At thirteen, my mother dropped me at my Aunt June's cattle ranch with my clothes stuffed inside a black garbage bag.
At thirteen, my mother dropped me at my Aunt June's cattle ranch with my clothes stuffed inside a black garbage bag.
Eighteen years later, my father tried to buy that same ranch for my sister, and by sunrise my phone showed eighty-eight missed calls.
Chapter 1: The Black Bag
Nobody in that driveway knew what the land would one day be worth.
Least of all the girl standing in it.
It was the first week of June, and the Montana heat had already turned the road to powder.
The SUV rolled to a stop outside the cattle gate, dark blue and spotless, with Colorado plates and a layer of dust that hadn't been there an hour earlier.
My father, Robert Harper, kept both hands on the wheel and the engine running.
He wore a gold Rolex and a pressed polo shirt, and he never once looked at me.
My mother, Sheryl, stepped out in white sandals, with an orange Hermès Birkin on her arm and a gold Cartier bracelet that clinked each time she moved.
She opened the rear door and pulled out a black garbage bag, tied at the top with a knot.
Inside were my jeans, my sneakers, a paperback, and my toothbrush.
I knew because I had packed it myself, at five that morning, while she watched from the bedroom doorway with her arms crossed.
She dropped it in the gravel at my feet.
It landed with a soft, heavy thump.
In the back seat, my little sister, Laurel, was nine years old and wearing headphones.
She was watching a tablet and swinging her legs.
She didn't look up either.
"Mom," I said. "Where am I supposed to put my..."
"Holly."
Mom crouched slightly, so we were nearly eye to eye, and fixed her mouth into the patient, tight smile she used on waiters.
"Your sister deserves real summers," she said. "You only ruin them."
I heard it.
I understood every word.
It's strange how a sentence can be perfectly clear and still make no sense at all.
"I did something wrong," I said. "Tell me what, and I'll fix it."
"It's not that simple." She stood. She smoothed her blouse. "June will take good care of you."
"When are you coming back?"
Mom was already getting into the car.
"August," she said, without turning around.
The door shut with the heavy, expensive sound of a luxury vehicle.
The engine growled.
Dad lifted two fingers off the wheel, the way you'd wave to a stranger on a country road, and the SUV rolled slowly down the long gravel lane.
I stood in the middle of the road with my bag.
I watched until the taillights became two red dots, then one, then a trembling smear on the heat.
Then there was only dust, hanging in the air.
The cattle lowed behind the fence.
A meadowlark sang from a post.
The whole world kept going, as if nothing had happened.
June found me twenty minutes later.
She came walking up from the barn in a sweat-stained denim shirt, with a coil of baling wire over her shoulder and her gray braid pinned under a sunhat.
She was my father's older sister, forty-seven years old, tall and weathered, with hands like boot leather.
I had met her four times in my life.
She stopped when she saw me.
She looked at the bag.
She looked at the road.
"They said they'd come back in August," I whispered.
June looked down the empty gravel for a long time.
Her jaw tightened.
"Nobody told me that," she said quietly.
Then she did something I'll remember for the rest of my life.
She set down the wire, took the bag out of my hand, and said, "Come on, Holly. Let's get you some water."
She didn't ask a single question.
August came.
Then September, with its first frost on the pasture.
Nobody came.
June never made a speech about it.
She never said the word unwanted, or abandoned, or any of the long, kind words adults use to hurt you gently.
That first evening, she put clean sheets on the spare bed under the eaves and set a tin lamp on the nightstand.
She made grilled cheese in a cast-iron skillet, with the crusts burnt black at the edges, and cut it into triangles, the way you would for a child half my age.
Then she sat at the end of the kitchen table with a seed catalog and pretended to read it, until I finally put my face in my hands and cried.
She didn't hug me.
She didn't say it was okay.
She just kept turning pages, quietly, steadily, like someone keeping a fire going.
When I was done, she slid a fresh napkin across the table.
"Eat," she said. "Then sleep."
The next morning, at five-thirty, she knocked on my door.
In her hand was a pair of stiff leather work gloves, much too big.
"There's a gate that needs fixing," she said. "You can stay as long as you need."
I turned the gloves over in my hands.
They smelled like hay and horse and old rain.
Nobody had ever made staying sound so simple.
I didn't know it yet, but I would wear a pair of those gloves every day for the next eighteen years.
The black garbage bag went into the barn.
June folded it into a neat square, without comment, and put it on a shelf above the workbench.
I never asked why she kept it.
I only knew that every time I walked past it, I felt something twist inside me and then, slowly, begin to ease.
Chapter 2: What the Land Remembers
My parents stopped answering June's calls by October.
In November, a thick manila envelope arrived with a Denver return address.
Inside were my school records, my birth certificate, a vaccination card, and a notarized guardianship form, stamped and signed in blue ink.
Dad's signature slanted hard to the right.
There was no letter.
There wasn't even a sticky note.
June read the form standing up at the kitchen counter, with her glasses pushed to the end of her nose.
Then she folded it in thirds, slid it back into the envelope, and put it in the drawer where she kept the deed to the ranch.
"Well," she said. "That's that."
She never once said a bad word about her brother in front of me.
She didn't have to.
Laurel's life appeared online in bright, glossy squares.
Cancun in January.
Disney in March.
Skiing in Aspen over Christmas, then a cruise out of Miami, with my mother in a white sundress and my father laughing at something outside the frame.
Four people at a table with a cake, the numbers on the candles reading 10.
I counted the faces.
There were always the same three faces.
None of them was mine.
For the first two years, I told myself it was a mistake.
That they'd realized, that they were only waiting for the right moment, that any day a dark blue SUV would turn in at the gate.
At sixteen, standing in a frozen pasture at six in the morning with a bucket of feed in each hand, I finally understood.
It wasn't a mistake.
It was a choice.
I set down the buckets, and I cried for exactly one minute, and then I went back to work.
That's what June had taught me.
You let it hurt, and then you open the gate.
June never treated me like leftovers.
She treated me like help, which, on a ranch, is the highest form of respect.
By fourteen, I could drive the feed truck.
By fifteen, I could pull a calf at two in the morning in a thunderstorm and sew up a cut by flashlight.
She taught me cattle breeding, and how to read a pedigree the way other girls read magazines.
She taught me bookkeeping at the kitchen table on Sunday nights, with a cup of cold coffee and a green ledger.
She taught me fencing, irrigation, and how to read the sky.
She made me finish school, and she made me do it properly.
"A ranch isn't a place," she told me once. "It's a set of promises. You make them to the animals, the grass, the neighbors, and the water. And you keep them, even when nobody's looking."
She also taught me to read a land contract.
Not skim it.
Read it, clause by clause, with a ruler under every line.
"Read the water first," she'd say, tapping the page. "Then the roads. Then the rest. Anybody can sell you dirt. Water is what you're actually buying."
At eighteen, she showed me a yellowed document in a plastic sleeve.
The water right for Cedar Creek, dated 1889.
It was the oldest and most senior on the whole stretch of the river, which meant that in a dry year, every user downstream would have to shut off their pumps before Cedar Ridge lost a drop.
"Someday," June said, "somebody will want this land for something that isn't grass. They'll offer you more money than you've ever seen. Remember that paper."
"Why would anyone want it?"
She just smiled, and slid the document back into its sleeve.
"Land remembers who takes care of it, Holly. Sooner or later, so does everyone else."
At twenty-two, I came home from agricultural college in Bozeman with a diploma and a list.
I started rotational grazing, moving the herd across the pastures in a slow, careful rhythm so the grass could recover.
I leased a hundred and forty unused acres to a solar company, on a twenty-five-year contract I read four times.
I put every dollar of the first lease check into a refrigerated trailer, and I started selling June's grass-fed beef directly to restaurants and families in Livingston, Bozeman and Billings.
Within three years, the label on our packages read CEDAR RIDGE — JUNE'S GRASS-FED, and a ranch that had been scraping by on thirty-one head was turning a profit.
June pretended not to be proud.
She'd say, "Not bad, kid," and go check a fence she'd already checked.
When she d*ed, nine years later, in the spring, in her own bed with the window open to the pasture, she left everything to me.
The ranch, the herd, the label, the little cluttered office in the barn.
Not because I had been left there.
Because I had earned my place there.
I never contacted my parents.
Not to tell them about June.
Not to tell them about the ranch.
Not once.
Six months later, on a gray Tuesday in October, my cell phone buzzed in the barn office.
The screen said MARCO HERRERA, HERRERA & BLACK REALTY.
"Ms. Harper? I'm sorry to call out of the blue. I have a buyer who's very interested in Cedar Ridge."
"It's not for sale."
"I told him that. Twice."
"Then why are you calling?"
There was a pause on the line.
"Because the buyer is Robert Harper."
The pen in my hand snapped.
Outside the window, the herd was drifting across the south pasture in the long afternoon light, and for a moment I couldn't hear anything but my own heartbeat.
"He says it's a gift for his younger daughter," Marco went on, carefully. "A wedding present. And he's mentioned there might be a family ownership issue. A claim on his late sister's estate."
I almost laughed.
"There isn't."
"That's what I told him. He asked me to pull the county record before our meeting tonight. I thought you should hear it from me first."
I looked at the green ledger on the shelf, the water right in its sleeve, and the folded black square above the workbench.
"Pull it," I said. "Show him everything."
I didn't sleep that night.
I fed the horses, mended a fence that wasn't broken, and sat on the porch step in the dark with a cold mug of coffee, watching the road.
At eight-forty, Marco texted: "Meeting done. Call me."
I didn't.
At eleven, my phone began to buzz.
At midnight it was still buzzing.
I turned it face down on the porch rail and listened to it crawl across the wood like a beetle.
By sunrise, when I finally picked it up, the screen said eighty-eight missed calls.
Chapter 3: Eighty-Eight
I listened to every one of them.
It took forty minutes, sitting on the porch step with a blanket over my shoulders and the sun just starting to color the ridge.
Thirty-one were from Dad.
At eleven that night, his voice was smooth and warm, the voice he used on clients.
"Holly. Robert Harper. Your father. We should talk, honey. It's been too long."
By two in the morning, it had hardened.
"I don't know what games you're playing. Call me back."
At four, it cracked.
"Name a number. Any number. Three million. Five. Just call me."
Twenty-nine were from Mom.
The first few were bright and breathless.
"Sweetheart! It's Mom! We've missed you so much."
The middle ones were tearful.
"After everything we did for you, Holly. All those years."
The last ones I played only halfway.
"You owe this family. You owe your sister. Pick up the phone."
I deleted each one the moment it finished, and my hands didn't shake.
That surprised me.
I had imagined, for eighteen years, how it would feel to hear her voice again.
I had never imagined feeling nothing.
The last twenty-eight were from a number I didn't recognize, with a Denver area code.
They were all the same.
Short.
Quiet.
"Hi. It's Laurel. I don't know if you remember me. Please call."
"Hi. It's Laurel again. I'm sorry. Please."
"It's me. I know it's late. I just want to talk."
The twenty-eighth message was nearly a minute long.
It came in at 5:12 in the morning, and her voice sounded raw, like she'd been crying for hours.
"Holly, I don't know what Dad told you. I didn't know about the ranch. I didn't ask for a ranch. I didn't even know you were still..." She stopped. She breathed. "I found out tonight what they did. Not all of it. Enough. I'm so sorry. I'd like to meet you, if you'll let me. That's all I want. Please call me back."
I saved that one.
At five-forty, I went to the barn office.
I wasn't looking for anything.
I only needed to be near something June had touched.
I opened the bottom drawer of the old oak desk, where she'd kept the deed and the notarized form, and found something beneath them that I'd never noticed.
A manila folder.
Two letters, stapled to the inside cover.
They were on thick, cream-colored letterhead from an outfit called PRAIRIE GATE HOLDINGS, LLC, with a post office box in Denver.
The first was dated three years ago.
The second, eleven months ago.
Both made the same offer for Cedar Ridge Ranch, first for two million dollars, then for three, and both ended with the same polite line: "We would be pleased to discuss any terms."
Across the top of the second letter, in June's firm red pencil, three words were scrawled.
ROBERT'S. DON'T SELL.
Underneath, smaller, she had added another.
WATER.
My coffee had gone cold in my hand.
I stood in that cluttered office, with the dust and the green ledger and the folded black square on its shelf, and I felt every piece of the last eighteen years begin, very slowly, to slide into place.
I picked up my phone.
It rang before I touched it.
"Holly, it's Marco." His voice was low and urgent. "I'm sorry to call this early. I couldn't sleep. After the meeting, I did some digging."
"Go on."
"Your father's firm is called Harper Land Partners. Prairie Gate is one of three shell companies they've used over the past four years. They've quietly bought up twenty-nine hundred acres around Cedar Ridge, in parcels, so nobody would notice the pattern."
"Why?"
"They're building a data center. A big one. Fourteen hundred acres of server halls, a power substation, a cooling system that needs a river." He paused. "It's called the Summit Ridge Compute Campus. They need four thousand acres, a transmission corridor, and ten thousand acre-feet of senior water. Cedar Ridge has all three."
I closed my eyes.
Read the water first.
"The gift for Laurel," I said.
"Was cover. If he'd come to me as Harper Land Partners, I'd have quoted a hundred million. He told me it was a wedding present, a sentimental family thing, so I'd name a price like a man doing a favor."
"And the family claim?"
"He's told his investors, and the county planning commission, that Harper Land Partners already controls Cedar Ridge through his late sister's estate. He's been saying it for months." Marco swallowed. "Holly, the rezoning hearing is at nine this morning. They're voting on whether to approve the whole project, and the approval is contingent on proof of site control. If your father stands up in that room and says what he's been saying..."
"Then the first thing he'll find out," I said slowly, "is that his sister left everything to the daughter he threw away."
I didn't change my clothes.
I was wearing the same jeans I'd worn all week, with a smear of dried mud on one knee and a green work shirt with the sleeves rolled.
I washed my face at the barn sink, braided my hair, and put on June's old straw hat.
Then I went to the shelf above the workbench, took down the folded square of black plastic, and tucked it under my arm.
I took the water right in its plastic sleeve.
I took the manila folder.
I took the green ledger, because June always said you should never walk into a room with money in it without your own books.
Ty Sayer, our foreman, came out of the bunkhouse in his socks, rubbing his eyes.
"Holly? Where are you going?"
"To town."
"Want me to come?"
"No." I climbed into the truck and started the engine, and the whole old frame shook, the way it always did. "Feed the herd, Ty. I have a meeting."
The sun cleared the ridge as I turned out of the gate.
I drove down the same gravel lane where a dark blue SUV had once rolled away without me.
This time, I was the one leaving.
And I was going to be on time.
Chapter 4: Site Control
The Park County commission chamber smelled like floor wax and old coffee.
It was packed to the walls.
Ranchers in clean hats.
Women from the Grange.
A reporter from the Livingston Enterprise, a pair of men in suits from some firm in Seattle, and a hundred and fifty neighbors who had driven in from the valley to find out what was going to happen to their water.
I slipped in through the back door just as the chair, a stern woman named Gayle with silver hair and reading glasses on a chain, called the item.
Nobody noticed me.
I stood against the rear wall, in my muddy boots, with a garbage bag under my arm.
My father was at the podium.
I hadn't seen him in eighteen years.
He was heavier now, grayer, in a navy suit with a silk pocket square, and the gold Rolex flashed under the fluorescent lights each time he touched the screen behind him.
The slide said SUMMIT RIDGE COMPUTE CAMPUS, in clean white letters, over an aerial photo of the valley.
It was my valley.
He spoke in the smooth, practiced voice of a man who had never been told no and meant to keep it that way.
"We're a local family, madam chair. Harper roots run deep in this valley. My late sister, June Harper, ran cattle on Cedar Ridge for thirty years. I'm proud to tell you that the legacy parcel at the heart of this campus is secured, through my family, and fully committed to this project."
In the front row, my mother sat very straight in a cream suit, with the orange Birkin balanced on her knee and the gold Cartier bracelet gleaming on her wrist.
She nodded along, smiling like a woman at a charity luncheon.
Beside her, one row back, sat a young woman in a gray cardigan, with my father's eyes and my mother's mouth, staring at her hands.
Laurel.
She was twenty-seven.
I knew her instantly.
The gray-suited woman from Seattle leaned toward the commissioner and murmured something.
"Mr. Harper," the chair said, "to confirm for the record. You're representing to this body that Harper Land Partners has site control of the Cedar Ridge parcel."
"We do, madam chair."
"Thank you. We'll move to public comment."
I walked down the aisle.
My boots left dry dust on the carpet.
Heads turned, one by one.
Someone whispered, "Is that June's girl?"
Someone else said, "That's Holly. From Cedar Ridge."
I reached the microphone, tapped it once, and the sound boomed through the room.
"Holly Harper," I said. "I'd like to be heard."
My father turned.
It was a slow turn, as if his whole body had to be convinced.
For a second, his face showed nothing at all.
Then it drained, the way a glass empties.
The pointer slipped out of his hand and clattered on the floor.
"That can't be right," he whispered.
It was the exact sentence Marco had described.
It carried clearly through the silent chamber.
"Ms. Harper," said the chair. "You're on the record."
I set the manila folder and the plastic sleeve on the podium, and laid the folded black square on top of them.
"I'm the sole owner of Cedar Ridge Ranch," I said. "The deed is recorded in this county under my name alone. My aunt, June Harper, left it to me when she d*ed in March. I've brought a certified copy."
A murmur rolled through the room, low and deep, like wind in grass.
"The ranch is not committed to this project. It has never been for sale. Harper Land Partners made two written offers through a shell company called Prairie Gate Holdings, and my aunt declined both in writing."
I held up the letter, with its red pencil.
ROBERT'S. DON'T SELL.
"Mr. Harper told this commission, just now, that he has site control of my land. He doesn't. He never did."
Nobody coughed.
Nobody breathed.
The reporter from the Enterprise had stopped writing and was simply staring.
"And the water," I said, "belongs to Cedar Ridge. The right on Cedar Creek was filed in 1889, and it's the most senior on this stretch of river. In a dry year, ten thousand acre-feet of it will go to the cattle and the neighbors before one drop goes to a server hall. It isn't for lease. It isn't for sale. And it isn't a gift."
"Holly." My father found his voice, thick and cracked. He came around the podium with his hands out, palms open, the way you'd approach a spooked horse. "Sweetheart. We can talk about this. Family doesn't..."
"You haven't called me that since you drove away from a gravel driveway in June," I said, quietly.
I picked up the folded black plastic.
I shook it open.
The sound of it filled the chamber, a crackle like fire catching.
Mom gasped.
"This is what I came to your sister's summer with," I said. "My clothes, in a garbage bag. I was thirteen. Mom told me she deserved real summers, and I only ruined them."
I turned it in my hands.
"I didn't ruin anything. I spent eighteen years taking care of the one thing you couldn't buy. And my aunt always said that land remembers who takes care of it."
I looked around at the neighbors, the old ranchers with their hats in their laps.
"So does this county."
For a long, long moment, nobody moved.
It was the quietest room I have ever stood in.
Then, from the third row, an old man in a canvas jacket, Merle Kessinger, who had sold feed to my aunt for thirty years, stood up very slowly.
He took off his hat.
And then somebody else stood.
And somebody else.
Within seconds, the entire room had risen to its feet, not clapping, not shouting, just standing, a hundred and fifty people holding their hats against their chests.
"Mr. Harper," the chair said, in a voice like ice. She had taken off her glasses. "You've represented, on the record and under oath, that you control this parcel. Is that statement accurate?"
My father opened his mouth.
Nothing came out.
"Madam chair," said the woman from Seattle, rising, white-lipped. "On behalf of our investors, we'd like to request that this item be withdrawn."
"Granted."
The gavel came down once.
My mother stood up so fast her Birkin slid off her lap and spilled across the floor.
Lipstick, a compact, a heavy leather wallet.
She ignored it.
"This is a misunderstanding," she hissed. "Holly, you've always been..."
"Mom," said a small, steady voice behind her. "Stop."
Laurel stood.
She was shaking.
But she didn't sit down, and she didn't look away.
"Please stop talking," she said. "I've heard enough."
Then she turned, picked up her purse, and walked out of the chamber.
She didn't go to the parking lot.
She went into the hallway, and sat down on a bench beneath a framed photo of the county courthouse, and waited.
Chapter 5: Real Summers
Laurel was sitting on the bench in the hallway with her hands pressed between her knees, like a kid waiting outside a principal's office.
I stopped a few feet away.
Neither of us said anything.
Through the wall, I could hear the commissioners shuffling papers, and a man's voice rising and falling, and my father saying something about "a clerical misunderstanding."
"You look like Dad," Laurel said finally. "Around the eyes."
"You look like Mom."
She laughed, and it cracked in the middle.
"That's the worst thing anyone's ever said to me."
I sat down beside her, leaving a cushion's width of bench between us.
Her gray cardigan had a loose thread at the cuff.
She'd been twisting it for an hour.
"I was nine," she said. "In the back seat. I had headphones on, and a movie playing. I heard what Mom said to you through the window." She looked at her knees. "I heard it, Holly. And I turned the volume up."
"You were nine."
"I'm twenty-seven now." Her voice shook. "For eighteen years, they told me you chose it. That you loved the ranch and hated the city and didn't want to see us. When I was sixteen, I got June's number from an old address book and called, and Mom picked up the extension and hung up on me. She said it was a wrong number."
My throat tightened.
"Last night, Dad's lawyer said something in the car. About the guardianship papers. About how it was 'cleaner' with you out of the picture. I made them pull over." She wiped her face with the back of her wrist. "I called you twenty-eight times. I didn't know what else to do."
"I saved the last one," I said.
Her head came up.
"The long one. At five-twelve in the morning."
She stared at me.
Then she folded forward, and I did something I hadn't planned.
I put my arm around her shoulders.
She smelled like airport coffee and hotel soap.
She shook for a long time.
What happened to my parents took about six weeks.
The Park County attorney referred the matter to the state, because telling a public commission you control land you don't is not a clerical misunderstanding.
The Seattle investors withdrew by Friday.
Harper Land Partners' three shell companies were dissolved in November, and the twenty-nine hundred acres around Cedar Ridge, bought on loans against the house in Denver, went to the bank in January.
I read it all in the Livingston Enterprise, in the barn office, with a mug of coffee and no satisfaction.
The orange Birkin turned up on a consignment site in Boulder in February.
I never learned who sold it.
My father called once more, on a Sunday night.
I let it ring four times.
Then I picked up, and said, "Dad. I'm only going to say this once. Laurel is welcome here. You aren't."
There was a long silence on the line.
"Holly," he said, in a voice I'd never heard him use. "I don't know how to..."
"I know," I said. "Neither did I, at thirteen."
I hung up.
It was the last time we spoke.
In March, the neighbors and I signed the paperwork.
Twenty-nine families, a land trust, and a notary with a bad cold, around the long table in the Grange hall.
The water right from 1889 and every acre of Cedar Ridge went under a permanent conservation easement.
No data center.
No subdivision.
Nothing but grass, cattle, and the creek, for as long as there is a Montana.
June's promise, written down.
Merle Kessinger, eighty-one, cried openly during the signing and said, "She'd have loved this," about three times.
He wasn't wrong.
Laurel came to the ranch on the first Saturday of June.
She arrived in a rental car, with a canvas duffel bag and a cardboard tray of coffees, and she stopped at the cattle gate and stood very still.
Same gravel.
Same fence line.
Same meadowlark on the same post.
I walked down the lane to meet her, in June's old straw hat.
"I didn't know if I should bring something," she said. "I brought coffee. And a bag. And I didn't know what to say."
"You don't have to say anything."
"Is it okay that I'm here?"
I took the duffel from her shoulder, the way June once took a black bag out of my hand.
Then I reached into my back pocket and pulled out a pair of work gloves.
They were stiff, much too big, and they smelled like hay and old rain.
"There's a gate that needs fixing," I said. "You can stay as long as you need."
Laurel looked at the gloves.
She put them on, one finger at a time, and when she looked up, she was smiling and crying at once.
"Real summers?" she whispered.
"Real work," I said. "The summers come after."
That evening, we planted tomatoes behind the house, in a long bed beside the porch.
The soil was cold, and the nights were still sharp, so I went to the barn.
I took the folded black square from the shelf above the workbench, where it had sat for eighteen years.
Laurel watched me from the doorway.
"Is that...?"
"Black plastic warms the ground," I said. "June taught me. It gives the roots a head start."
I cut the bag open along its seams and flattened it across the bed, and we pinned it down with stones.
Then we cut small holes in it, one by one, and set the seedlings through.
It was a quiet evening.
The cattle lowed along the fence, the sun slid behind the ridge, and the light turned the whole valley gold.
Laurel pressed the soil around the last plant with both hands.
"Do you think she knew?" she asked. "Aunt June. That someday somebody would use it for this?"
I thought about a woman with a gray braid, sitting at the end of a kitchen table with a seed catalog, turning pages for as long as it took.
"I think she knew," I said, "that land remembers who takes care of it."
I looked at my sister's dirty hands, and the green shoots rising through the black.
May you like
"And so do people."
THE END
