Page 48 of Under the Orchard’s Spell

“No, please.” I shake my head, and even though I know exactly what I’m doing, this, too, is pure muscle memory. My lips stretch into a smile. “You haven’t. I’m fine.”

Logan’s eyes tighten as he watches me.

It’s absolutely fine that Logan is leaving.

Not in a “smiling over the pain” way, which I guess, sure, is something I do. Rather, because it should be fine. What I just went through with Blake and Liv was objectively worse. Logan is a long-forgotten childhood crush. We’ve spent, what, a few days together? Kissed once since I was sixteen?

Meanwhile, I was engaged to Blake for more than a year and we dated for five more before that.

My feelings about Logan should be a single raindrop in a flood.

Yet the truth is that my relationship with Blake never felt like a storm—and that was the point. Blake was a person who went to college an hour away from the town where he grew up and spent every Sunday with his parents. He had five-year plans. Shared his calendars with me. Always refilled my wiper fluid. When we moved in together, he started making me the same banana and peanut butter smoothie every morning, insisting that it was just as good as a cup of coffee. Sure, I usually ended up dragging myself into a coffee shop an hour later, still half asleep because bananas do not, in fact, have the “waking up power” of a French vanilla iced coffee. But still. I liked that the smoothies felt repetitive. I thought that meant something.

When he proposed, saying yes felt like the right choice, but also, the only choice. We were both in our late twenties, and we’d been together for half a decade. Our friends were buying houses and having babies. Casual acquaintances had begun to ask when it would be our turn, and Blake’s dad had long moved past good-humored teasing. A few weeks after we spent Christmas and New Year’s with his family—and a few months before my uncle’s diagnosis—Blake proposed.

I said yes because it felt like the inevitable—the right—step on the path I was walking. But I knew it was the right choice for certain nearly a year later, when Blake agreed to move to Oregon to take over my uncle’s farm with me. I might have seen his five-year plans and weekly visits to his parents’ house as signs of dependability and trustworthiness, but his willingness to set them aside and return to my home meant even more.

As it turns out, I was wrong. Maybe it never meant anything at all. And if I can’t count on my own sense of certainty, what can I count on?

So, Logan?

He’s leaving. And that’s fine. There’s too much else on the line.

Over the next week, we return to work in earnest. Back in the barn, Logan and I resume our efforts to round up the bunnies. This time, instead of lunging at the rabbits, we try to lure them to us by testing out a variety of enticements. As it turns out, our furry friends are quite partial to unsweetened apple cider soaked with allspice.

“Little traitors,” I whisper affectionately as I dip my finger in dark liquid and hold it out to the hole in the barn’s wall. “I still can’t believe they turned up their noses at my pears.”

Within moments, I have a highlighter-yellow bunny tucked into an elbow and apple cider dribbling down my wrist. It’s striking just how quickly I’ve gotten accustomed to these ridiculous rabbits and, perhaps, the broader idea that this land is supernatural. Maybe because this place has always been remarkable to me. Its further strangeness isn’t a shock. It’s just a deeper layer of the familiarity I’ve always held close.

“Terrible taste,” Logan agrees before letting out an exaggerated sigh. For the last five minutes, he’s been trying to lure out a rabbit cowering behind a ladder, but it has staunchly refused a single lick from his outstretched bowl.

I deposit my catch into our makeshift crate and crouch next to his shoulder.

“You have to be enticing.” I make a gentle cooing noise as I hold out a hand with more apple cider on my fingertips. “Try not to glare like you’re about to give them a stern lecture.”

“A stern lecture,” Logan repeats flatly.

“You know what I mean.”

“I really do not.”

I swivel to look him up and down. He’s hunched over, frowning, his big frame taking up twice as much space as it should. “Rabbits respond better to positivity.”

“How would you—”

The cowering rabbit takes two tentative hops toward my outstretched hand. Moments later, I have its soft, wriggling body in my arms, licking at me with a bristly tongue.

“Like I said.” I steer my triumphant grin toward Logan. “They like it when you smile.”

With obvious effort, his gaze lifts from the rabbit, nuzzled against my fingers, to my face. “I see that.”

Our eyes meet, and something sparks like static up my spine before Logan turns away.

He’s leaving, I remind myself sternly as I cuddle my bunny closer. And that is fine.

We use Logan’s truck to transport the rabbits to a rescue outside of town, and although Logan fretted about this decision—What would the people say when we showed up with blue and silver rabbits?—his worry turns out to be needless. As soon as the creatures are off the property, their colors revert to natural ones: gray, brown, white. Another miracle of the mundane.

Then, the real work begins. We clear out piles of broken equipment and replace the barn’s cracked, foggy windows with clean glass. The fresh sunlight makes me acutely aware of Logan watching me as I balance on the stepladder, stretching on tiptoes to wedge the last windowpane into place. When my foot slips slightly, he lifts his hands to steady me—reaching as his shoulder brushes my thigh—before he catches himself and steps back, fists tightening at his sides.