no longer knew another way to live.

One evening she asked, How long has it been like this?

He read the question and stared at the stove for several beats before he answered.

Since childhood.

Doctors said it was tied to the deafness.

No cure.

Did you believe them? she wrote.

His pencil pressed hard enough to dent the page.

No.

Three nights later, he collapsed in the middle of supper.

The chair struck the floor.

A bowl shattered.

Elias dropped to one knee, then both hands, clutching the side of his head so hard Clara thought he might tear the skin.

She grabbed the lamp, knelt behind him, and pushed his hair back from the ear.

Something moved deep in the inflamed canal.

For a second she thought the light was wrong.

Then it shifted again, dark and small and horribly alive.

Clara’s stomach lurched, but the shock turned hard inside her.

She boiled water, cleaned her sewing tweezers with alcohol, and wrote on the notebook with a steadier hand than she felt.

There is something inside your ear.

Let me take it out.

He shook his head at once.

It’s dangerous, he wrote.

So is leaving it there.

Do you trust me?

He looked at her for a long time.

Snow tapped the window.

The stove snapped.

At last, he gave one slow nod.

Clara lifted the lamp, braced one wrist with the other, and guided the tweezers inward.

Elias gripped the edge of the table until the knuckles whitened.

She felt resistance almost immediately, something fibrous and deep.

She pulled harder.

A long blackened plug slid free.

It was twisted sheep’s wool, stiff with years of dried filth.

An earwig kicked weakly from the matted center.

At the far end sat a tiny lead pellet, slick with old blood.

Clara nearly dropped the tweezers.

Elias stared at the thing with raw recognition.

Then the kettle on the stove gave a thin, high hiss.

His head snapped toward it.

Clara did not breathe.

She lifted a spoon and struck the pot once.

The sound was small and sharp.

Elias flinched like a man touched by a ghost.

He seized the notebook and wrote one name.

Pike.

Doctor Amos Pike had told him since childhood that the pain and deafness were the work of fate, not injury.

Clara cleaned the blood from Elias’s neck and looked again at the filthy plug.

Wound through the wool was a thread of dark red cloth, finer than anything in the house, like a strip torn from a town coat lining.

Before dawn, while changing his pillow, she found a seam in the ticking that had been stitched shut by hand.

She opened it carefully and drew out a brittle scrap of folded paper.

The writing belonged to a woman.

If this packing ever comes loose, do not let Pike touch him again.

Mercer knows what happened.

Keep the north spring deed from him.

At the bottom, Elias touched the name with one finger.

Rosalie.

My mother.

When he was calm enough to write, the memory came in broken pieces.

He had been nine.

Mercer Hale, already drinking that afternoon, had taken Elias and his father, Mateo Barragan, to the creek bottoms to shoot grouse.

Mercer fired low.

Elias remembered the blast at