Following, Soleil passed the garden, where two of the teenagers, Lexie and Angelique, were picking squash for tonight’s dinner. Both still unaccustomed to getting their hands dirty, they were handling the vegetables as if the plants might jump out and bite them, which begged the question of why they’d applied for internships, but Soleil knew better than to expect to turn a bunch of city kids into earth mothers in such a short time.

She arrived at the field where she could see one boy, Jordan, overseeing the nine goats who hadn’t run off. This field bordered one of the main roads into town, and there was a section of fence that needed repairing, which meant there was a chance the errant goat could make it to the road and get hit. With that thought, she quickened her pace up the hill. At the top stood a grove of oak and bay trees, and beyond them was the road where she could barely hear the sound of passing cars.

Halfway up the hill, she heard Silas’s bark indicating he’d located the goat. But a second distressed bark told her something was wrong.

She scrambled the rest of the way up, then through the grove of trees. There she saw the source of the trouble-the goat on the far side of the road. Silas paced before her in a panic because he knew better than to cross the dangerous roadway.

The goat, for its part, didn’t know any better. And before Soleil could do anything, the goat took a few tentative steps into the road just as a car rounded the bend fifty feet away. The driver, in a black SUV, slammed on the brakes, swerving into the next lane.

Soleil could only cover her face and pray as she heard the car skidding to a stop.

A moment passed, silent, without any sickening thud of bumper against flesh, and she opened her eyes to see the car stopped a foot away from the goat, who was staring at it nonplussed.

“Jules!” she called to the goat, whom she could identify now by the animal’s white markings. “Get over here now!”