“Yeah,” Sorrow said.
It was what she was supposed to say, in spite of the weak nervous feeling she had inside. There had been nothing but talking around her all day. The police, Verity, the lawyers, all the murmured voices at the sheriff’s department behind coffee mugs and closed doors, a constant patter of questions, and what she wanted now was quiet. But Sonia was talking about tomorrow, the next day, a promise of what was to come, and Sorrow was tired of crying, tired of shouting, tired of treating her entire life like an obstacle course riddled with traps and mistakes.
“Yeah,” she said again. “Okay.”
“We’ll see you when we get in tomorrow afternoon,” Sonia said. “I love you, Sorrow.”
“Love you too.”
Sorrow walked up the driveway slowly. Rain pattered on the maple trees, and the temperature was dropping, but there was no bite in it, no ominous unseasonal threat. It felt nice on her skin, soothing when she lifted her face to the sky. Soft gray curtains were drifting over the mountains, nudging the downpour closer. Everything was green and lush and summer-alive.
She went around the back of the house and into the kitchen. Grandma was chopping up vegetables and dumping them into a big pot on the stove.
“Rainy day soup?” Sorrow said, and Grandma nodded. “That’ll be good. Where’s Verity?”
She didn’t mean to glance up at the ceiling as she asked, but she couldn’t quite stop herself. Verity had been perfectly calm and controlled all day, reasonable and rational and even a bit stern when she’d met Sorrow at the sheriff’s department. She had sat by Sorrow’s side through the entire ordeal without once wavering.
Grandma pointed her needle toward the barn.
“What’s she doing out there?”
Grandma shrugged. Sorrow went back outside and jogged across the lawn. She ducked into the barn as the rain began to fall.
At the threshold she paused to let her eyes adjust. The air was stuffy with the scents of rust and fertilizer and a faint, lingering hint of hay. Verity was sitting on the workbench with her feet propped up on the engine block of the tractor. She had cleared a space on the cluttered bench for herself and the white file box beside her; the lid was tipped off and she had a stack of papers on her legs.
“What are you doing out here?” Sorrow asked. “You’ve been home like five minutes.”
“I was looking for some old insurance paperwork, but I got distracted.” Verity fanned her face with the stack of papers. “We’ve been shoving stuff in here for so long I don’t even know what’s in half these boxes. But I’d like to get it cleared out and get rid of this thing.” She kicked the tractor. “I want to park the car in here this winter. I’ve spent enough of my life scraping ice off the windshield.”
“So you’re going to start now?” Sorrow asked.
Verity glanced down at the papers, and when she looked up she was wearing a self-conscious smile. “Well, it’s raining, and I don’t want to be stuck in the house. I might start remodeling again just to have something to do.”
Sorrow looked down uncomfortably, scraped her toe over the floor. She didn’t know how to answer, not when her first impulse was to say something awful: Why did you wait until everything was ruined to start remodeling rather than sleeping all day? That wouldn’t help. That wasn’t the right thing to say.
But maybe there was no right thing to say. There were no magic words they could pass between them, no confessions or reassurances that would heal the wounds. Patience had figured that out too, right before the end. She had gathered her courage to push and demand, to look beyond the orchard and imagine another life for herself. For so long Sorrow had believed she’d been following Patience’s lead in doing everything she could to avoid causing even the slightest ripples, but she knew now she had learned the wrong lesson. Patience would never have wanted her to make herself quiet and small. Patience would have challenged her to a race just to see how far they could go.
Sorrow’s eyes were stinging again. She blinked twice, cleared her throat. “You want help?”
Verity gave her a considering look. “You don’t have to. You look exhausted.”
“If I nap now, I won’t be able to sleep later. I can help.”
“Okay. Grab a box. There’s a trash bag over here, and I’m putting stuff to donate in the wheelbarrow.”
Sorrow stepped over a length of dented gutter and a pile of garden stakes. There was already a pile in the wheelbarrow: mismatched tools, a painted birdhouse, an elbow of plastic piping, a pair of leather work boots. She reached for an age-softened cardboard box just inside the door, where the cool damp air stirred around her. She turned the box, and a fluttery feeling settled high in her chest, something light and a little painful. Patience, in Grandma’s handwriting on the side. She was tired; she hadn’t been paying attention. She withdrew her hand.
“You can go through those, if you want,” Verity said.
Sorrow looked over her shoulder.
“But you don’t have to.”
There was a scattering of leaves and a fine layer of dust over the gray sweater at the top of the box. Below the sweater, a white dress with tiny blue flowers. A long skirt patched together from two of Verity’s old dresses—Patience had made that one herself. Beneath the skirt was a sky-blue wool scarf—Grandma had knit it because Patience had fallen in love with the yarn at the store, had kept returning to brush her fingers gently over the skeins even after she had sighed at the price tag.
Sorrow tugged the scarf out, drawing it gently between her fingers. It was still as soft as a kitten; Patience had liked it too much to wear it often.
“You should take it,” Verity said. “It’s too nice to give away.”
Sorrow didn’t have any use for a thick wool scarf in Florida, but she folded it into a square and set it aside.
Under the scarf were more folded clothes, skirts and shirts with no particular sentimental meaning, and at the bottom of the box she found a journal bound in leather and tied closed with a green ribbon. It was familiar, but Sorrow couldn’t recall ever seeing Patience use it. She slid the ribbon off and opened to a page in the middle.
It wasn’t Patience’s handwriting that filled the pages, but Grandma’s.
Sorrow flipped through the book, frowning. She remembered how Grandma used to write in her journals, early in the morning before anybody else was awake, or late at night by a crackling fire, the scratch-scratch of her pen on paper a constant and reassuring sound, but Sorrow hadn’t seen her do it once this summer.