The second had killed Patience.
When she was little, Sorrow had suffered nightmares every night for months, always about the same thing: falling into a bottomless pit while fire raged around her. Her father assured her she hadn’t been present for either of the fires, she had been safe at home in bed, but she imagined her sister’s last moments so vividly, so many times, she believed could feel the crackling heat and taste the smoke. The nightmares had faded, become a reminder more like a toothache than a terror. It had been years since Sorrow had woken in a panic, screaming for help.
Dad said the police believed Patience must have seen the fire or smelled the smoke—even though the cider house was far from the house, and it had been the middle of the night—and was trapped when she went to investigate. Nobody had ever been blamed or arrested.
When Sorrow had begun to realize how little she remembered, she had tried to research it, look up articles and information online. Abrams Valley had a weekly newspaper that mostly reported on trail clean-up volunteer days and high school football games, and the fires had been in the news—the sudden death of a teenage girl was a shocking tragedy for so small a town—but all Sorrow learned was that the police believed both fires had been started by a drifter or an addict trying to keep warm. There had been a meth lab bust on Mill Run Road a few months before, and locals were convinced big city outsiders were bringing trouble into their quiet little town. It had been a bitterly cold winter. Nobody in Abrams Valley locked their outbuilding doors. Who knew what somebody off their head on meth or heroin would do if they were caught out?
Sorrow had hoped, when she started looking, there would be something Dad had neglected to mention, something that explained why Patience had been outside, why she hadn’t called for help, why she hadn’t woken their mother or grandmother. But nothing she found filled in those blanks.
There had been a fire. Patience died. It was maddening, simplistic, and hollow, but that was what Sorrow knew.
The Abrams house and garage passed out of sight. On the opposite side of the road was the stretch of land that had once belonged to the Johnsons. They had moved a few years ago—gotten tired of the winters, Verity had reported during a phone conversation, and the property had passed through a couple of different owners since then. There were two horses grazing in the field, a big gray and a smaller bay, both flicking their ears and tails at flies.
“Who lives there now?” Sorrow asked, grasping for something to fill the silence.
“The Ghosh family,” Verity said. “Jana and Helen. They moved here from New York last August. They have two kids about your age. Jana wants you to give her a call if you’re interested in working a little. I know you’re only here for a month, but they’ve got an opening for a few shifts a week while one of their regulars is traveling.”
“Yeah, maybe,” Sorrow said, but she was barely listening. She hadn’t remembered how long the seven miles between town and the orchard could feel. It was as though the mountains were closing around her, the valley deepening, the trees crowding the road.
“They bought one of the outdoors stores, and they’ve been doing pretty well with it. If you want . . .” Verity trailed off, the words fading into a soft ending.
Sorrow’s heart began to beat faster. She sat up straighter. She wanted to tell Verity to stop the car. She needed a moment to catch up. A chance to breathe. She wasn’t ready. Eight years was barely a blink for the town, less than a flicker for the mountains, but it was half of her life, and she wasn’t ready.
The road bent around a curve, and there was the orchard.
Long lines of trees passed in a flicker of light and shadow. The pink and white flowers were gone and the apples hadn’t yet swelled, so there were only the green summer leaves in endless rows. Before the road dipped again, Sorrow saw the ragged crown of the black oak, sitting like a watchtower atop the hill. At its base would be the grave of their ancestor Silence Lovegood, who had murdered her own children two hundred years ago and been hanged as a witch. The tree’s massive shape was so etched in Sorrow’s memory she could have drawn it with her eyes closed, needing nothing but fingers and feel to re-create branches she and Patience had climbed countless times on summer days that had seemed to last forever.
Sorrow couldn’t see around the shoulder of the hill to the remains of the cider house. It was hidden from the road. Once a ramshackle wreck, now a charred ruin. Verity had never mentioned tearing it down. Sorrow had never asked.
Verity turned in to the driveway. The wooden fence was unpainted and crooked, as it had always been, and there was no gate. There was no name on the leaning mailbox; everybody knew whose farm this was. The drive was unpaved and rutted, a narrow track through a green tunnel of sugar maples.
In Sorrow’s memories, through all the years she had been away, the little white farmhouse had faded, seeped into the gray rain of that last cold spring, leached of warmth and color. She expected it to be smaller, shabbier too, the paint peeled away, the front lawn patchy and brown.
But the house was in better shape than it had ever been during her childhood. The white paint was fresh, the shutters robin’s-egg blue. The lawn was rich deep green, a little high, but not choked with weeds. Flowering bushes grew along the front of the porch in bright bursts of breathtaking color. She had known Verity and Grandma were fixing up the place, but she felt a pinch of betrayal to see how neat it was now, how clean, how colorful. The farm hadn’t spent the past eight years sinking into dilapidated disrepair in her absence, crumbling in reality as it was in her memory.
It didn’t look like a place where a family could have been so easily broken apart.
Verity turned off the engine. “Well. Here we are.”
The car was too small, the air too thin. Sorrow fumbled with her seat belt, pushed the door open. The moment her feet touched the ground, a wave of dizziness washed over her, as though the earth itself were recoiling from her touch. She clung to the car, squeezed her eyes shut, and swallowed back sudden nausea. She waited for the ground to settle.
“Sorrow?”
She opened her eyes. The sky was blue and clear, the trees so green it hurt to look at them. The day was hot and muggy and everything smelled of grass, of earth, of living, thriving things. Leaves rustled in a gentle breeze. The sun was sinking toward the horizon, pressing long shadows into the ground. The orchard was beautiful. She had forgotten that, somehow, lost the loveliness in all her memories sharp with killing frost, murky with mud and matted dead leaves. It was beautiful.
The storm door squeaked open. Eight years and nobody had oiled the hinges. Grandma Perseverance stepped onto the front porch.