Page 65 of Under the Orchard’s Spell

“If we’re going to have this talk,” she says heavily, “I’m going to need to a drink.”

In the kitchen, Val sinks down to the table while, at her instruction, I forge to the basement to retrieve a dusty bottle of rhubarb wine from the shelf filled with jars of preserves and dill pickles. When I return, I pour pale blush liquid into two crystal glasses.

Val eyes them, then me. “Just us, right?”

I nod. “Logan already left for Maplehurst. He had a meeting with his insurance company, and then he’s going to bring Mason back for the gala tomorrow.”

“Good.” She lifts her glass and takes a deep swallow, then wipes her pressed lips with the back of her hand. “I guess you’ve got the gist of it, then. Mostly.”

I squeeze the bottle in my hands, watching the sediment spin as my head does the same. “People who come here end up leaving.”

A curt nod. Her eyes remain on her glass, now clutched tightly between her callused fingers. “The way Martin would say it—it drove away the people he loved. The Reid who tends this land is cursed to a kind of solitude.”

My next few heartbeats flicker as I try to digest the words drove away and cursed to solitude.

Val sighs again and takes another long swig of wine, draining her glass. She slides it toward me and I refill it before stepping away, taking refuge by a countertop.

“I didn’t believe him for a long while,” she continues. “For years I wondered if Martin didn’t make it happen himself. He was always talking about how he was meant to be alone, always so goddamn convinced of it, that he holed himself up in this house until that’s exactly what he got. I didn’t want that for you, too.”

“That’s the reason you wouldn’t tell me the truth?”

She frowns. “No. I didn’t tell the truth ’cause I promised the man I wouldn’t. Before he died, Martin made me swear not to tell you.”

“He what?”

A fresh round of betrayal rises up in me.

We had a whole month together, at the end. We played pinochle and did about six hundred puzzles. I’d wake up in the middle of the night—plastered with sweat from those heavy quilts—and my cheeks would already be wet because I couldn’t imagine how this world could exist without him. How these trees could thrive without him tending them. I asked him a million questions about watering schedules and irrigation systems and clung to every word of his answers. Yet he didn’t tell me this.

This. The most important thing.

Val fiddles with one of the lace doilies on the kitchen table. “He said he was worried you’d hightail it out of here if you knew the truth. And…you know how he felt about this land. What it would have meant if you weren’t the one to take over.”

I suck in a deep, steeling breath as my mind flicks back to those last days. He was oddly insistent about educating me on the land’s problems. I haven’t understood why he seemed so adamant—usually it was Val who told me I needed to be more realistic, not Martin. But now I wonder. Was it guilt? Did he feel conflicted? Maybe it was his attempt at honesty, like emphasizing all the other problems would make up for withholding this big one.

That doesn’t make it right, though. He should have told me. I deserved to know.

“Like I said,” Val continues, “up ’til recently, I wasn’t so sure the curse was real. Just some self-fulfilling prophecy he’d laid on himself. But then you came here with those two….” She blinks like the names are on the tip of her tongue.

“Blake and Liv.”

“Yeah. Them.” Even though she doesn’t know the whole story about what happened—I’ve only told Logan about what I saw in the barn—her expression tells me exactly how she feels about them both. “And not a few months after, they were gone. And the land started acting up almost right away.”

My jaw clenches. “And you still didn’t tell me.”

“I gave the man my word,” she says. “And I tried to tell you what I could. Without breaking that last promise.”

“Some things are more important than a promise.”

“Not to me.”

I look at her flatly, arms still crossed.

“I have my flaws, Ali,” Val says, and her voice is rougher than usual. “I know that. I haven’t got much patience. I never seem to know the right thing to say when folks are hurting. And I’ve been called ‘bullheaded’ from time to time, maybe even rightly. But if there’s one thing I’ve always been good about, it’s keeping my word. Especially when I give it to good people. And your uncle—god love him—was one of the best men I’ve ever known.”

I rub at the bridge of my nose as I push off my counter, then lower myself to a seat next to her. My jaw is throbbing from clenching my teeth so hard. At the same time, the person to blame for that isn’t here.

“That’s why you told me to talk to my mom,” I say heavily. “Because she’s one of the ones who left.”