The air is warm. Calm and placated. Seagulls spin in dizzying circles overhead, swooping down to the steep shoreline and snatching up fish caught in the tide pools. I catch the silhouette of Mom inside the greenhouse, walking among the decomposing plants.
I peer across the island to Anchor Cottage. Is Bo still inside? Or did he pack his bag and find a way off the island while I slept? A knot tightens in my stomach. If I find the cottage empty, cold, and dark, how will I feel? Despair? Like my gut has been ripped out?
But at least I’ll know he’s safe, escaped this town before he wound up like Gregory Dunn.
A noise draws my focus away from the cottage. A low sawing sound—the cutting of wood. It echoes over the island. And it’s coming from the orchard.
I follow the wood-slat path deeper into the island, but before I’ve even stepped into the rows of perfectly spaced trees, I can tell that things are different. The wood ladder that normally rests at the farthest row against a half-dead Anjou tree, protected from the wind, has been moved closer to the center of the grove and has been positioned beside one of the Braeburn trees. And standing on the highest rung, leaning into the thicket of branches, is Bo.
He didn’t leave after all. He didn’t do the smart thing and flee when he had the opportunity. Relief swells inside my chest.
“Hey,” he says down to me, holding on to one of the low branches. The sun makes long shadows through the trees. “Is everything okay?”
He takes several steps down the ladder, his hat turned backward on his head.
“Fine,” I answer. “I just thought maybe you’d . . .” My voice dissipates.
“What?”
“Nothing. I’m just glad you’re still here.”
He squints and wipes at his forehead. “You thought I would leave?”
“Maybe.”
The sunlight catches his eyes, making the dark green seem like pieces of emerald glass, an entire world contained within them. His gray T-shirt sticks to his chest and arms. His cheeks are flushed. I watch him a moment too long.
“Have you slept?” I ask.
“Not yet.” He smiles from one side of his mouth—his mood seems to have lifted slightly since this morning. While I was curled up in bed, sheets pulled over my head to block out the sun, he’s been out here working. Sleep probably seemed like an impossibility after last night, after what he saw. “I wanted to get started on the orchard.” He hooks a wide-toothed handsaw over a low, crooked limb then climbs down the ladder, brushing his hands across his jeans.
I hand him one of the freshly baked orange muffins. “What are you doing exactly?”
He cranes his head up to the tangled limbs above us, squinting. The scar beneath his left eye pinches together. “Cutting out any new growth. We only want the oldest limbs to stay because those are the ones that produce fruit. And see how some of the branches grow straight up or down? Those also need to go.” He blinks away from the sun then looks at me.
“Can I help?”
He sets the muffin on a rung of the ladder then lifts the hat from his head and scrubs a hand through his short hair. “If you want to.”
“I do.”
He drags out a second ladder from the old woodshed and finds another, smaller handsaw. He places the ladder against the tree next to the one he had been pruning and I climb carefully to the top, a little unsteady at first as it wobbles beneath me. Once I feel settled, I realize I’m shrouded by a veil of limbs, hidden in a world of branches, and then Bo climbs up behind me, standing one rung down. He extends the handsaw up to me and then wraps his arms around my waist, gripping the ladder to keep me from falling.
“What do you see?” he asks, his voice at my neck, my ear, and I shiver slightly at the feeling of his breath against my skin.
“I’m not sure,” I say truthfully.
“The trees haven’t bloomed yet,” he explains. “But they will soon, so we have to take out all the branches that are crowding the older limbs—the old wood, it’s called.”
“This small one,” I say, tapping it with my finger. “It’s growing straight up from a thicker branch, and it still looks a little green.”
“Exactly,” he praises. And I lift the saw, holding it to the limb. On my first stroke across the branch, the saw slips out, and I lurch forward to keep from dropping it. Bo tightens his arms around me, and the ladder teeters beneath us. My heartbeat spikes upward. “The saw takes some getting used to,” Bo adds.
I nod, gripping the top of the ladder. And then I feel the sharp stinging in my left index finger. I turn my palm up so I can examine it, and blood beads to the surface along the outer edge of my finger. When the blade slipped, it must have cut into my skin where my hand was holding the branch. Bo notices it at the same time, and he leans closer into me, reaching around to grab my finger.
“You’re cut,” he says. The blood drips down the tip of my finger and plummets all the way to the ground, six feet below. I notice Otis and Olga sitting in the swath of sun between rows, orange-and-white heads titled upward, watching us.
“It’s okay,” I say. But he yanks out a white handkerchief from his back pocket and presses it to the cut, staunching the bleeding. “It’s not that deep,” I add, even though it stings pretty good. The white fabric turns red almost instantly.
“We should clean it out,” he says.
“No. Really, I’m fine.”
This close, with his face directly beside mine, I can feel each breath as it rises in his chest, see his lips move as he exhales. His heart is racing faster than it should. Like he was worried I might have just cut my entire hand off, and it would have been his fault for allowing me to wield a saw.
He lifts the handkerchief away to inspect the cut, leaning into me.
“Do we need to amputate?” I ask lightheartedly.
“Most likely.” His eyes slide to mine, the corner of his mouth lifting. He tears off a small strip of the handkerchief, holding my hand in his, then ties the narrow piece of fabric around my finger like a makeshift tourniquet. “This should keep the finger from falling off until we operate.”
“Thanks,” I say, smiling even though it still burns. My lips so close to his I can almost taste the saltiness of his skin.
He slides what’s left of his handkerchief into his back pocket and straightens up behind me so that his chest is no longer against my back. “It’s probably safer with just one person on the ladder,” he amends.
I nod, agreeing, and he climbs down, jumping the last couple feet to the ground and leaving me weightless atop the ladder without him.
He scales back up his ladder, and we work side by side, sawing away the unwanted limbs on each tree. I’m careful to keep my fingers out of the way, and soon I feel confident with the saw. It’s a tedious, slow process, but gradually we work our way down the first row.
This becomes our routine.