She stood alone in the kitchen, listening to the silence settle back over the house like dust. It pressed into corners, into the gaps between boards, into her lungs. Clara moved to the pump, worked the handle until water gushed cold and clean, then splashed her face. The shock brought her back to herself, reminding her that she was here for work, not sentiment, and that grief did not pay wages.
In the window glass she caught her reflection: a woman of forty-two too thin for her dress, brown hair threaded with gray, lines around her eyes that hadn’t been there five years ago. Clara stared at herself as if she were a stranger she’d been assigned to manage.
“You came here to work,” she told her reflection. “So work.”
The pantry was well-stocked: flour, sugar, salt pork, dried beans, cornmeal. The root cellar offered potatoes and onions and carrots starting to soften but still usable. She found eggs in a basket by the door and, out back, a garden pushing up late-season life: beans, squash, tomatoes warm from the sun.
Clara rolled up her sleeves. By six-thirty, beans simmered with salt pork, cornbread baked in the oven, and sliced tomatoes sat on a platter with vinegar and the last of someone’s careful herbs. It wasn’t fancy, but it was honest, and Clara had always trusted honest things more than pretty ones.
She set the table for seven, then paused, staring at the empty chairs as if they were a dare. The house had been too quiet to hold children, yet it claimed six of them. Clara wondered if they would come in like ghosts, or if she would eat alone with the hollow-eyed man who had hired her like one might hire a fence post: necessary, replaceable, expected to endure weather.
At seven exactly, she heard them.
Footsteps on the stairs, cautious and measured. A whisper quickly hushed. The creak of floorboards in the hall, as if the house itself were trying not to draw attention.
Then they appeared in the kitchen doorway.
Six children arranged by height like a set of stair steps, all staring at her with a weary, assessing intensity. The oldest boy stood in front, shoulders squared as if ready for a fight. He had his father’s dark hair and gray eyes, but where Luke’s face held emptiness, the boy’s face held something fiercer: anger carefully banked.
