Haisley woke to the sound of the house breathing wrong. It was a low, wet rhythm—her mother’s lungs drawing in heat and letting it out again, a sound like a kettle someone forgot on the burner. The quilts tangled around her mother’s shoulders were steamers of damp wool. Haisley counted breaths as if counting trout nets: in, two—out, three—each one a measure of time she could waste or spend. Fifteen days. That number was a basin she’d already been staring into, trying to catch the reflection of what would happen next. The room smelled of boiled garlic and broth, the smell of trying to keep a fever from becoming a verdict. A cast-iron pot hissed on the stove behind the bedroom door. Her grandmother, Mabel Weller, moved like a shadow across the threshold with a cup every few hours, her face a map of old grudges and newer calculations. Gideon Bradley snored down the hall, the kind of snore that felt like ownership. The curtains were drawn against the river light; in Marrow Creek dawn came thin and gray, like a half-remembered apology. Haisley rested her cheek on the mattress and watched her mother. Rosa Bradley’s lashes fluttered. Her skin was the color of paper money soaked and dried—thin, blotched, soft. Every so often, her mouth would open and Haisley would see the ghost of the last thing that had happened in the other life: the hand around her own