Marcus
June arrived without ceremony. The heat came up slowly, the way it always did in Georgia — a degree at a time until one morning you stepped outside and realized summer had moved in while you weren't looking.
Marcus was at the barn by six most mornings. They had acquired a small starter herd now — six healthy cows and a pair of horses, bought from a seller two counties over. Learning their rhythms took time. He spent the first two weeks just moving among them, letting them get used to his presence, his smell, the particular way he moved. He didn't rush it. Animals knew when you were in a hurry and they didn't like it.
One of the older cows developed a slight lameness in her left front foot. Marcus spent an hour trimming the hoof, cleaning carefully between the clefts, murmuring low and steady the whole time. When he stood and she put her weight back down without flinching, something in him settled.
The greenhouse frame went up behind the main barn through the first week of June — treated lumber, heavy plastic sheeting, built to last without looking impressive. Roy and Dale helped with the heavier beams, and Dale had opinions about the ventilation that Marcus hadn't considered and ended up deferring to. He didn't know greenhouses. He knew how to build things, and he knew how to listen when someone with better information was talking. Roy had a dry sense of humor. Dale knew more about soil composition than he let on, and Marcus had been taking notes without making a show of it.
In the afternoons, when the heat peaked, he often drifted toward the creek.
Maggie was there one day wrestling with a broken irrigation pipe near the water line. He crossed over without asking.
"Need a hand?"
She straightened, brushed dirt from her cheek. A small smile through the frustration. "It's been fighting me for an hour."
He crouched beside the pipe, examined the break. Pulled a spare fitting from the work belt he'd started wearing without really thinking about it. "This should do it. Hold that end."
They worked without needing to talk much about what they were doing. Her hands were capable
— she didn't fumble or second-guess. When the repair was done and the water ran clean through, she sat on a flat rock at the creek's edge and dangled her work boots in the current.
"You're always just there," she said, without accusation. More like she was working something out. "When something needs fixing. You just appear."
Marcus sat nearby, a little upstream. "I'm usually close by."
"I've noticed." She studied the water. "Most people want you to notice them helping. You just help."
He passed her a clean rag from his belt. "Helps when it's worth doing." She took it. Wiped her hands. "That simple?"
"Yeah."
She laughed quietly, a real laugh, not a polite one. He liked the sound of it.
They sat there a while. She talked about growing up on this land — the bad stretch after her mother died, her father's remarriage, the way she'd eventually come back around to the farm and to her faith, though her version of faith was quieter and more personal than Hershel's. She mentioned her stepmother, Annette, with a complicated warmth. Mentioned Beth the way you mentioned someone you genuinely loved and also sometimes found difficult.
Marcus listened. When he did speak it was simple, direct, without performance. He told her about camping with Sam as kids — real camping, the kind where you learned what actually mattered versus what you thought mattered. About preferring a problem he could fix with his hands to one he had to talk his way through.
"I'm the same way," she said. "I know."
She looked at him. "You've been paying attention." "I pay attention to people in the circle," he said.
A pause. "Your circle." "Yeah."
She was quiet for a moment, turning that over. Then she nodded once, like she'd decided something, and they both went back to watching the water.
* * *
Sam
He had built a routine and he kept to it with the discipline that had always come naturally to him, even when nothing else had.
Morning run. Five miles on the quieter roads, out before most people were awake. He used it to think, to observe, to file things away. Which houses had dogs that barked at strangers. Which neighbors waved first and which waited. The pickup parked in front of the gas station on Main three mornings out of five, its driver coming out with coffee and a newspaper, glancing at the sky like a man who cared about the weather in a professional way.
Gym, three mornings a week. A local place without pretension — just weights, a few machines, a rubber floor that smelled like rubber. The conversation in that room was useful. Crop prices, town politics, the growing unease people talked around more than directly. An older man named Carl who came in every Tuesday and Thursday and didn't talk much but listened carefully. Sam was the same way. They'd nod at each other across the weight rack and that was the whole friendship, which suited them both.
Afternoons were for supply runs, coordination, logistics. He and Marcus had developed a system over the past weeks — purchases spread across multiple trips, multiple stores, nothing that would raise an eyebrow. The pantry in the red farmhouse was fuller than it looked because Sam had reinforced the back wall of the storage room and added a second layer of shelving behind the visible one. He thought about doing the same in the barn, in a more significant way, once Roy and Dale finished the current phase.
He thought about the news more than he let Marcus know.
There had been something on the radio last week — a report about an unexplained illness cluster in a city three states over, the details vague in the way official reports got vague when officials were themselves uncertain. He'd searched for more information and found very little, which was its own kind of information. He filed it away with several other things he'd filed away over the past months: the way certain supply chains had been intermittently disrupted, a pattern of
hospital capacity stories in urban areas, a general quality of low-level tension in the national news that wasn't attached to any single event.
He was not panicking. Panic was wasteful and usually wrong. But he was accelerating certain preparations, quietly.
Davina had agreed to the fair on Saturday. He was looking forward to it more than he'd expected to, which was interesting data.
* * *
Davina
Beth had heard about the Daystar brothers through Maggie, and now she wouldn't stop talking about them.
Not in a bad way — Beth wasn't built for gossip or unkindness. She was just genuinely curious in the open, uncomplicated way she was curious about most things. "Maggie says the one named Marcus barely talks but fixed their gate without being asked," Beth said over dinner one night, her voice warm with approval. "And that the other one, Sam, is really charming."
"He seems nice," Davina said, very carefully. "Have you met them?"
A pause. "They stopped at the diner a few weeks ago." "Oh! What are they like?"
Davina thought about how to answer that accurately. She thought about Sam — the way he'd tilted his head when she wasn't expecting it to listen better, the genuine attention that felt earned rather than performed, the way he'd ordered chocolate at the ice cream stand and finished it in about three minutes because he clearly just liked chocolate.
"They're both pretty quiet," she said finally. "In different ways."
Beth nodded like that made perfect sense and asked what Davina wanted to do after dinner, and the conversation moved on.
Davina was glad. She didn't want Beth to meet Sam yet. She knew that wasn't fair — Beth had a right to meet whoever she wanted, Sam wasn't hers, they'd spent one afternoon together — but
she also wasn't ready to watch Beth turn her quiet, natural warmth on him and see what happened.
She'd seen it before, with other people. Beth didn't try to draw attention. She just did, like a light left on in a room where everything else had gone dark.
The fair was Saturday. She'd already figured out what to wear.
* * *
Marcus
The county fair smelled like fried food and sawdust and livestock, which Marcus didn't mind at all. He and Sam had come with the Greenes — Hershel had suggested it, and it seemed like the right kind of yes to say at this stage.
Sam had brought Davina.
The girl moved differently out here than she did in the diner — less guarded, more herself. She lit up around the livestock pens, moving from stall to stall with a confidence she didn't carry in public spaces. She crouched to let a goat investigate her hand and talked about it for ten minutes afterward without any self-consciousness.
Marcus watched Sam with her. His brother was attentive without being overwhelming, asked the right questions, laughed at the right moments. He was good at this. But there was something else too — something Marcus had only started noticing recently, a quality in Sam's attention toward Davina that was different from his social default. Less calculated. More simply present. At one point Sam said something that made Davina laugh and then apparently surprised himself enough that he laughed too, a real one, the kind that got away from him before his usual control caught up. Marcus noted it without saying anything. It was good to see.
Maggie walked beside Marcus through the livestock barn. She had opinions about the cattle competition results that she expressed calmly and then immediately moved on from, which he appreciated.
"Beth's over there," she said, nodding toward the agricultural displays where her younger sister was examining rows of canned preserves with genuine interest. "She wanted to enter the preserves competition but we didn't have enough time this year."
"Next year," Marcus said.
Maggie glanced at him. "You sound pretty sure we'll all still be doing this next year." "I plan to be."
She was quiet for a moment. Then: "I like that about you." He looked over.
"You just say what you mean," she said. "You don't dress it up." "Seems faster," he said.
She laughed — that same real laugh from the creek. He kept doing things that caused that laugh and he wasn't entirely sorry about it.
Later, at the ring toss, he won Maggie a small stuffed horse on his second attempt. She carried it for the rest of the evening without any trace of self-consciousness, which he thought said something good about her.
The night ended in the parking field with fireflies and the smell of spent sparklers. Beth was talking to Sam and Davina was standing slightly apart from them, watching the sparklers someone nearby was setting off. Marcus drifted over.
"You good?" he said.
She looked at him, a little startled. Gave him a small nod. "Yeah. Just tired, I think."
He stood beside her and watched the sparklers for a moment. He wasn't going to pretend he hadn't noticed the thing she was carrying. But she didn't need him to name it for her, and he wasn't her person to do that anyway.
He just stood there until Maggie came to find them both, and then they all walked back to the trucks together.