Page 39 of Apple of My Eye

Once inside, I stood for a moment, inhaling, and took stock. There’s the clawfoot tub, the old desk, the worn leather couch. The window, with its long view down the rows, revealed the bare branches in the October morning light. Nothing had been disturbed or moved like up at the house.

Most people didn’t know this place existed, tucked into the center of the orchard, disguised by the trees in every season. In summer, the leaves hid it, but it blended into the snow in winter, given it’s white painted clapboard siding.

I crossed to the corner and crouched down. I knew the board by feel, the third from the wall, the one that ran slightly short on the left end and just enough of a gap to get two fingers under. Dad had never fixed it. I had never asked him to. It had always been there, and when I needed a place to hide something where nobody would think to look, I hid it there.

I worked it free and lifted the board. My diary was still there, wrapped in an old cloth flour sack, the way I had left it. The worn horse on the cover was barely visible. I lifted it out and held it to my chest for a moment, reunited with the weight of it.

Dad’s journals may have been taken off my nightstand by whoever had walked through the house last night. But not this. My diary was still here. The one that mattered to me very differently, for very different reasons.

It contained my record of every date, every incident. Photographs, too. Every conversation I had logged in my own careful handwriting, because I had learned from my father that you wrote things down. You did not trust memory alone. Memory could be argued, could be questioned, whereas a handwritten record with dates and specifics was harder to dismiss.

There was only one other person on Earth who knew this existed.

Congressman Bruce Brewster.

An icy shiver moved down my spine that had nothing to do with the frost outside.

I had used the diary once, a long time ago, as a warning. A line in the sand.“Stay away from me and my family, or I'll release every detail of what your son is. What he did. What I know.”The threat had worked, or something like it had; a truce of sorts, shaky, but the kind that held as long as both sides found it convenient.

Until now. Maybe.

Questions turned over in my head, the way they did when I needed to think something all the way through before I let myself react to it.

Had seeing the congressman and Trevor at the Chesson place stirred something up the other day? Had that encounter prompted someone to come looking, ransacking our place last night? Bruce would not have known exactly what to look for. He could easily have mistaken Dad’s journals for mine and taken the wrong ones entirely.

Or had someone overheard in the Copper Cup that Dad had been keeping detailed records about the Brewsters’ activities, and came for those notebooksspecifically?

I had no way of knowing.

I set the diary carefully back in its place. Didn’t bother to read it because I had no intention of revisiting the past. I replaced the flour sack and the floorboard.

I stood and looked around the cottage, and let myself feel, only for a moment, how much of my life had lived inside these four walls. More than the house, maybe. So many nights I had come here when the grief was too large for the farmhouse and I didn’t want my sisters hearing me crying. After Mom and Dad—this place was the only thing that helped. The ledgers had kept Dad’s handwriting alive for me. And my diary, with everything I had not been ready to share with anyone, stayed hidden here in a place only I knew about.

I sighed and pulled the door shut behind me. Then I stood on the small step and looked at the door handle.

No lock.

I had never once considered needing one. Privacy in the country with wide land around us, no neighbors close, trees on every side, had always felt like its own kind of safety. Last night someone had stripped that assumption bare without asking my permission.

I wanted a lock on this door. Now.

The wanting of it brewed up my anger at whoever had been in my home, and at the years of careful holding-everything-together that had still not been enough. It had taken my privacy being violated to make me believe that a diary hidden under a loose floorboard with no lock on the door might no longer equal protection from the worst human I knew.

I walked back through the orchard, back into the house. Knox was still asleep, judging by his snores.

I made coffee and got to work, because work helped me stay sane.

Henry and Carlarrived at half past eight, reliable as the season itself. I met them in the drive, told them what had happened the night before, and watched their faces go through the particular sequence of shock, then fury, then the quiet resolve of men who had been working this land long enough to take its problems personally.

They offered to stay and help put the house back together. I thanked them, told them we would manage, and proudly handed them their checks—a full season's wages plus a bonus that I had been planning since the grocery distribution deal came through. I hugged them both, which was not something I did often enough, and Henry patted my shoulder in the way of a man who did not have many words but meant every one he had.

Then we went back to work in the orchard.

There was still fruit on the ground to collect. Good fallen apples went into crates for cider and butter. Henry liked to take a bin for his pigs, and I always let him. Overripe ones went to the compost pile. The rest we spread in the field beyond the trees, where the deer and other wildlife would find them by nightfall. Whatever still hung on the branches, we picked and kept for ourselves in cold storage, hoping for enough to make pies and have for afternoon snacks through winter.

The physical labor helped keep worries at bay with my hands rough in the cold air, the familiar weight of a full picking bag around my shoulder, the smell of late-season apples and damp earth. The orchard had been doing this for me my entire life. Grounding me when I did not have the energy to do it myself.

Sometime mid-morning I went for water and glanced up at the house.