She set the leather journal aside and lowered the box to the floor. She opened the next, dug through layers of sweaters and summer dresses until her fingers brushed over something solid. She pulled out two more of Grandma’s old journals. She paged through them, one after another, her curiosity growing. She had been expecting diary entries, notes about the seasons and the orchard, thoughts and reflections. But that wasn’t what Grandma had been writing at all.
“What have you got there?” Verity asked.
Sorrow slid the journals into a stack and carried them over to her. “Look.”
Verity’s eyes widened in recognition. “Those are Mom’s.”
“I know. They were in with Patience’s things.”
“I haven’t seen these in years.” Verity took the top journal, the one with the leather cover, and opened it. “I didn’t even know she still had them.”
“Have you ever read them? It’s not a diary, not like in the normal way,” Sorrow said. “They’re stories. Stories about our family.”
“She started writing in them when she stopped talking,” Verity said quietly. “But I never knew what she was writing. I never . . . I didn’t like to ask a lot from her then. Oh, I remember this story. My grandmother told this to me when I was just a little girl.”
Verity paused at a page near the center of the book. At the top of the page was a name written in black ink: Grace Lovegood. Below, a pair of dates. 1811–1873. Birth and death. Sorrow recognized the years from her gravestone. Silence Lovegood’s one surviving daughter.
“What happened to her?” Sorrow asked. “I’ve always kinda wondered about that. She must’ve gone to live with somebody, right? After her mother was executed?”
“She did. Her father’s family here in Vermont refused to have anything to do with her, so she went to stay with an aunt in Baltimore. Anne Derry. She was the only one who would take Grace in. But it turned out to be a good thing.”
“It did?”
Verity’s lips curved into the beginning of a smile. She turned a few pages, scanning quickly. “Anne Derry was this eccentric spinster type—not very old, maybe only thirty at the time, but a woman didn’t have to be old to be considered a spinster in those days. She saw to it that Grace got a good education, learned everything a girl was supposed to learn, and all the things boys were supposed to learn too. They traveled all over together. They went to Paris, to London, eventually to India. By the time Grace was twenty she had seen half the world. She’d studied all kinds of things—math and science and law and history. She was a brilliant woman.”
Sorrow had only ever known the bookends of Grace Lovegood’s life: the tragic childhood, the eventual death, with the orchard always at the center.
“Why did she come back?” she asked.
“You know, I don’t know,” Verity said. “The way my grandmother told it, it always sounded like an inevitability, like there wasn’t anything else she could have done. Something about needing to claim the land back for the family. But I was only a kid when I heard that story, and my grandmother wouldn’t have bothered to explain the details to me. I do know Grace didn’t come back until she had a daughter of her own. Anne, named for her aunt.” Verity turned a few more pages. Her touch was gentle now, almost reverent. “There’s a lot more here than I remember.”
“You never knew this was what Grandma was writing down?”
“I had no idea. She must have heard a lot of this from Devotion.” Verity ran her forefinger over a crease in one page. “My grandmother was a terrible person, but she had a mind like a steel trap. She remembered everything.”
“She never left, did she?” Sorrow said. “She never lived anywhere else. She had no choice but to remember.”
“No,” Verity said. “She didn’t. I don’t think she ever traveled more than ten miles from this spot. She used to say—usually when she was angry about something—she used to say the land was a part of her and she was a part of the land, and anybody who wanted to separate them would have to rip up every tree in the orchard to find every piece of her.”
Devotion had never ventured beyond the sloping shoulders of Abrams Valley. Every one of her days had been spent pruning Lovegood trees and tilling Lovegood land, working every season of every year until the soil was ground into the creases of her hands, until her sweat and blood flowed through the veins of the trees, and she would have remembered everything. The orchard was as much a part of their family as the mud-brown hair and hazel eyes, and it held their grief and their memories as firmly as the mountains held the roots of their apple trees.
“I thought she was just . . . well, my grandmother. I thought she was just odd,” Verity said. “Until I went to college.”
Sorrow studied her face for a moment, looking for signs that her question would not be welcome. “Did you start to forget?”
“It didn’t feel like forgetting,” Verity said. “I wasn’t even gone a full year, but it felt like . . . like everything was fading. Like things that had happened to me were things I had read in a book. I began to understand why so many women in our family were so obsessive about remembering our history—including my grandmother, for all her faults.”
Sorrow flipped through one of the journals, but glancing over pages of Grandma’s sloping, spiky script, she felt a wormlike wriggle of discomfort. It might be their shared history on the page, but these were Grandma’s words, and she had always kept them to herself. Sorrow closed the journal and smoothed her hand over the cover. It wasn’t up to her to decide what Grandma ought to do with the voice she had found when she stopped speaking.
“We’ll ask her what she wants to do with them,” she said.
Verity looked the leather journal over one more time before handing it to Sorrow. “At the very least we should bring them inside so nothing gets into them out here. Check if there are more.”
“Yeah. I’ll look.” Sorrow set the journals beside the blue scarf and hefted another box to the top of the stack. This one was full of Patience’s old schoolbooks and paperbacks; she spent a couple of minutes flipping through each notebook to see whose handwriting covered the pages.
When Verity spoke again, her voice was quiet, almost hesitant. “Are you going to go back to Florida with your father after he gets here?”