Cade appeared in the doorway then, looking like he'd been up for hours.
His clothes were dirty.
His hair a mess.
But his eyes were sharp.
"Talking about how much everyone hates us?" he asked casually. "Fun breakfast topic."
"Sit down and eat," Norah said.
"Not hungry."
"Sit down anyway."
Cade hesitated, then slouched into a chair with exaggerated reluctance.
Norah put food in front of him.
He stared at it like it might bite him, then picked up his fork.
"We don't need pity," he said.
"Good thing I'm not offering any."
Norah sat down with her own plate.
"I'm offering food. There's a difference."
"Is there?"
"Yes. Pity is feeling sorry for someone from a distance. Food is standing in a kitchen at dawn making sure you don't starve. One's useless. The other keeps you alive."
Cade considered this, then started eating.
"You're weird."
"I've been called worse."
After breakfast, the boys scattered to their various tasks.
Norah tackled the disaster that was the rest of the house.
Laundry had piled up to the point where some of it had started developing its own ecosystem.
Dishes from previous meals sat crusted with food.
Dust covered every surface thick enough to write in.
She started with laundry, hauling water and heating it in the big pot over the fire.
Her hands were raw within an hour.
The lye soap they had was harsh, stripping skin as efficiently as it cleaned clothes, but she kept working.
Scrubbing shirts and pants and linens that hadn't seen proper cleaning in months.
Ru appeared beside her while she was wringing out a shirt.
"Can I help?" he asked.
Norah looked down at the four-year-old who'd been trying to cook dinner on a stool yesterday.
"You can hand me things from that basket when I'm ready for them. Think you can do that?"
Ru nodded seriously and took up his position.
They worked in silence for a while.
Norah washed.
Ru handed her items.
And slowly, the pile of clean laundry grew while the pile of dirty shrank.
"Why'd you come here?" Ru asked suddenly.
"Your father needed a wife. I needed a place to go."
"But why here? This place is..."
He struggled for the word.
"It's broken."
Norah paused, a wet shirt dripping in her hands.
"Most places are broken in some way. The question is whether you try to fix them or just live with the breaking."
"Pa says some things can't be fixed."
"Your Pa's wrong about that."
Ru looked up at her with surprise.
"You can't say that. Pa's always right."
"No one's always right, honey. Not your Pa, not me, not anyone."
She went back to scrubbing.
"But we can still try to do better than we did yesterday. That's all fixing really is."
Before Ru could respond, shouting erupted from outside.
Norah dropped the laundry and ran toward the sound, Ru right behind her.
She found Thomas and Eli in the yard, facing off like they were about to throw punches.