Cassie shook her head, but she said nothing.
“I’ll tell them about the barn fire,” Sorrow said, “and you tell them what happened after. It was an accident. You were only a little kid. Tell them about Julie’s note. Can I—” Her voice caught. She breathed a moment, cleared her throat. “Can I tell you what she said to me? The day before she died? She came over here to talk to me, and she said—she said that sometimes people don’t realize that the hurt they’re causing themselves by keeping a secret can be worse than the secret itself. I thought she was talking about something else, but she was—I think she was talking about you. She knew how much it was hurting you.”
“Nobody will believe me that it was an accident. My parents didn’t even believe me.”
Sorrow’s heart broke again. “Your parents aren’t thinking clearly. They weren’t then and they aren’t now. They should never have made you lie.”
“What will happen to them?”
“I don’t know.”
“And me?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why do you even care? You must hate me. How can you not hate me?”
“I don’t know,” Sorrow said. “Maybe I do. I don’t know what else to do.”
Cassie didn’t answer. She didn’t answer for a long time, but Sorrow didn’t push. Grandma would be worried. Ethan might have called again. The people looking for Cassie might now be looking for Sorrow too. They would just have to worry a little longer. She wasn’t leaving Cassie in the orchard alone.
Finally, finally, Cassie unfolded her legs. She left the gun on the ground.
“You’ll come with me?” she said, her voice so small, so scared.
Sorrow stood up, felt the burn in her legs as she moved. She held out her hand.
When they left Patience’s graveside they would walk together through the orchard until they heard people calling their names. They would see flashlights flicking behind trees and silhouettes moving in the distance. They wouldn’t answer until they were close enough to be recognized, and when they did it would be Sorrow who spoke, who lifted her voice over the questions and demands, the exclamations and scolds, to say they needed to speak to the sheriff. They needed their parents. They needed help. They had a story to tell, and they would tell it even if nobody wanted to hear. They would tell it together. There would be whispers—the Lovegood girl, the Abrams girl, did you hear? How terrible—but they would say what needed to be said, and unearth the long-buried secrets, and weather what followed.
When they left the graveside, the world would crash around them again, but for a moment, this last moment, they were only two girls who might have been friends, had never wanted to be enemies, and a grove of ash trees bending protectively around them. Cassie took Sorrow’s hand and held on tight.
37
PERSEVERANCE LOVEGOOD
1947–
IT WAS ONLY a single shoot, thin as yarn, but it was green.
The ground was soft and muddy, sinking into soggy craters beneath her feet. It had rained steadily through the night, a cold stinging downpour that drummed on the roof and rattled through the naked trees. She had sat up listening to it, alone in the kitchen, letting cup after cup of tea cool by her elbow. When gray morning light crept through the window and the rain softened to a drizzle, she stood—knees cracking, joints creaking—to go outside.
The clouds had broken apart after dawn, and in a fleeting patch of sunlight she found a green stem emerging from the ground. She knelt beside it; her knees pressed into the earth. With a trembling hand she cleared a tangle of rotted leaves and winter debris. The little shoot looked like a single green matchstick separated from its bundle, but she recognized it as the beginnings of a crocus, the first flower of spring. Two months late and so fragile a misplaced step would crush it.
And she thought, for one wild moment: she would hurry back to the house with the news. Spring had come after all, finally, finally there was life in the orchard, and the girls would whoop and laugh with joy and—
They were gone.
Her girls were gone. The house was empty. There was nobody waiting for her return, nobody to celebrate this one bold flower-to-be. A thousand flowers could have bloomed overnight and she would remain the only one to see them. Even the little Abrams boy, the one who looked so much like Henry—like the child they might have had, if everything had been different—he was nowhere to be seen. She was rather afraid she had scared him away for good, when they had surprised each other a few days ago. She had been without her notebook and unable to tell him he was allowed to stay, she wasn’t a wicked witch who gobbled up little boys for supper, she wasn’t going to hurt him like whoever had given him that bruise on his wrist.
She could show him the crocus if he appeared again. Enlist his small hands to search for other shoots, to clear the dead leaves and let them breathe. There was too much quiet now that she was alone. A child could be trusted with a flower.
Her knees ached. Her eyes remained fixed on the crocus shoot, but her thoughts turned and stretched, traveled through the muddy gray orchard and over the brown fields, up to the house now echoing and empty, and she imagined herself walking back slowly, grass and flowers springing from the earth with every footstep like she was a crone from a fairy tale, not a selfish hag but a generous queen. Overhead the apple trees would blossom pink and white, a blush spreading over every leafless branch, and by the time she reached the house, spring would have come, and as flowers bloomed in a riot of color and the garden grew heavy with bounty, Verity would return from the hospital, Sorrow from her father’s home, and together in the orchard, in the embrace of their living mountains, they would be a family again, and begin to heal their broken hearts.
It was only a single shoot, one shy crocus not yet formed, but it was green.
38
HEAVY GRAY CLOUDS were gathering over Abrams Valley again. The air was humid and warm, but there was a breeze kicking up. This was the promise of a summer storm, not an aberration. Those few tourists still wandering around town were eyeing the sky warily.
Verity held the door of the sheriff’s department open for Sorrow, and they walked down the sidewalk toward the car parked half a block away.
“It’ll rain soon,” Verity said.