He blinked. "What?" "Are you sad?" She repeated patiently, as if he might just need more time with the question. "Because you live alone and the house has been empty a long time, and sometimes people who live alone get sad, but they don't always know how to say so.
Mama says that about grownups." He sat on the edge of his bed. He thought about several responses and discarded them one by one. He settled on, "What made you think to ask that?"
"The room," she said. She looked at the walls. He looked at them, too. Bare, except for a faded outline where a picture frame had hung for a long time before being taken down.
He'd been meaning to put something else there. He hadn't gotten around to it. "There used to be something on that wall," she said. "You can see where it was."
He was quiet for a moment. "People take pictures down when they don't want to look at them anymore," Lucy said. "But they don't always stop missing them. That's different from not wanting to look." She tilted her head.
"So, are you sad?" He thought about it properly, which she seemed to deserve. "Some," he said. "That's okay," she said. "We were sad for a long time after Papa died.
Mama cried at night when she thought we were asleep. Owen used to cry, too, but he probably doesn't remember now." She stood up. "I just wanted to know because you've been kind to us.
Owen likes you very much." "Owen likes my horses," Caleb said. "He likes you more than the horses," she said, and delivered this with the confidence of someone reporting a fact they had verified personally. She moved toward the door. "Good night, Mr.
Thorne." "Good night, Lucy." She paused at the door. "You could put a different picture up," she said. "If you wanted.