Page 59 of Under the Orchard’s Spell

We crest a small hill. Light bounces over dry fissures in the ground—like the soil has cracked open by the roots. Eventually, Logan says, “I keep coming back to what she said about how this is the cleanest version of her love.”

It takes me a moment to remember what he’s talking about. Lydia’s letter didn’t explicitly mention her family, which, come to think of it, is disconcerting. But there was an oblique line about my uncle staying present for her—because her husband didn’t? And what she’d left behind, which must have been a reference to her kids. Then there was the part about the cleanest version of her love.

“What do you think she meant by that?” I ask.

“Do you remember when you asked if I had any theories about where she went?”

“You said your dad blamed himself.”

“And I didn’t answer,” he points out.

“Oh,” I say. “Right. What, then?”

“I used to have this hope that…that deep down she had an altruistic reason.”

“Altruistic?”

He blows out a breath. “The year after she left, Andrew read A Wrinkle in Time for school. Do you know that book?”

“I saw the movie. The dad disappears and the kids go to find him, right?”

“Exactly. It took me forever to get Andrew to read it—all his schoolwork was a fight that year—but when he finally started it, he wouldn’t put it down. For months after, he carried his copy around and kept asking me questions about it. Like whether I thought tesseracts could be real. Or if there was any chance Mom was working on a top-secret government project.” He sighs. “It was a child’s interpretation of the loss, but also…”

We’re walking fast again, nearly at the end of the property, but this time Logan is setting the pace, a half step in front of me. I touch his elbow, intending to slow him down, but his entire body tenses. He wheels, back stiffening as he faces me.

I pull back my hand.

“But, also, you hoped something like that could be true?” I ask.

The crystal pears cast shimmering light across Logan’s expression, highlighting the ridge of his nose, the clench of his jaw. Distantly, I wonder if the pears will still be glowing like this two nights from now, and how on earth we’re going to hide them from two hundred guests.

“I was always angry with her for leaving us,” he says. “But sometimes, when I got tired of being angry, I let myself believe that it wasn’t her fault.” He pushes out a breath. “I know that doesn’t make any sense.”

My mind flashes to something my mom once said. We were in the car on a long stretch of highway, parabolas of the orange-and-white trailer visible in the rearview mirrors. I was crying, but we were in some expanse of arid desert—going through Utah, maybe, or Nevada—with no exits, no rest stops, no escape.

Her knuckles were nearly white as she clutched the steering wheel and she said to me, “Can’t you see I’m doing this for you?”

Sometimes, later, I’d think about that. It was always when my chest was wrung dry of tears, when I was too exhausted to rail against her wall of indifference any longer. I’d give up instead. I’d tell myself that exact lie.

She’s doing this for me.

Sometimes, I almost believed it.

“Sometimes,” I say now, “you get so tired of feeling something that you just have to shut it off.”

He swallows, eyes on mine. “Yeah.”

Wind gusts over the branches and they shiver in response, drawing the crystal pears into a tinkling harmony. I don’t know how we ended up here, but this row has always been one of my favorites. The trees are old—planted by my grandmother when she first took over from her father—and the limbs nearly crowd together, carving spaces beneath that feel like secret dens.

Logan leans a wide shoulder against a branch. He’s still watching me, intensely enough that I feel my heart skip its next beat.

“See?” I say.

“See what?”

“Being in the trees, it helps.”

“It’s not the trees that are helping,” he says.