“I don’t think she should—” Be out there. Be alone. Invite the memories in. Sorrow’s breath was short, her chest tight. “I’m going to get her.”
She left her tea steeping on the counter and marched into the orchard. It still looked like an ordinary overcast summer day, all the grass thick and full, all the trees heavy with green leaves, but the cold deepened when she stepped into the shade of the orchard, the more she found that was wrong. There were no leaping grasshoppers or lazy bobbing bees, no chasing squirrels or chattering birds. There was a hush over the orchard as oppressive as the gray clouds, and every flower she spotted in the grass beneath the trees was wilted.
She was wearing a flannel shirt, but the fabric felt too thin in the deepest orchard shadows, and she found herself shivering every time she stepped from sunlight to shade. One night. It had taken only one night of cold to brown and shrivel the blossoms, to silence the birds, to chase away the bees. The only sound was the gentle, sporadic patter of drops falling from the leaves. After so many days of persistent shimmering heat, it felt as though the volume had been turned down on the morning.
Sorrow slowed as she reached the point where the dirt road dropped down to the property boundary. She had expected to see a police car outside the Abrams house, or people milling around the cider house, but there was neither. Both places looked deserted.
She found Verity about halfway down the hill. She was sitting at the base of an apple tree with her knees crooked up, and in profile, from several feet away, she looked so much like Patience that Sorrow’s breath caught. The illusion faded quickly. Patience had never worn jeans, never cut her hair short, never worn an expression of such careful blankness she might have been carved from stone.
Sorrow picked her way along the hillside and sat beside her.
She thought about asking, What are you doing out here?
She thought, What are you thinking about?
And, Did you go down there?
And, I know you’re thinking about Patience.
The police had come to the house last night. The sheriff was a woman named Reyes, and she had told them Julie’s death did appear to be suicide, but there would be an investigation to determine the cause of death. She wanted to know why Sorrow had been out in the orchard in the middle of the night. Sorrow had told her about the cold, going outside to check for frost, smelling smoke.
She told the sheriff, too, about both times she had spoken to Julie.
“She didn’t seem depressed,” Sorrow had said, painfully aware of Verity sitting beside her at the table. She could not meet her mother’s eyes, so she had looked at her hands, at the sheriff’s pen and notebook, at the mist on the window, at the clock on the stove ticking through the early hours of the morning. “It didn’t seem like there was anything wrong.”
Sheriff Reyes had taken her leave sometime around 2:00 a.m., with a promise to provide more information when she had it.
Sitting beside her mother on the hillside, Sorrow drew her legs up, mimicking Verity’s posture, and she said, “Doesn’t look like anybody’s over there.”
“They left a little while ago,” Verity said.
There was a sour taste at the back of Sorrow’s throat, a sting in her eyes, and she was suddenly, overwhelmingly tired. She shouldn’t have come out here. She didn’t want to hear that flat tone in Verity’s voice. She didn’t want to talk about the Abramses and the daughter they had lost. She didn’t want to feel the damp earth beneath her, the dripping dew pattering on her arms like rain, the cold breathing from the shadows. She didn’t want to feel the well of Verity’s silence beside her.
And she didn’t want to have to talk about Julie. She didn’t even want to think about Julie, and how she had been alive and warm in the ash grove, silent and hanging in the cider house, one and the other, both at the same time, a cycle and a blur, and it was no use. There was nothing she could do to turn her thoughts away from the awful certainty she had felt leaning into that firelit cellar. She felt the shock of seeing Julie’s face over and over, every time she tried to think about the weather or the orchard or her mother’s waiting silence, like a wound that would never stop tearing open.
She blinked rapidly and turned away, rubbed at her nose to quiet a sniffle.
“Are you coming back to the house?” she asked. “Grandma’s in the garden.”
“Does she want to scold me for not doing my chores?” Verity said.
There was a spark of annoyance in her voice, a ripple in the awful flatness, but it didn’t make Sorrow feel any better. She didn’t know what she could say that would draw Verity to her feet, turn her away from staring at the cider house, and bring her back to the house—and even if she found the right words, she didn’t know if it would matter. The cider house would still be marring the orchard in a tumble of charred wood. Julie would still be dead. Patience would still be eight years gone and everywhere all at once, filling every space between them with thistle barbs and thorns.
Verity said, “They keep telling me I should tear it down.”
Sorrow didn’t need to ask, but she couldn’t leave those words dangling and unanswered. “Yeah?”
“Some kids got into it a few years ago,” Verity went on. “They were using it as a sort of hangout. Smoking pot and drinking and—well, you would know better than I do what teenagers do these days. They were coming over for weeks before anybody noticed. I don’t know what they”—a flick of her wrist toward the Abrams house—“were doing that they didn’t notice a party practically in their yard—no, that’s right. They were in Europe that summer.”
The pause that followed was where any other morning Verity would make a wry comment about how tough it must be to spend the summer in Europe, how wrong it was that the Abrams family cared so little for their land they could abandon it for months at the height of summer. Any other morning she would have laughed, not in envy but in mockery, before going on.
Verity cleared her throat. “One of the kids fell and broke his wrist. His parents threatened to sue—with Paul egging them on, obviously. He was the only reason they were talking about it.”
“Did they go through with it?” Sorrow asked.
“They realized pretty quickly that a lawsuit would mean having a public record of their son’s illegal activities, and college admissions might not like that. They dropped it.”
“You never told me any of that.”
“You were twelve,” Verity replied. “It didn’t amount to anything.”
“You didn’t tear it down,” Sorrow said.
She could guess why: if the entire town had been telling Verity and Grandma to tear down the cider house, they would have dug in their heels and done the exact opposite. Lovegoods did not allow the people of Abrams Valley to push them around—not even if it was only common sense, that a dangerous old ruin and eyesore should be removed. It was such an ugly thing, a black blight on the green land.
“It’s not the first cider house to stand where it is now,” Verity said.