Alden saw Freya’s thin waist-length hair disappear behind the first wave of huckleberry and rhododendron and he didn’t budge. He sighed as one sighs at the first snow, at a crescent moon. “I am captured and recaptured,” he thought and then he went downstairs to make the oatmeal.

Eyrie was already making the oatmeal. She’d watched her mother for eleven years and now her own hands mimicked Freya’s. Her palms scooped up and brought in a tight fist the same quantity of oats to the steaming pot. Her thumb and two fingers took the same pinch of salt from the saltbox and sprinkled it. She guided the spoon around the inside edges of the honey jar and gathered there just the right amount of sweetness to drizzle in letters and pictures into the bubbling oatmeal. She rummaged in the sack of dried apricots, chopped, and stirred. The meal, once it was mounded into crockery bowls, set on the table next to the milk and spoons, was the same in each particular of taste, and scent, and appearance as if Freya herself had prepared it. Eyrie poured a mote of milk around the oats in her bowl and looked at her father for the first time that morning. Alden made a lake of milk in the center of his bowl, and ate.

When Eyrie had eaten her last bite Alden reached for her bowl and took it to the sink.

“Mom left,” she told him.