She finally found what she was looking for in a long sliver of wood she peeled from the cracked leg of an orchard ladder. One end was thick, but the other tapered to a point, and that point was narrow enough to jam into the gap between the door and the frame. She had to let the lighter go dark and slip it into her coat pocket to get a good grip on her wooden wedge, but she didn’t need to see now. She worked the wedge upward, wood scraping on wood, until it bumped into the two-by-six on the other side. She held it tight with both hands and pushed it up and up and up. The bar on the other side moved a little. It was heavier than she expected, and holding the wood hurt her hands, but inch by inch the bar rose. When she was sure she had lifted it high enough to clear the bracket, she leaned on the door.
One end of the bar fell to the ground, and the door swung open. Sorrow tumbled out of the cider house.
It was colder now, the light grimmer, the wind more bitter. She ran back to the house as fast as she could, slipping and sliding through the snow. She couldn’t wait to tell Patience and Mom how she had escaped the pitch-black cider house using Rejoice Lovegood’s trick, and she had done it with the help of the first favor of the year. She had desperately wished for a light, and the orchard had given her one, and that meant the land was waking from its long winter hibernation.
Her excitement lasted right up until she burst through the door to find the kitchen empty. The soup pot was still on the stove, the bowls still in the sink. The only sound Sorrow could hear was the gentle chug-chug of Grandma’s sewing machine in the living room.
She shut the door. The sewing machine fell quiet, and Grandma appeared in the doorway. She tilted her head to the side in question.
“I was only taking a walk,” Sorrow said.
Grandma looked at her for a long moment, then nodded and went back to her sewing.
Sorrow was left alone in the kitchen. The lighter was a hard lump in her pocket.
Nobody had even noticed she was gone. She had been trapped in the cider house and she might have been trapped there forever, but nobody had noticed.
34
THE LONG WHITE whalebone stay was in her hand.
Sorrow knew what it was, even though she had never seen one before.
She had stopped walking. Before her the dirt road curved to the right, to the north, to skirt the base of the hill before dropping down to the cider house meadow. To her left was the path to the cemetery where she had chased after Patience on that winter day eight years ago. The orchard was growing dark as the sun sank lower and lower. The rows of trees were more shadow than light now, murky and indistinct at the edges of her vision. A breeze turned and brought with it a breath of air cold enough to raise goose bumps on her skin. Leaves crackled and rustled. Sorrow suppressed a shiver.
The stay wasn’t a curve of bone at all, not like she had always imagined. It was more pliable than rigid, a thin, bendable finger of fiber. It was hard to imagine how it could have been used in a jailbreak, but maybe Rejoice had been even more clever than the men had given her credit for. She would have been calm, unimpressed by her predicament. She wouldn’t have cried and screamed for help. She wouldn’t have felt the numbing deep cold of panic settle over her, not the way Sorrow had in the cider house.
Her breath was coming fast now, remembering, fast and shallow like she was eight years old again, and in the gloaming she could hear the creak of weakened boards beneath her feet, and she could see her breath misting in opaque puffs, and she was trapped again, she was trapped, she wasn’t going to get out, she was trapped and she was—
She was cold.
Sorrow gripped the stay so tight the edges bit into her fingers. The temperature had dropped. She wasn’t imagining it, the mist of her breath, she was seeing it right there in front of her face. Her arms were covered with goose bumps, her nose stinging, her ears beginning to ache. She was so cold it felt as though the blood had slowed in her veins, and her mind was creaking and groaning through an impossible crackle of ice. Frost crept over the green leaves as she watched.
It was July. This couldn’t be happening again. It couldn’t. Not now. If the cold was back that would mean Cassie was gone, and she couldn’t be. She couldn’t be. Sorrow was going to find her.
She closed her eyes and shook her head, and there was a voice echoing no, no, no, but it didn’t sound like her voice, it didn’t sound like a voice at all but rather footsteps rustling through dry autumn leaves, and they were her own footsteps. She had chosen the left path. As she walked the leaves frosted and crisped around her, and when she passed they thawed and steamed, and droplets of water pattered to the ground.
She was carrying it with her, the cold. She was holding on to that icy stone of grief. It had been there all along, sitting high in her chest, and with every step another fissure split through its middle—shivering over the orchard, frosting and melting, seasons flickering around her with the rhythm of her breaths, with the beat of her heart, she and the trees and the earth all part of the same creature. The ice she was carrying, the memory she had left buried in the orchard for so long, it cracked, and weakened, and woke, and by the time she reached the fence around the cemetery grove it was ready to shatter.
There, balanced on a fence post, was an engraved silver lighter.
35
EIGHT YEARS AGO
MOM AND PATIENCE both emerged from their rooms to make dinner. They ate together, the four of them. Nobody argued. Nobody stormed away. Nobody mentioned school.
And nobody asked Sorrow how she had spent her day.
It was there on the tip of her tongue, every time Mom and Patience fell silent. She nearly blurted it out half a dozen times, but each time the urge grew smaller, the words withering away, until finally she was determined to say nothing at all. Mom was out of her room and talking, Patience wasn’t picking fights or bringing up things she shouldn’t, and Sorrow wasn’t going to be the one to change all that. She wasn’t going to let Cassie Abrams ruin everything.
When it was time for bed, Mom came to tuck Sorrow in. She smoothed Sorrow’s hair back from her forehead and said, “I know it’s not easy being stuck inside all day. Why don’t we do something fun tomorrow?”
Let’s do something fun, Cassie had said. Sorrow shivered, tried to hide it, but Mom saw anyway.
“Do you need another blanket?” she asked.
“No,” Sorrow said. She hadn’t felt warm all evening, not even during dinner when she had been sitting right next to the woodstove, but she didn’t want Mom to worry. “I’m fine.”
Mom kissed her forehead. “You’re always fine. It’s like having another little grandmother in the house.”
Sorrow wrinkled up her nose, because that was what she was supposed to do, and she was rewarded with a smile from Mom.
“How about we bake some cupcakes?” Mom said.
“It’s nobody’s birthday,” Sorrow pointed out.
“We’ll call them it’s-still-winter-and-we’re-sick-of-it cupcakes,” Mom said. “They’ll be better than birthday cupcakes.”
Sorrow wanted to believe it. She wanted to trust the smile on Mom’s lips, the easy way she talked about baking without needing a reason to celebrate. But she kept hearing the sound of doors slamming in her mind. Mom’s, Patience’s, the cider house’s, one after another, each one adding to the nervous tremble in her chest. She wanted to ask Mom to promise, but she didn’t ask for promises anymore. Asking only made Mom cry.