“Beckett?”
I ignore the call from the far end of the field and continue digging.
Push. Dig. Dump.
I’ve been out in the fields for an hour and the sun still hasn’t inched above the horizon. The sky is filled with the dull gray light that comes just before dawn, the sky deciding how it wants to wake up for the day. Thick clouds have hidden the stars and it looks like they might hide the sun today, too.
Good.
“What the hell are you doing?” Luka demands from halfway across the field.
What the hell are you doing, I want to snipe back. These are my fields, after-all. But I’m not in the sixth grade anymore and Luka is damned persistent when he wants to be, trudging his way towards me with a mug of coffee in each hand. I ignore him and drive the shovel down again.
Push. Dig. Dump.
“I’m digging.”
I’m digging because the second I sat on the edge of my bed and reached for my sweatpants, I remembered her fingertips against my shoulder blades, her body twisted in worn flannel and her face in my pillow. I got up to go to the kitchen and heard her laughter bouncing against the countertops. Pictured her chopping tomatoes with her hair tucked behind her ear.
I’m seeing Evie in every single empty space and planting these saplings felt like the logical thing to do. I’ve got a hurricane inside my chest and the pull and stretch of my muscles is the only thing keeping it contained. I bite my teeth around it—clench my jaw so hard it hurts.
“I can see that,” Luka mutters, eyes firmly on the hole at my feet. “But why are you digging at four in the morning?”
I don’t say a thing.
Push. Dig. Dump.
“Beck, what’s going on?” he sighs.
I grunt. “I’m digging a hole—”
“I can see that.”
“—for your body.”
He snorts a laugh into his coffee mug. “That’s nice.”
I drive the shovel into a fresh piece of earth and rest my elbow against it, my thumb swiping at my eyebrow. “How’d you even know I was out here?”
“The cameras,” Luka offers. Stella installed cameras over the winter when someone was vandalizing the farm. It turns out the town librarian, Will Hewett, really wanted an alpaca farm and decided that destroying ours was the best way to accomplish that particular goal.
Idiot.
“Stella got a notification about a madman loading saplings into his truck and driving them out into the field.” He takes a loud, obnoxious sip of coffee. “Which is weird because dig day is in a couple of days. It is also not scheduled for four in the morning.”
“Decided to get a head start,” I say, as casually as I can manage, peering over the handle of my shovel at the hole I've been working on. It’s way too deep for a sapling, but I’m committed now. I place the shovel to the side and reach for one of the bundles from the wheelbarrow. I loosen it from the travel-safe container they arrived in and transfer it carefully to its new home.
It drops to the bottom, the top branches not even visible.
I sigh.
“That’s quite the hole,” Luka says.
I pinch the bridge of my nose.
“Will it—” he tilts his head to the side and takes another slurp of coffee. “Will it grow up out of the ground, you think?” He mimes some complicated gesture with his hand, like a rocket launching. “Like a pineapple plant. Have you seen one of those?”
I have. I sincerely doubt this will look anything like that.
I reach into the hole and pull the tree out, shoveling some of the dirt back in with my arm. Luka taps my shoulder and holds a cup of coffee in front of my face.
“Hold on a second. I brought you coffee.”
“I don’t want coffee,” I say, contradicting myself by immediately grabbing the mug out of his hands. Luka’s mom always makes sure Stella has the good stuff stocked for when she and all of Luka’s aunts randomly descend upon her cottage. Last time they brought biscotti, too.
I collapse back on my ass in the dirt and take a sip out of the mug. It has a tiny fox on it, a chip on the handle. Luka stares at me with one hand on his hip. For the first time, I notice he’s wearing one of Stella’s old sweatshirts, the sleeves too short on his long arms.
“What’s going on with you?” he asks.
“What do you mean?”
He makes an exasperated sound in the back of his throat, the hair on the left side of his head sticking straight up in a riot of curls. Stella must have kicked him out of bed to come out here to check on me. The thought lifts my spirits, oddly enough. “Oh, my bad. You’re right. This is totally normal. We always have conversations before the sun is up.” He rolls his eyes and kicks at my boot with his. “Why are you out here planting trees? Where is Evelyn?”
Probably in some boutique hotel in a bright and shiny city, charming everyone she meets. Glowing like the fucking sun.
She’s not here. That’s the only part that matters.
“I don’t know.”
I hate that I don’t know.
Luka eyebrows flatten into a line of confusion. “Isn’t she staying with you?”
“She was,” I say. “Now she’s not.”
I avert my eyes to the line of trees I’ve managed to plant this morning—a somewhat chaotic row of small green bundles. In five to seven years, this whole field will be filled with whispering branches and thick evergreen.
I wonder if I’ll still be sitting here.
“What do you mean she’s not?”
“I mean her rental car isn’t in the driveway and her stuff isn’t in my house.” Maybe. I think. There’s a part of me that’s rolling my eyes at my assumptions, but the much bigger part of me is just trying to protect what I can. “She left.”
I don’t know if Luka wants me to draw him a map or what, but it feels pretty straightforward. I can see her reasoning. She was staying with me while she figured her stuff out. She figured it out. She left.
That’s it.
Luka makes another small sound under his breath, his eyes squinted in concentration. I want to roll into the hole I dug until he decides to leave me alone.
“You know how I met Stella, right?”
I roll my eyes to the sky and drape my arms over my knees. I guess he’s staying.
“I know how you met Stella.” I’ve heard the story enough over the past couple years. She fell down the steps of a hardware store and smacked right into Luka. They then proceeded to pretend they weren’t hopelessly in love with each other for close to a decade. I fix my gaze on the trees swaying in the distance and clench my jaw. “You can skip this whole thing.”
“Skip what?”
“Whatever hopeful platitudes are about to spill out of your mouth.” Luka loves a good motivational speech. “I don’t want to hear it.”