, before the lines went down, because she always arrived when the weather gave her an excuse. She stood in my kitchen with her nurse’s tote and her reading glasses on a chain, telling me Walter needed his afternoon pills and I looked pale. I knew what her version of pale meant. It meant unstable. It meant she’d already started writing the story in her head.

The baby monitor was small, black, and cheap. I’d bought it at a thrift store in Morrisville two weeks earlier and never told Luke. It wasn’t for the baby yet. The baby wasn’t due until January. I’d told myself I wanted to test it, that I could put it in the dooryard and hear the goats. That was a lie I could live with. The truth was that I’d started waking up with my tongue tasting bitter and my arms too heavy, and I wanted to know what happened in the sugarhouse when I wasn’t meant to hear.

At 4:40, I slipped out the kitchen door while Maribel was running water in the sink. The freezing rain had glazed the dooryard into a sheet of glass. I held the rail and walked sideways to the sugarhouse, where the backup Wi-Fi router blinked green in the office even with the power dead. I hid the camera in the feed bucket, behind the scoop, lens facing the evaporator. Then I turned it on and watched the red light pulse once.

I didn’t hear Luke until the sugarhouse door banged open.

“What the hell are you doing out here?” he said.

I turned. He was leaning against the doorframe, his Carhartt dark with rain, his boots shedding slush. His eyes went past me to the feed bucket, then back to my face.

“Checking the router,” I said. “Walter’s monitor cuts out when the generator cycles.”

“Walter’s monitor,” he repeated. “You’re supposed to be in the house.”

“I was. Maribel’s there.”

Something ugly moved across his face. He hated when I said his mother’s name like that, like she was a problem instead of a saint. He stepped in and pulled the door shut behind him. The lantern light jumped.

“You think I don’t know what you’re doing?” he said. “Sneaking around. Talking to your sister. Acting like you’re the only one who does anything.”

I kept my voice low. “I’m not doing anything but checking a router.”

He came closer. I could smell beer under the woodsmoke. He’d been in the barn with the generator and the chainsaw, and now he wanted a fight the way some men want a drink.

“You were in my office,” he said. “What’d you take?”

“Nothing.”

“You’re lying.”

He grabbed my wrist. I flinched, and my hand went to my apron pocket. The monitor was there. I’d scooped it out of the feed bucket without thinking when I heard him. The red light was hidden under my fingers, still pulsing.

Luke saw the movement. His eyes narrowed.

“What’s that?”

“Nothing.”

He let go of my wrist and backhanded me across the cheek.

The blow turned the world white. My shoulder struck the black stainless steel of the evaporator, and I slid down it, scraping my hip along the cold metal. I landed hard on my knees with one arm wrapped around my belly. The pain came in two places, cheek and shoulder, then a third, lower, a deep ache that made me gasp.

Luke stood over me. His palm slammed the wall beside my head. The whole sugarhouse seemed to flinch.

“You stumbled,” he said. “Say it.”

I couldn’t say anything. I was trying to breathe. The baby kicked once, hard, as if he knew.

“Say it, Cora.”

“I stumbled,” I whispered.

Bootsteps scraped the threshold. Maribel stood in the doorway with her cardigan buttoned neat over her scrubs, a plastic bottle of blue capsules in her gloved hand. The lantern light caught the gray in her bob. She looked at me on the floor, then at Luke, and her voice was calm as a nurse taking a temperature.

“Make sure she takes the blue ones,” she said. “Before the clerk calls back.”

Luke’s gaze dropped from my face to my apron.

The red light pulsed under the canvas, bright enough to show through the weave.

He reached down.

I twisted my shoulder into the evaporator and flattened my thumb over the memory card slot as his fingers closed on the monitor through the apron cloth. The red light flared between us. He never looked at the slot. He never saw the tiny card.

“What’s this?” he said.

Maribel’s shadow stretched across the dark boards. “Luke.”

“I said, what’s this?”

I stared up at him and kept my thumb where it was.