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shooed her protesting son out of bed. She helped him with his sneakers and zipped up a jacket over his pajamas. They set off over the field that backed onto their yard. There hadn’t been much rain so the going was easy, none of the usual mud slurry. They walked along the drystone wall that bounded the left side of the field. Officially, they trespassed on neighbor Travis’s land, but no one minded such things as long as they left the cows and sheep to their peace. The fog lightened and other rock walls appeared as faint lines that divided the hills into squares and rectangles. Great swathes of heather covered the hillsides in a purplish haze. They’d turned colors overnight, September on the wane.
    Little good the peaceful vista did her today. Something lurked, all right, but this could also be her guilty conscience. Failure as a mother. Failure as a lover. Failure as a wife. She just thanked whatever saint was out there that the children hadn’t mentioned the babysitter she’d found to sit them last night. Danny would have beetled his eyebrows at her and said “Oh?” in that leading way of his, putting her on the defensive. She deserved a life too.
    Such as that went. What a bloody joke on her.
    Petey yanked on her arm. “What about Grey Man?”
    His whines filled her head but she kept on with shoulders tensed in response to the weight of him, her own sweet boy, dragging her down. Up ahead, an abandoned famine cottage perched on the nearest rise. She called the building their stone folly, and it usually welcomed them to treat it like a playhouse. Today, though, the cottage appeared like a primordial head rising out of the ground. The two windows were sunken eye sockets and the darkened doorway part of a nose. The mouth and chin were below ground, ready to gobble up wayward children. Or wayward parents. She banished the thought from her head.
    Make it to the cottage; just that goal, for this moment, for this day. And then they’d turn back.
    “That wasn’t so bad, was it?” she said when they arrived.
    “Yes, it was,” Petey said, his tone sulky. “You’re mean.”
    “I guess I am, but you’ll have to live with it, won’t you?”
    His little fist connected with her hip. “I wish Da were here!”
    Petey dashed into the cottage, stumbling over the sunken threshold. Ellen followed him but stopped just inside the doorway. The usual abandoned scent of the place had gone missing. Someone’s presence had rearranged the dirt on the floor in front of the door and the grit lodged in the rock walls. Petey stood frozen in the center of the room except for the foot he edged toward something bundled on the ground. When it didn’t move, he dropped to his hands and knees.
    “I’m investigating like Da,” he said. “I’m not scared.”
    On a slow breath Ellen said, “Peter Michael Ahern, come here. Right. This. Instant.”
    “I hear something,” Petey whispered.
    He crawled toward the far corner of the room, and before Ellen had made it halfway to him, he ran back. “We’ve got to save these kittens from Grey Man!”
    Petey hugged two mewling kittens against his chest. Skinny and matted little things they were, and without thinking Ellen plucked them from her son and set them on the ground. She pulled Petey toward the door.
    Petey let out a wail. “But what about the kittens?”
    She half carried him over the threshold, and when he resisted, she gave him a get-going swat on the bum. “Off with you, or you’ll not be getting dessert tonight.”
    “I don’t care about dessert!” His fist connected with her hip again. He added a second jab before running to the drystone wall. “I hate you!”
    Exhausted, Ellen watched him almost disappear into the air itself. Her fingers tingled with unspent adrenaline. Once again, she had handled the situation all wrong, letting the pressures that surrounded her day in and day out—the instability, the loneliness, the isolation, the guilt—turn into a slow burn that lit