At the base of the hill she crossed from the shade to sunlight, into the meadow between the Lovegood and Abrams farms. The yellow crime scene tape was still up over the collapsed wall of the cider house, but one end had come loose to flutter lazily in the morning air. Verity had already started making arrangements to have the building torn down. Sorrow kept her distance and paced the area around the squat stone well.
When she found a flat spot, she dragged her heel through the dirt to make an X. Julie would be buried in the graveyard in town, her name carved into stone and set alongside her ancestors stretching all the way back to Clement Abrams, but she deserved to be remembered here as well. Ashes were forgiving trees, not particularly finicky about how well drained their plot of earth might be; they would grow in the damp meadow soil as well as they grew in the cemetery. The Lovegood land was the richest in Abrams Valley, with all the tragedy it had endured, giving and taking in equal measure.
Sorrow glanced at the well and, after a moment’s thought, added two more marks. George Abrams would have hated it, a Lovegood daughter planting trees for him and his son, but George had died on Lovegood land, and Henry had loved a Lovegood woman. They belonged to the orchard now.
With a glance at the yellow tape and the burned ruin, Sorrow left the meadow and climbed the hill to the black oak. She walked around the perimeter of the clearing, pressing her palm to each of the children’s ash trees in greeting, then circled the oak at its base until she found the protruding knot that gave her the best foot up. She climbed to a height of about twenty feet to settle on the branch Patience had always claimed was Silence Lovegood’s hanging branch.
She sat on the branch with her back against the trunk, one leg drawn up and the other dangling. She wondered if she might learn to hear what Patience had heard echoing through the wood. A mother’s desperation, a town’s rabid terror. The chafe of a rope on bark. That could have been the end of their family, but Grace had returned to remake a home from the ruins, and they were still here.
The rising sun cast dappled patterns over Sorrow’s bare arms. She felt an insect tickle her skin and brushed it away without looking. The trunk at her back was rough, almost painful, but if she didn’t move, didn’t shift around and fidget, she barely felt it. Here there was no decision to be made. There was no home and no away, no families split by difference and distance, no past and no present. There were no gaps in her memory anymore—the missing pieces had been here all along, cradled in the mountains and waiting—and in their absence the seams between the lonely lost child she had been and the person she was now were that much harder to find.
Nearby two birds were starting the day with an argument, and high above, a faint breeze turned the leaves of the oak. The rows of apple trees sloped into the valley, into fields and forests, hills and hollows wild and tamed, over the sharp line where the orchard ended and the preserve began, all stitched together like blocks of her grandmother’s quilts in countless shades of green. In the cool morning dew everything smelled of old, old apples.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many thanks to my editor, Alexandra Arnold, without whom this book would never have evolved into anything worth reading. Thank you for your endless patience through endless revisions, and for pushing me to make the story so much more than I ever thought it could be.
And thank you to my agent, Adriann Ranta, who has yet to flinch at any of the random genre changes and wild ideas I throw her way.
A million thanks and cookies and fancy cocktails to Audrey Coulthurst, Adriana Mather, and Paula Garner. I never would have made it through the year I spent working on this novel without your friendship. (My liver, on the other hand, most adamantly does not thank you.)
And thank you to the members of my San Diego writing group (and our Oregon annex): Valerie Polichar, Jessica Hilt, Morgen Jahnke, James Seddon, Gary Gould, and Alex Gorman. Your beautiful stories, helpful insight, and good company were always a welcome diversion during a most difficult year.
Endless gratitude and thanks to the members of the Sweet Sixteens debut group. Through all the ups and downs of being a debut author, there is no comfort like knowing you’re not alone on this wild ride. I am looking forward to cheering for every single one of you as you bring more amazing books into the world.
And thank you, as always, to my family, for your unwavering love and support.