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The next morning the sisters rose without speaking while the boy remained encamped under the kitchen table. Evelyn put on her old plaid shirt and jeans and went to let the chickens out. Lily came past her a few minutes later on her way to the gazebo, one of their mother’s woven shopping bags under her arm. Evelyn watched her go as the hens gathered around her.

“Keep an eye on that one,” she said to the cockerel.

The cockerel looked at Evelyn and shivered, and a thin cloud of dust rose from its plumage. She looked at the other chickens, and they, too, seemed coated in something like fine flour. Sawdust from the coops, she assumed. The chickens were older, too—wasn’t everybody?—and less able to preen themselves. Yes, that was it. Any other conclusion was not worth entertaining. And yet hadn’t the rest of the garden also seemed a little dull, a little faded, in recent days?

She collected the eggs and went back inside. In the kitchen the boy was going around his flower arrangements, swapping blooms in and out and lifting their drooping heads. They were already looking withered, and not even a day had passed.

“They’ll fade more quickly if you keep touching them like that,” Evelyn said.

He drew his hand back. “What’s happening to them?”

How could he not know?

“They die when you break the stems,” she said.

“They die?”

“Eventually.”

“She didn’t tell me.”

They were silent for a moment, and Evelyn realized that they were alone for the first time in days.

“So. She put you up to this, did she? A team effort.”

“Oh no. It was my idea. But she showed me where to find the ones you liked.”

“That was kind of her.”

“Do you have a favorite?”

Evelyn looked around the kitchen. He’d collected half of the garden. She loved them all—grieved for them all now. On the windowsill was a teapot crammed with thick spears that glowed purple and orange against the sunlight. She went over and examined them. Lupins, snapdragons. A familiar bouquet.

“Where did you get these?” she asked, though she knew the answer.

“Out there.” He made a vague gesture.

“Where, exactly?”

“By the big rock.”

“Did she tell you that you could pick these?”

“I don’t know. I don’t remember.”

Evelyn put on her slippers and took her stick and opened the back door. She walked as fast as she could, faster than she could. She felt her hips grinding. She took the well-worn route past the toolshed and out toward their patch of wheat, knowing that the boy was still behind her but not speaking, or perhaps speaking very quietly, and she came to the spot that marked her mama’s grave and found the rock bare and the flowers gone and the whole plot flattened by the boy’s huge feet.

She got on her hands and knees and put her forehead to the warm earth.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry, Mama.” Over and over.

After a while she was aware of the boy standing silently beside her. He tried to put a hand on her shoulder, but she snarled and he backed away. He did not try again and went back to the house. Evelyn remained there, prostrate, for some time.

When she finally came back to the kitchen, the boy was standing on the doorstep wringing his hands. She ignored the ache in her heart and in her knees and marched toward him as if she were twenty years younger. Straighter than she had been in days. Her hand was raised before she even reached him, and he cowered slightly but did not move, as if already resigned to punishment.

“You stupid creature!”

She kept her hand raised but did not move any farther, struck by a vision of her mother, in the same position, silhouetted against the sky.

“You can’t just go around doing what you like. Chopping flowers off left, right, and center. Do you have any idea what Mama will say?”

She felt a throbbing in her arm and began to lower it.

“Ruined. All ruined. After everything I did for you. After I fed you, and clothed you, and stitched you back up, this is what you do.”

He tried to get past her, but she reached out and without thinking grabbed the thigh that Lily had cut with the shears. She squeezed the muscle between her thumb and her fingers, and he cried out.

“I know where you’ve been going at night, too. I know about the house. You’re probably wondering where your bag is, aren’t you? And your telephone.”

The whites showed all the way around his eyes.

“What’s it for? Who have you been talking to?”

“No one!”

“You’re a liar!”

She squeezed his leg a little tighter and he gritted his teeth.

“Tell me. Show me how it works.”

He was about to speak when Lily came around the corner of the house.

“Sissie, stop it!”

Lily pulled her away and Evelyn let go of the boy’s thigh. She looked at her sister and then at her hand, as if it had behaved of its own accord.

“What’s all this about?” Lily said.

Evelyn wanted to tell her about the telephone, but still she could not find the words.

“The flowers, Lily,” she said in the end, her voice not half as loud as it had been. “He took them from Mama.”

“He wasn’t to know, was he? It’s not his fault.” Lily touched his thigh lightly with her fingertips. “How could you be so beastly?”

“He needs to learn.”

“Oh, for goodness’ sake, Evie.”

“I mean it. If he’s going to stay, he needs to follow the rules.”

“They’ll grow back.”

“It’s not just about the flowers. I told you. He’s been going into the house.”

“And I told you I don’t see what the problem is.”

“From now on I want him where I can see him.”

Lily narrowed her eyes and a hint of a smile appeared on her face. “Oh. I see.”

Evelyn frowned. “You see what?”

“I see what this is about.”

“It’s about making sure he doesn’t ruin everything we’ve done.”

“I don’t think it’s about that at all. I think it’s about you. I think you’re jealous.”

“ Jealous? ”

“You’re jealous because he’s changed his mind. Because he likes me more than you.”

Evelyn wanted to slap her sister, too, but was forestalled by something. By the thought that there was some truth in what Lily had said. Not so much that she was no longer the boy’s favorite, but that she was no longer Lily’s. That they were no longer each other’s favorite.

While she groped for words, Lily took the boy by the arm and led him back into the kitchen. Evelyn was about to follow them but stopped when she heard their feet on the tiles. The boy’s boots thumped heavily, but Lily’s steps were almost soundless. Evelyn looked down at her sister’s feet. She was wearing silk pumps that Evelyn had never seen before, the toe round and padded, two broad ribbons crossed over the top of her foot. They were slightly too big for her. The flowers, the house, the telephone, all quite left Evelyn’s mind.

“Lily,” she said quietly. “Where did you get those shoes?”

Lily ignored her and helped the boy into a chair. She fussed around him, examining his thigh, stroking his hair, offering him water.

“Was that what you were carrying to the gazebo?”

Her sister still didn’t reply.

“I know they’re not yours because yours would be too small now. So they must be Mama’s.”

Lily finally stood up. She looked at the pumps and raised one foot and then the other. The satin was wrinkled and grimy and of no color whatsoever.

“Yes,” she said, “I suppose they must be.”

“He got them for you, didn’t he? You sent him into the house to find them.”

Lily looked at the boy and then back at her sister and laughed. “Oh, for crying out loud, Evelyn.”

“He got them from upstairs, didn’t he?”

“If you insist.”

“Where else would they have come from?”

“Maybe I found them,” Lily said.

“You found them.”

“They were lying in the grass by the wall. You must have buried them, and something must have dug them up.”

“I didn’t bury them,” Evelyn said. “I’d remember that.”

“Oh, yes, Sissie, because your memory is so infallible!”

Evelyn came forward and pointed a quivering finger at her sister’s face. “You’ve been telling him to go into the house to fetch things for you, haven’t you? What else did he get for you? Books? Clothes? Papa’s gun?”

“Papa didn’t have a gun. You’re being hysterical.”

Evelyn’s head swam, and she found herself clinging to the back of a chair.

“After all this time! After everything Mama said! How could you be so idiotic?”

“You looked in the house, too, didn’t you? I know you did. Snooping around the sunroom.”

“Snooping! I did no such thing.”

“Of course you did. But then it’s fine when you do it, isn’t it? I was always the one Mama took it out on.”

“Yes. And frankly I’m starting to understand why.”

Lily gave Evelyn a look that was almost like pity. “Take a deep breath, Sissie. It’s just a pair of shoes.”

“It’s not just a pair of shoes, and you know it! You’re trying to get something back, Lily, something else, and you know you can’t. And you know you shouldn’t. Mama said so. Where will it end? Are you just going to empty the house of all our old things? Why don’t we just open the place up and go back to sleeping in our old bedroom?”

And then she pictured it, suddenly, their little twin beds, the shaft of yellow sun from the skylight, a conference of stuffed animals between them. She closed her eyes and clapped a hand over her mouth.

Lily put a hand on her shoulder, but Evelyn shrugged it off.

“I think you need a rest,” Lily said. “I found the shoes. Are you listening? There’s no conspiracy here. It was a bit of good luck. I’ve not been sending him into the house to do anything.” She paused. “But it’s nice to hear you trust me as much as ever.”

Evelyn felt exhausted. Perhaps she had been mistaken after all. Had she buried the shoes? She honestly had no memory of it. But they had buried so many things over the years.

“There’s something else,” she said, feeling the weight of the telephone in her pocket.

“There’s always something else!” cried Lily. “For goodness’ sake, Evelyn, please let it go. You’re like a dog with a bloody bone.” She turned to the boy and brushed the fringe from his eyes. “Come on, you’ll live. Still plenty for us to be getting on with.”

The boy looked at Evelyn and seemed to be on the verge of speaking, but he closed his mouth and pushed back his chair. Then the pair of them went arm in arm out into the garden, Lily padding soundlessly in her new shoes. The more Evelyn looked at them, the surer she was. She had never buried them. She should trust her instincts, she thought, and her instincts told her that Lily was mischievous and covetous and a bad liar; that perhaps, at long last, her sister deserved some sort of punishment for her wayward behavior.