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background had sounded. Almost like a baby crying.
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    Mary Bethany had not slept since she’d found Christopher in her barn. At first, she’d determinedly blocked out all thoughts of what to do except take care of his immediate needs. She changed his wetdiaper and burst out laughing as he sprayed her before she could get the new one on. His skin was softer than any kid’s fleece. Soft—everything about him was soft from the top of his head to the soles of his feet. How could finger-and toenails be so small, so perfect? He curled his fist around her finger and made that soft mewling sound again. So different from her demanding nannies. So different from the cries of enraged infants she’d occasionally heard in the aisles of the Granville Market.
    Lacking any alternative, she had filled one of the bottles with goat’s milk, warmed it, and watched in delight as he greedily sucked it dry. Mary prided herself not only on her cheese but her milk. It was always sweet and fresh. Two lactose-intolerant customers swore they couldn’t tell the difference from cow’s milk, as if that were the standard. Cow’s milk—Mary thought it should be the other way around. She would never have taken up with cows. Much too bovine. No personality. She’d known cows.
    It was only when Christopher had once again fallen asleep—as she rocked him gently in the chair her mother may have rocked her in—that Mary began to consider her alternatives. Happily, calling the authorities was not a choice. There were no authorities to call. She doubted the Staties would be down patrolling Sanpere on Christmas Eve.
    She was happy about this for several reasons, first and foremost being an innate disinclination to “open up a can of worms.” They’d bring in social workers, put Christopher in a foster home, everything his mother was clearly trying to avoid by leaving him in Mary’s barn. Mary had no idea who the woman could possibly be, but she did know one thing. Christopher’s mother had chosen Mary, and she had chosen her because she thought Christopher was in danger. “Keep him safe,” she’d written. The baby was a trust, a sacred trust, and Mary Bethany was not going to betray that. Let it be according to her wish.
    But what to do? Even though she rarely saw other people—only at the bank, the market, or if she happened to be in the shed when they came to buy cheese or milk—there was no way she could pass the baby off as her own. Besides her age and the lack of any physical evidence—Mary had always been as slender as a reed—the notion of Mary with a lover would be greeted not only with skepticism but derision. She could hear them now: “Mary Bethany pregnant? Maybe by one of the goats.”
    Mary was born on the island, but the Bethanys were from away. Her parents had come to Sanpere when her father got a job as a welder at the shipyard after the war. Her mother’s family had come from Italy and endowed Mary with the dark hair and Mediterranean features that she shared with others on Sanpere. But their looks had come down from the Italian stonecutters who had arrived in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to work in the now abandoned granite quarries. Mary’s grandparents had landed in New York and worked in the garment business—the wrong kind of Italians for Sanpere. True, Mary’s father’s family were Mainers, but from the north, Aroostook County—potato farmers. They weren’t fishermen. Her father had learned his trade in the service, met her mother, Anne, at a USO dance, and when the war was over, they’d ended up on Sanpere not for any particular reason, but because people have to end up somewhere. Without the kinship network that was as essential and basic to Sanpere as the aquifer and ledges the entire island rested on, Mary and her older sister, Martha, were always viewed as outsiders.
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