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Then Penny called, “Mom, I found a green one.”

Kate stayed exactly where she was for one second longer. Then she smiled. “Later.”

“Later.”

Their fingers separated reluctantly. Penny came back carrying her leaf as though she had discovered a rare species. Kate took it with appropriate admiration.

Wes picked up the basket and handed it to her. “Tell your mom the pie was good.”

“She’ll be devastated by the surprise.”

Kate gave him a look that said a good deal more than goodbye before turning toward Bramblewood.

Penny waved her stick. “Bye, Wes.”

“Bye, Penny.”

He watched them until the trees hid them from sight. Then he returned to the trailer. The crew was still moving steadily through the rows, bins filling one after another. Work had continued while he sat beneath a tree eating pie with Kate and showing Penny rabbit tracks. Wes picked up the wrench.

His bear stretched contentedly inside him. That was a very good ten minutes.

Wes glanced toward the track where Kate had disappeared. It had been closer to twenty. He did not regret a second of it.

Another gust moved through the orchard. Stronger this time. Wes looked toward the ridge. The cloud line had thickened since morning. He finished tightening the hitch, then reached for his phone.

CHAPTER 15

Kate

Penny had spent most of the morning collecting things. Not useful things. Not even particularly interesting things, as far as Kate could tell. But the small red bucket she carried around the orchard now contained half a dozen leaves, two acorns, a piece of bark, several stones and one feather that Alan had made her promise not to put anywhere near her mouth. Kate sat on the grass beneath one of the older trees while her father helped Penny decide whether another stone was sufficiently different from the ones she already had to deserve a place in the collection.

“It’s rounder,” Penny explained.

Alan turned the stone over in his hand before passing it back. “Then I think you have a case. The others are all much flatter.”

Penny dropped it into the bucket with satisfaction and wandered off again.

“You’re encouraging her,” Kate said.

“She knows what she likes. I don’t see the harm.”

“You’ll see the harm when Mom finds half the orchard in the washing machine because Penny forgot to empty her pockets.”

Alan laughed and lowered himself carefully onto the grass beside Kate. “You did exactly the same thing. Stones, leaves, feathers. I used to check your coat pockets before your mother did the laundry because I knew there would be something in them.”

Kate turned toward him. “I did not.”

“You absolutely did. You went through a stage where you collected shiny stones because you were convinced they were valuable. I think you were five or six. Every walk ended with me carrying half of them because your pockets were full.”

The memory was too faint for Kate to catch properly, more feeling than picture. Long walks with her parents, her father’s hand around hers when the path became steep, the certainty that anything worth keeping could be handed to him if it became too heavy. “Did you ever throw them away?”

“Not while you were looking,” Alan said. “I learned that lesson quickly. You remembered every single one.”

“That sounds like me.”

“It does.” His smile softened. “You always knew what mattered to you. Even when nobody else could see why.”

Kate looked toward Penny, who was crouched several yards away inspecting the roots of a tree. Some days, having a daughter felt like being given a window into parts of herself she had forgotten. Penny was not the same child Kate had been. She was louder about some things, more cautious about others, completely her own person. But every so often Kate would see something familiar in the concentration on her face or the determined way she carried home an object nobody else would have given a second glance.