"We do our best, Mr. Mercer. Though — " Mrs. Quill's smile thinned by a fraction. "We do miss having you at our Christmas service. You used to come, before."
"Before," Jonah agreed, and said nothing more.
The nursery was at the end of the upstairs hall, and it was there that the white walls finally broke Tala's composure — not by being cruel, but by being kind.
It was a small room, sunlit, with four cribs. A rocking chair. A shelf of wooden toys, each one whole. And over the nearest crib, folded with care, a quilt.
Tala stopped walking.
The quilt was made of feed-sack cotton, pieced in squares of faded blue and undyed white. Nothing about it should have stopped her heart. But along the border ran a row of stitching — a chain stitch in indigo thread, each loop pulled through the next in a pattern like links in a chain, like vertebrae in a spine — and Tala knew that stitch the way she knew her own pulse.
Her mother had taught it to her when she was nine years old, sitting in the doorway of their jacal while the goats cropped the yard. *This one is ours,* her mother had said, guiding Tala's small fingers. *Your grandmother's mother brought it across the mountains. When you sew it, you are never alone in the room.*
Tala had sewn that border into a blanket for her daughter, six years ago, on the last night before the raid — sitting up late by lamplight while Paloma slept, finishing the edge because a mother finishes what she starts. She remembered the weight of the sleeping house around her, the smell of the oil lamp, the way her needle had flashed in and out of the cloth. Paloma had kicked in her sleep and murmured something about a dove, and Tala had smiled and sewn faster, as if she could stitch the night closed and keep the morning out.
The morning had come anyway, with hoofbeats.
Her face did not change. She had learned, in six years of searching, how to keep her face still while her heart ran. But her hand tightened on the strap of her medicine bag until the leather creaked.
"What a lovely quilt," she said. Her voice sounded like someone else's. "Did one of the ladies make it?"
"Donated, I believe," Mrs. Quill said, glancing at it without interest. "We receive so many donations. The town is generous."
*Donated.* Tala looked at the stitch — her stitch, her mother's stitch — folded over a stranger's crib in a whitewashed house on a hill, and understood that the blanket had come here the same way Paloma had come here. Taken. Sorted. Placed.
"Mrs. Quill," she said, "do you keep records of the children? Their names, where they came from?"
"Of course." The woman's eyes narrowed by a hair. "Why do you ask?"
"A healer likes to know her patients." Tala smiled, and it cost her blood. "If I am to treat the children, I should know who they are."
"That won't be necessary. Our children are healthy. The Reverend can tell you — we have not had a serious illness in two years."
"Two years," Tala repeated. "Remarkable."
They were in the garden when Tala saw the girl.
She was fourteen, perhaps — tall for her age, thin in a gray dress identical to all the others, sweeping the garden path with a broom too big for her. Her hair was black and pulled back severely, and she did not look up as the tour passed.
Until she did.
It was one beat. One held breath. The girl's eyes lifted from the path and found Tala's face, and stayed there a fraction longer than a stranger's eyes should stay — long enough for Tala's heart to stop and start again like a stumbled horse — and then the girl looked away, back to her sweeping, her rhythm unbroken.
"H-22," Mrs. Quill said sharply. "The path, not the guests."
H-22. Not a name. A number, spoken the way you'd speak to a dog that had wandered.
The girl — H-22 — bent lower over her broom. But as the tour moved on, Tala saw her hands: white-knuckled on the broom handle, the knuckles standing out like small stones. A girl who had recognized something, or thought she had, and was holding herself together with both hands.
Tala kept walking. She did not stop. She did not turn. Inside her chest, something was screaming her daughter's name, and she put her hand over it the way you press a cloth over a wound.
*Not yet. Do not hope yet. Hope is a thing with teeth.*
She was fourteen. The right age. Paloma would be fourteen now — eight when she was taken, six years gone. But the girl's face had been half-turned, shadowed by the porch roof, and Tala had not seen enough. Not the scar on the left thumb from the cooking fire. Not the small gap between the front teeth. Not enough.
*Don't hope yet.*
On the ride back down the hill, neither of them spoke until the Home was out of sight behind the cottonwoods. Then Jonah said, very quietly, "She showed us what she wanted us to see."
Tala looked at the road ahead. Her hands were steady on the reins. They had no right to be.
"She showed me my daughter's blanket," Tala said. "Folded over a crib. With my mother's stitch in it, and my own hands in every loop." She turned to him then, and her eyes were dry and terrible. "That was her mistake, Jonah. Whatever else she hides in that white house — she showed me that, and she doesn't even know what she showed me."
Jonah was silent for a long time. The tremor in his right hand had spread to his jaw.
"There's a girl," he said at last. "Fourteen. Sweeping the path. Did you see her?"
"I saw her."
"When I worked for Ashford — " He stopped. Started again. "The children in the system don't keep their names, Tala. They get numbers. H-numbers, for Home. If your Paloma is in there, she's a number now. That's how they — " His voice cracked. "That's how they make them easier to move."