Horizon. Sophie Littlefield

to baking flat breads, to boiling river water to purify it. There was no time for heating tea or leftovers, barely even for warming one’s hands over the flames.

       But Jay spoke before she had a chance. “This is a hell of a thing, Cass.”

       She was surprised at the approbation in his voice. He leaned back against the counter, his jeans slung low under a gut that had been slowly disappearing ever since Cass had known him. No matter how much kaysev a person ate, it wasn’t enough to make or keep them fat. Even Fat Mike was lean these days, though the nickname stuck.

       “What do you mean?”

       Jay winced, closing his eyes for a moment as if the conversation pained him. “Sammi’s been to see me.”

       Cass set a hand on the back of a kitchen chair to support herself as she absorbed this fresh bad news. Sammi had told. Despite Cass’s deep anguish over hurting Dor’s daughter, she had never considered that Sammi would want revenge against her. But of course, Cass would be much easier to hurt than her father. Their affair didn’t go against any of New Eden’s covenants, and there were those who might even admire him for keeping a couple of women in play…but Cass had trouble fitting into New Eden from the start and this would only make people that much more reluctant to befriend her—

       “She told us all about it. How she’d had her suspicions, about how people were talking.”

       Somehow the knowledge that Sammi suspected the affair troubled Cass even more. Would that have been enough—would knowing that they were hurting her have been enough to make them stop? Cass hoped the answer was yes, but there would be no way to know now.

       “Look, I know we messed up. But I never meant to, to hurt anyone. We just, it was private, it—”

       “‘We’?” Jay’s gray eyebrows, thick and untrimmed, knitted together in consternation. “Who’s we?”

       They stared at each other for several seconds, Cass spinning possible scenarios wildly through her mind.

       “I am talking about your drinking, Cass. If there’s other folks—I mean, the issue’s judgment, if there’s partying going on, people who need to keep their wits about them to do their job, when it affects all of us—look, we’re not trying to go on a witch hunt here.” Jay wiped a callused hand across his forehead. “The only reason it was agreed we needed to do something was, first of all, the mistake that’s got a boy down in the quarantine house. If your little problem made you careless, then hell yeah, I think it’s community business, and at the very least we need to think about taking you off the harvest detail. But as Ingrid pointed out, and I’ve got to say I agree with her, leaving you in charge of the kids when you’re high as a kite ain’t much better. I mean, I know I won’t have an argument from you when I say they’re our most precious resource, right? These little ones?”

       Throughout his speech, Cass was trying to keep up, trying to assimilate what Jay was saying. Why hadn’t Sammi said anything about what she’d seen on the dock? But the answer hit her with blinding clarity: because it wasn’t enough to hurt her, not in a big enough way. By revealing her drinking, the girl could hit her on every level that mattered—calling into question her commitment, her competence, even the wisdom of letting her have a role in the children’s lives.

       Of course, there was one secret Sammi still hadn’t shared. If she ever told the others that Cass had been attacked and infected, that would be a sure way to stir up so much trouble that Cass could get thrown out of New Eden. Cass wasn’t the only Beater victim ever to recover, but no one in New Eden had seen such a survivor before. And with tensions running high, there was no guarantee they’d listen when Cass offered up frantic, self-serving explanations that she was no threat to anyone.... Nor was Ruthie....

       “But I love the children,” she mumbled, on the verge of tears. “You can’t think that I don’t.”

       “Aw, hell,” Jay said, his shoulders slumping forward, and she realized that he had been hoping he was wrong. He was a good man, a family man with no family anymore, an associate dean at Sacramento State with no one to ride herd on. And he had the broken capillaries and red nose that signaled that he too had once known his way around a bottle. “I hate this, Cass. Lord knows I don’t have any beef with you. But there’s too much at stake. I’m here to ask you to resign. From child care and picking both. You can stay on gardening—I don’t think you’ll get any argument for that, everyone knows you’re the best with the growing. And that’s enough for anyone—Hell, there’s lots of folks that don’t get a fraction of that done. We got Ingrid, we got Suzanne, we got Jasmine ready to pop, maybe we can get another of the gals to pitch in with the little ones. Valerie, maybe, she’d be good.”

       His words cut deep. She understood why he said it—Valerie would have been a great mother; her patience, her soothing voice, they were perfect.

       “Maybe,” she said bleakly, but it was a lie because the day that Valerie was responsible for Ruthie’s care would be the day Cass had failed utterly. Her daughter had been taken from her twice before, when other people decided Cass wasn’t a fit mother. She couldn’t let it happen again. “Or I don’t know…maybe I could take Ruthie in the field with me when I work. Let me think, okay? Just give me a day to think about it.”

       Jay sighed and folded his hands over his gut. You could see in the gesture the shadow of what he had once been, a paunchy, proud, cheerful man. “That’s fine. I don’t want to take this up with the council in any official way, you know what I mean? That wouldn’t serve anybody. Just, hey, Ingrid’s a little sore with you right now.” He hooked a thumb in the direction of the living room. “Let’s let her finish out the day with the kids, maybe you go for a walk, talk to a friend, whatever you feel like. An afternoon off. Looks like the weather’s breaking, maybe we’ll get a little more sun, everything’ll look different by tonight.”