Lying on a bed of soil, Harriett listened and wondered if they might be right. She wasn’t behaving as a woman in her late forties should. She’d maintained a steady high since that first joint in the garden, and put a serious dent in her dilettante ex’s collection of wine. Once morning glory vines had sewn up the last few gaps in the wall of foliage that surrounded the house, she’d taken to spreading out on a lawn chair in her underwear. Then those few strips of cloth disappeared, followed shortly by the lawn chair. This isn’t normal, Harriett often told herself. Then her eyes would latch onto a butterfly and follow it as it lazily looped across the sky.
For the first time in ages, she’d found a place that welcomed her—one where she felt she truly belonged. So much of the human world seemed designed to exclude her. There, men valued women for their youth and fertility. Those who could no longer procreate were cast aside. But now Harriett knew nature wasn’t prone to mistakes. Her grandparents had looked to the Bible for God’s word, never realizing it was written on the world all around them. That scripture was telling Harriett she was still around for a reason—and would be for decades. If she was going to spend those years in her garden, Harriett wanted to know more about it.
Deliveries arrived from rare bookstores across the country. Every evening, she’d bring in the boxes stacked in towering piles on her doorstep and rip them apart in a frenzy. She’d lost all interest in everything beyond her garden. There was so much to learn about the things she’d discovered within. She bought books to identify the new plants that had commandeered the flower beds and books that might hold the cure for the unusual rash on her leg. She ordered books on entomology and biochemistry to find out why the bugs never nibbled the mint and why thyme drove the bees wild. After a hawk dropped the corpse of a squirrel at her feet, she devoured a nineteenth-century tome on the ancient art of augury. She found a suggested dosage for jimsonweed seeds in the diary of a colonial-era cunning woman, then spent an entire night tracking the constellations as they sailed across the sky. She devoured the private journals of Catherine Monvoisin, the infamous poisoner, and chased them down with biographies of Agrippina the Younger and Lucrezia Borgia. She developed a recipe for a magnificent pesto.
She was reading up on rootwork one evening when the doorbell rang. Without pulling her eyes from the book, she’d opened the door.
“Well, hello there!” The handsome deliveryman was standing on the other side of the threshold with three stuffed grocery bags in his arms and a shit-eating grin on his face.
A week had passed since his last visit, and during that time, Harriett had given up clothes. “So sorry!” She’d reached for a bag and used it to cover her shame, certain he could see through her skin to her shriveled, old ovaries.
“No apologies necessary,” he assured her. “I’m Eric, by the way.”
She’d come to think of herself as a hideous crone. But Eric certainly hadn’t seemed scarred by the sight. Maybe, she thought, she’d been mistaken. Maybe that wasn’t how it all really worked.
It was the last day of her three-week vacation, and Harriett was basking in the sunshine when she heard a car pull into her drive. The sound of the doorbell didn’t rouse her, and she managed to ignore the persistent knocking that followed.
“Harriett Osborne!” a man finally called out. “Are you back there? Can you hear me?”
The man’s brusque intrusion into her thoughts jolted Harriett upright. He’d given up at the front door. Now she could hear him prodding at the vegetation surrounding the garden, looking for a way past her defenses. She snatched up her robe and held it to her chest. “Who are you?” she demanded.
“It’s Colin Clarke!” A long pause followed as Harriett racked her brain for a clue to the man’s role in her life. “I’m the lawyer representing you in your divorce.” He sounded concerned, as though she’d forgotten the president’s name. The man was important. She should have known who he was.
“Of course!” Harriett jumped to her feet and wrapped the robe tightly around her, but somehow couldn’t figure out what her next step should be.
“My office has been trying to reach you for days,” he called through the plants.
“Oh no, I’m so sorry!” She had no idea where she’d last seen her phone. She didn’t know an explanation was required, so she didn’t bother to give one.
“Mrs. Osborne—” he started again, clearly worried.
“Ms.” She didn’t really say it. The word just slipped out.
There was a pause. “Ms. Osborne, may I come inside? Your husband and his attorney have an offer they’d like me to present.”
“Inside?” The house could use a good cleaning, and it reeked of pot.
“Is that a problem?” he asked, his voice now teetering on the line between concerned and frustrated. “Ms. Osborne, is everything all right?”
“I’ll meet you at the front door,” she said, though she was sure she’d regret it.
When she opened the door, she realized she’d screwed up. She’d met the man on her doorstep exactly three times, and each time she’d been in tears when they parted. She’d known Colin Clarke by reputation long before she hired him. Everyone said he was the best divorce attorney in Mattauk. He specialized in representing well-off women whose husbands had retained Manhattan heavy hitters. Clarke was famously cold and formal. He made it clear to his clients that they would never be friends. The questions he asked would at times seem brutal. He might need to know things they wouldn’t want to share. But if they were honest and forthright, he’d ensure they left their marriages with every cent they deserved. Now he was standing in Harriett’s doorway in a lovely Italian suit—and an expression that made it clear that he was not at all pleased with her.
It had been weeks since Harriett had cared much about her appearance. There were likely leaves in her hair and fur on her legs. Having walked around naked for days, the robe felt like a sober-minded nod to convention. But Mr. Clarke clearly did not agree. His eyebrows lifted as his head reared back. For a moment, she wondered if she might smell terrible, too.
“Are you sure this isn’t a bad time?” he asked.
“Yes,” she told him. “Please, come in.”
As he walked past her, she read his reaction in his stiffened spine. When she turned back toward her living room, she realized why. Almost every inch of flat surface was claimed by pots, each holding a plant of a unique size, color, and shape. Only the coffee table had been put to a different use. It held the remains of Harriett’s last meal, as well as a large cannister that had once been filled with marijuana. Beside it lay empty rolling paper packets.
“I’ve taken up gardening,” Harriett said.
“So it seems,” Clarke replied in a soothing voice, as though she might be dimwitted or dangerous.
“The south-facing windows make the living room an ideal greenhouse.” For some reason she couldn’t quite fathom, she needed him to understand.
“Do you know what all of these plants are?”
The question threw her. It was something one might ask a child. “Of course,” Harriett replied self-consciously. “I bought or gathered the seeds myself. By April, the plants will be ready for the garden.”
“Ah yes, the garden,” he said with a sigh. “I drive past on my way to work every day.”