AFTER DINNER SORROW and Grandma went together to sit on the porch. The rain had stopped and the clouds had finally cleared. The sharp cold had subsided, leaving the evening pleasantly cool. Soft golden light filtered through the apple trees. Grandma had a ball of yarn and two wooden needles in her lap. Sorrow sat in the other chair, rocking idly from time to time, letting her inward restlessness show only in the occasional tap of her feet against the floorboards, the drum of her fingers on the arm of the chair.
All day she had considered and discarded things to say to her grandmother. She had reported that Verity seemed fine and might be coming home tomorrow, but she hadn’t been able to add: She told me about Henry Abrams. She had spent hours helping Grandma in the garden and around the orchard, but not once had she found a way to say: I know why you stopped talking. I know what hurt you so badly silence was the only way you could live through it. I know why you and Verity have wrapped yourselves in a protective cloak of loneliness and quiet here on the farm, surrounded by memories and dead ancestors. I know.
All the words Sorrow could not say beat a steady rhythm against her ribs. She couldn’t say something just to prove she knew, not when it might hurt Grandma to have the truth drawn unexpectedly into the open after she had locked it away so long ago.
The sun sank, the shadows lengthened, and the only sound between them was the creak of rocking chairs on the porch and the occasional slap of a hand brushing away a twilight mosquito. After a while, Grandma let out a quiet sigh, picked up her needles, and began to knit. The soft tap of wood on wood joined the chorus of crickets and evening songbirds.
The phone rang; the noise was so loud and so unexpected Sorrow jumped in her chair.
“I’ll just—get that.” Her heart was thudding as she stepped inside to answer. “Hello?”
“Uh, hi, Sorrow? It’s me. Ethan.”
A wash of relief: she had feared it would be Dr. Parker. “Oh. Hi.”
“Look, this is kind of—have you seen Cassie?”
“Cassie?” Sorrow’s relief turned to confusion. “Uh, no. I haven’t seen her since the festival. Why?”
“Nobody knows where she is.”
Sorrow felt an electric spark down her spine. “Since when?”
“Nobody’s seen her all afternoon,” Ethan said. “Aunt Hannah doesn’t know exactly when she went out. They thought she was in her room.”
“She’s not answering her phone?”
“Her parents have it. They’re calling her friends, but nobody’s seen her.”
“Right. Right, you said . . . yeah.” They had taken her phone away after Julie died; Sorrow remembered Ethan mentioning that. “Do you need help looking for her? I wouldn’t even know where to start, but I can help.”
“I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” Ethan said. “They don’t know I’m calling you.”
Calling the Lovegoods for help with an Abrams family problem. Sorrow bumped her head softly against the wall and tasted, faintly, iron at the back of her throat, a drifting memory of that day she had run to the Abramses for help, so terrified she was doing the wrong thing.
“Right. Yeah. Have you . . .” Oh, she didn’t want to say it. She did not want to ask. “Has somebody looked in the cider house?”
“I did,” Ethan said, his voice quiet. “Just now. She’s not there. I don’t know if it’s . . . fuck, I don’t even know how freaked out we should be. But Aunt Hannah called me. She called me. She would never talk to me willingly unless she was really worried.”
“Yeah. Okay. What can I do?”
“I don’t know yet. I don’t know. If she shows up at your place and she’s . . . can you call me?”
“Yeah, definitely.”
“Thanks. Yeah. Thanks.”
“I hope you find her soon,” Sorrow said.
A pause, then Ethan said, “Yeah. Me too.”
Sorrow went back outside and dropped into her chair. “That was Ethan. Nobody can find Cassie. They don’t know where she is.”
Grandma’s eyes widened, and she lifted her hand in her usual go on gesture.
Sorrow shook her head. “That’s all he said. I don’t know if they think she’s . . . I don’t know. They wouldn’t even let Ethan talk to her a few days ago. I feel like I should do something.”
Grandma tilted her head to the side, and Sorrow made a face.
“I know. I’m the last person they want around. But I still feel like I should—”
The porch faced west. The sun was sinking before them, kissing the tops of the hills, just high enough to cast long bright rays through the apple trees, creating a striped pattern of light and dark over Grandma’s garden.
In one of those bars of sunlight, something glinted on the lawn.
It hadn’t been there before. She and Grandma had been sitting here for half an hour or more, watching the sun go down. She would have noticed that sparking bright reflection in the grass.
“Like I should do something,” she said absently. She stood; the chair rocked gently behind her. “I told Ethan I could help.”
She walked to the edge of the porch. Dropped down one step, another, stepped onto the hard-packed soil. Walked across the lawn until she stood above the glinting object.
It was a pair of old-fashioned wire-rimmed eyeglasses.
Sorrow’s heart beat quickly.
One of the round lenses was missing, the other broken down the middle in a lightning-shaped crack. She picked them up gingerly. The wire frame was warm to the touch.
She glanced back at the house. Grandma had risen from her chair.
A child could believe impossible things. A child with a home embraced by trees so old and roots so deep they were part of the mountains themselves, filled with small treasures, fading and growing with a cycle that sometimes had nothing to do with the seasons, she could rise every morning with the sun and work chores to tend the land, tame it just enough to make it nurturing, but not so much to make it docile. She could remember the stories her family had always told, passed down mother to daughter, woman to woman, words made breath through generations, and believe it was possible to pluck those stories from the soil with careful little-girl fingers. History never truly loosed its grip on the present. The past was never only memories.
Patience had placed the glasses on Sorrow’s face, her fingers warm from being tucked into her mittens. She had laughed at the find, delighted by proof that winter was ending. Sorrow had wanted to laugh. Oh, how she had tried, so achingly aware of the gap between the girl she was supposed to be and the one she was inside. Patience had believed the glasses were Sorrow’s first favor of the year, but Sorrow had been keeping a secret from her. In her pocket there had been a weight, so small nobody had noticed, so heavy it had threatened to press her into the earth.
She could feel it even now, a solid square against her ribs, right at the spot where her coat’s inside pocket had been.
She cupped the glasses in her hand and held them at her side. She glanced back at the house. Grandma was watching her, eyes shaded against the setting sun.