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MAN. BROWN HAT. LOOKED AT C. 2:14 PM.

"Good work, detective," Carolina says. She says it with such genuine respect that Faith straightens her shoulders, glowing.

The rest of the afternoon goes by in a long, bright, sugary stretch. Faith drags Carolina to the hay maze and comes out of it eleven minutes later with straw in her hair. Faith shows her the acorn with a hat and gets the correct word for it, cupule, which she repeats nine times. Faith asks if she's ever really eaten a worm. Carolina, who has been thinking about it, says "Once," with her face composed. Faith asks which kind, and the two of them discuss the relative merits of windfalls for the next fifteen minutes.

I walk behind with my hands in my pockets, and I'm in a lot more trouble than I know how to handle.

She listens to my daughter's questions as if each of them was a clinical report. She never says honey in that voice adults use for children. She just answers, and Faith answers back, and by four o'clock they're discussing the structural flaws in the hay maze like colleagues.

On the walk home, Faith's hand has found Carolina's again.

I don't say anything about it.

I make pancakes for dinner. It's a Saturday tradition, breakfast for dinner, and I've never once been able to make it look like what she asks for. Tonight she asks for a fox. I produce something orange and abstract with two lumps for ears.

She considers it. Carolina, who has been given a dish towel and told to sit, looks at it too.

"That's a fox?"

"It's a very abstract fox."

"It looks like a mitten," Faith says kindly, and eats it.

Carolina laughs into her coffee. She eats three pancakes with butter and syrup and a pile of the blueberries that Faith keeps pushing across to her. She says thank you to me at the end, plainly, like something she means. It's the first time she's looked me full in the face since the donut line.

Her cheeks are flushed from the heat of the kitchen. There's syrup on her thumb. She has the last of the daylight on one side of her face, gold from the window over the sink.

I make myself stack the plates.

After dinner Faith drags the afghan down from the back of the couch and climbs into the corner of it with her book, The Mouse and the Motorcycle, which she's read eleven times. She pats the cushion beside her.

"You can sit here," she tells Carolina.

"I'd love to."

"I'll read the first part and you read the second. You can do the voices."

"I don't know the voices."

"I'll teach you."

I clear the table slowly and wash every dish twice. In the living room Faith's voice goes on, high and sure, giving the mouse a squeak. Then Carolina's, lower and warm and a little uncertain, trying the voice she's been taught and getting it wrong and being corrected.

Faith's laugh. Carolina's. A silence, and a page turning.

When I finally dry my hands and walk to the doorway, the room is dim, lit only by the lamp beside the couch. The book has slid onto Carolina's knee.

Faith is asleep against her side.

She's slumped sideways with her head on Carolina's arm, her mouth open, one boot still on, the other kicked off under the couch.

Carolina hasn't moved. She sits very upright with her free hand resting on the afghan beside my daughter's hair, not touching it, as if she's afraid to.

She looks up and finds me in the doorway. She lifts one finger to her lips.

I stay where I am with the dish towel in my hand. Outside the windows the street has gone blue and the streetlamp at the corner has come on. The kettle ticks on the stove behind me, cooling. The house is quiet in a way I don't think it has ever been quiet with another person in it.

I made up the spare room this morning, while she was giving her statement, with clean sheets and the good quilt.