Verity looked up. “What happened?”
“You went to college. You got a fancy Boston girlfriend.” Verity raised an eyebrow, and Sorrow didn’t look away. “The Lovegoods and the Abramses were being all friendly with each other and hell didn’t freeze over. How did it get from that to the point where Patience and Julie had to creep around like criminals just to hang out? What happened?”
“Our families were never truly on good terms,” Verity began.
Sorrow rolled her eyes. “I know, I’m just—”
“I’m answering your question.” Verity’s voice was the crack of a whip. Sorrow shut up. “Mom and Henry were going to be married. They were planning an autumn wedding. I was so happy for her. She’d been lonely since my father died, even though she would never admit it. We Lovegood women don’t admit that sort of thing, do we?” A sharp little twist of a smile, gone in a flash. “I was only away for a few months, but it was long enough that I started to forget how bad things could be between our families. Isn’t it funny how all you have to do is step away for a bit, and things start to look different?”
“I don’t think it’s funny at all,” Sorrow said quietly.
“No. I suppose it isn’t.” Verity looked at her steadily for a moment before going on. “Mom called me a few weeks before the end of the school year. She was—I’d never heard her like that. She was hysterical, barely making any sense. All I could make out was that something had happened to Henry. It was too late for a bus and I didn’t know anybody with a car, so I hitchhiked. By the time I got to Abrams Valley, Henry was dead.”
“I heard it was a car accident?” Sorrow said.
Verity nodded. “They’d all been having dinner together, the Abrams family, and Henry brought Mom along. And Eli, well, he hated that. He started in on Mom right away. Asking her if she knew all the ways her mother had cheated his family over the years. Saying he knew she had helped Devotion kill his father and cover it up. Henry blew up at him, and they fought, and Henry stormed out of there.” Verity paused for a second; her voice had gone hoarse. “He’d been drinking—they’d all been drinking—and he only made it about two miles down the road before he missed a turn and smashed into a tree.”
“Oh no,” Sorrow whispered.
“It took him most of the night to die. They wouldn’t let Mom see him. Eli had his worthless sons pick her up and carry her out of the hospital, like she was a toddler having a tantrum, not a woman who only wanted to hold the hand of the man she loved before he died. And nobody said a word. Nobody helped her.”
Sorrowed cleared her throat, steadied her voice to ask, “Grandma told you about it? Afterward?”
“A little,” Verity said softly. “I heard the rest from other people. She was so distraught. I’d never seen her like that. I’ve never seen anybody like that. I didn’t know what to do. I came home to take care of her. She didn’t have anybody else. I thought . . . I thought after a few months it would go back to—not exactly normal, but it would get better. But she only kept fading. That’s when she stopped talking. Not all at once—I know that’s how people remember it, but it wasn’t sudden like that. It wasn’t like she woke up one day and decided not to speak. The words just dropped away. Every day she said a little less, and she spent more and more time writing in those books of hers.” Verity’s voice was quiet with old hurt. “By the end of the summer . . . it was an awful summer. We barely had any harvest at all. The trees were sickly, and the apples rotted on the branches, and we couldn’t do anything to stop it. By autumn I knew I couldn’t leave her to go back to school. I shouldn’t have left in the first place.”
Sorrow had wondered what was behind Grandma’s decades-long silence, but only in the same way she wondered why the sun rose in the east, why snow fell in winter. She had never known her grandmother any other way, and like all children she had assumed the world she knew was the world that had always been. She had never pictured Perseverance in love, or heartbroken, or humiliated, just as she had never imagined that Verity had once dreamed about life beyond the orchard, had even reached out to take it, only to be pulled back.
“Did Patience know any of that?” Sorrow asked.
“Patience?” Verity said, surprised. “No. I don’t think so. Why do you ask?”
She asked because even though the hospital walls around her were modern and white and bland, even though she was miles and mountains away from the orchard, she was still standing in the ash grove where their family was buried. She was still squirming with alarm to hear her sister, her idol, the person she trusted to lead in every situation, telling her in a voice raw with desperation how much she wanted to escape, how she dreamed of leaving, but even her dreams were shackled by the roots of the orchard. In that moment, that cold morning on the last day of her life, Patience had understood something Sorrow had been too young to grasp: the stories were never just stories, and history was never only in the past. If they echoed loudly enough, those long-dead spites and long-buried hatreds, they weren’t a legacy but a cage—and she had wanted out.
If only they had been a family who talked about what they wanted as much as they talked about where they had come from, Patience and Verity might have found that in common.
“I know you think I was unreasonable,” Verity said. “And you’re probably right. Sometimes I feel like my whole life I’ve done nothing but make one wrong decision after another. I was only ever trying to protect you. All of you. I didn’t want Mom to have to face that kind of pain again. I didn’t want you and your sister to ever know what that felt like. There were days when it seemed like all I could do to keep you safe was keep you close. I thought we would be safe in the orchard.”
“That’s not—” Sorrow stopped, and she didn’t say: That’s not rational. That doesn’t even make sense. That’s not how it works.
The protests were there on her tongue, but withered before she spoke them. Verity knew that already. The regret seeped through every word she spoke.
“How did . . .” Sorrow had to stop, take a breath. “How did Hannah end up married to an Abrams? After all that? How did she even end up in Abrams Valley?”
“At the end of that summer she came to try to persuade me to go back to school,” Verity said. “I didn’t even—I refused to see her. I didn’t want her seeing how much Mom and I were struggling. I suppose she and Paul met while she was staying in town. I don’t know. I never asked. The next time I saw her they were engaged, and everybody in town was talking about how Paul’s fiancée had dropped out of law school to marry him. That bothered me, actually. That she dropped out to get married. She’s smart. She could have had quite a career.”