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This place isn’t fit for that. It isn’t fit to live. It’s what my mum, Jekka, would say if she saw it. My dad would be kinder. Iggy sees the good in everything, even compacted soil, fields gone over, and fences leaning as though they’ve never been upright.

It’s why I grew up on a farm that was once more beat-up than this one, and why I step out into the yard—my yard—with all the faith I’ll ever need that I can turn this place around.

My parents have faith in me.

But that doesn’t stop the messages rolling in. The reams of emails I won’t ever read. The voice notes I can use an app to transcribe, but I know and they know I won’t bother.

Not now.

Not yet.

This is my land and I don’t care if they think I should’ve settled somewhere already built. Somewhere safe. They’re not here, and this place, for better or worse, it’s mine—most of it, anyway—and I trust the ground. Anything else, I’ll fix.

Or ignore.

I don’t have a bed.

I mean, I do, but not one that stops my phone buzzing and flashing day and night, a phenomenon so annoying I wind up dropping the thing into an apple crate and leaving it there.

Three days now. Not my best plan. It’s only a matter of time before Jekka decides I’ve died in a flooded ditch and sends Folk to drag me out of it. But for now, a reprieve. Quiet beyond silence and I wake with the dawn instead. Cold air in my lungs. Damp from the grass growing through the barn floor seeping into my bones. It smells of dust and wet wood in here, the roof at the far end so unsound I can’t use the space below until I can patch it. Or afford to replace it, but it’s a distant problem. One I’ll worry about next time I stop to think, which won’t happen anytime soon.

I get my bearings.

Remember why I can’t hear the birds sing.

Then I rise from the folded blanket I slept on, stamp into my boots, and roll into a day that has no rhythm yet. No solid routine. Just work. Farm life. And it looks worse in daylight. Everything from the barren fields to the half-derelict house listing to one side. I have so much to do, but I like it. It’s why I’m here. Why, when I step outside, my boots sink into the uneven ground, I know I’m where I’m meant to be.

I crouch to rub dirt into my hands and get on with it. Work through the morning until the afternoon hits and I take a nap in the sun.

It’s still warm on my face when I wake up. My body has sunk into the ground as though it’s claimed me for a while, but my mind is instantly alert to the disorienting gap where my hearing should be. A sense of wrong that used to knock the breath out of me, but now just exists, unwelcome and permanent, until I’m awake enough to bury it.

Or believe the crawling sensation that lingers as I sit up and survey my surroundings. Scan the broken fence lines, the long run of fields before the land meets the sea, and find a lanky figure leaning against my gatepost like he has an appointment I’ve forgotten about.

He hasn’t.

No one should be here, unless it’s my silent business partner checking up on his investment, and the man’s presence unsettles me enough to come upright with aggression humming through my veins.

I start towards him, fists bunched at my sides, assessing him the way my brother taught me when I was a child and he was a soldier who only had ten days a year to spare for me, noting the man doesn’t shift as I approach. As if he’s fully expecting me to punch him in the face and he’s okay with it.

Weird.

Up close, I see he’s nearer to my dad’s age than mine. Worn in a way that has nothing to do with age. Calm with a patience I don’t entirely trust. “You the new landowner?”

“One of them. What do you want?”

He answers so rapidly I don’t catch all of it, but I interpret enough. Work. Of course. But I can’t help, not yet.

“Come back next month. Might have something for you then.”

An honest truth and all I’ve got.

The man nods and slinks away from the gate and down the lane. Gone before I’ve moved a muscle, and I frown at the space he’s vacated longer than I need to, bemusement overtaking the agitation I woke up with. Something about the man bothers me, as if my gut can’t decide if he’s good or evil. But the feeling fades quick enough, overcome by the load of everything waiting behind me. A burden I chose, but still.

The land calls to me.

I go back to work. Mend fences and service elderly equipment. Tend the crops I guerrilla-planted before the farm sale went through, learning the earth before it was mine, seeds and young plants that’ll yield a midsummer harvest if I can get the poly-tunnels up before the mad weather in this part of the world shifts again.

It’s how I spend my evening, wrestling with poles and plastic sheeting long past sundown, grateful Folk ignored me when I said I didn’t need his friends to come up here and install floodlights in the yard and working plumbing in the old house. If he hadn’t, I’d be working in the kind of darkness that sits heavy on my skin. Where everything I can’t see and hear feels like danger and however daft I know it is, I’m too agitated to calm myself down.