Page 53 of Under the Orchard’s Spell

She purses her lips and gives her plant a quarter turn. “The family always had a rule about discussing this matter with children. Children are too unpredictable, too liable to let the secret slip. And by the time you were an adult, well…I did try to warn you.”

“You did?”

She nods. “When you called me to say you were taking over for Martin. I told you to be careful about what you were getting yourself involved in. I reminded you that I left for a reason, and it wasn’t just your father.”

I remember the conversation because it was one of those rare occasions she spontaneously brought him up. I seized the opportunity to talk about him, redirecting the conversation to how they met when he was in Apple Valley on assignment. I know little about their early history except that my dad was a photojournalist with a fellowship to work on a story documenting the slow decline of family-run farms. But as much as I pushed, Mom refused to budge. Instead she kept circling the conversation back to what I assumed would be the same laundry lists of complaints about the farm. Eventually, I ended the call, trying to avoid getting upset in front of her. I hadn’t realized she was trying to tell me something else entirely.

“You were determined to make the decision you wanted to make,” Mom adds. “My input was irrelevant.”

I sit back, trying to work that over in my head. Meanwhile, Mom busies herself: wiping dust from leaves, checking moisture levels with a slim meter. As a kid, I would resentfully watch her devote hours of meticulous attention to those plants, wondering what they had that I didn’t. Now I know it’s more about what I have that they don’t.

“Okay, then,” I say. “Are you still willing to tell me what you know?”

She resumes tweezing buds. “The farm’s affliction changed over the years. It was never precisely the same from season to season. But that was what it was: mercurial. A sunny day could easily turn to a thunderstorm. Pears straight off the trees would change flavor—sweet in one bite and too bitter in the next. Even the birds were erratic. Some days they’d sing in a kind of harmony, but on others their song would turn jarring and discordant.”

Huh. That doesn’t sound anything like what I read in my uncle’s journals.

“My pears are turning to crystal,” I say. For the first time in the conversation, I let a twinge of powerlessness creep into my voice. Mom doesn’t look up. I force myself to keep talking. “Have you seen anything like that before?”

“No, but I wouldn’t have.” I tilt my head and even though Mom isn’t looking at me, she continues, “The land reacts differently to different people.”

I sit up straighter. Now we’re getting somewhere. “Really? How so?”

A long pause stretches between us and I immediately worry that I’ve asked the wrong question.

“I mean—” I start.

“I realize I haven’t told you much about my mother.”

I blink. I can’t remember the last time Mom voluntarily talked about my grandmother. Wait, no, I can. I was in high school. Mom came home from some work function having had more than her usual two glasses of wine. She kicked off her heels and made an uncharacteristically off-the-cuff comment about how she never could have pleased her teetotaler mother and even “settling down with a man” didn’t win her any points.

Meanwhile, I hardly have enough of my own experiences to understand my grandmother. I recognize her from her portraits all over the farmhouse—stately and commanding in her frames—but I met her only a handful of times. My lasting impressions were the contradictory observations that she ruled the house with an iron fist but would cry if the pie didn’t set.

“Yeah, not much,” I say.

“She was married several times.”

This I did know—there are portraits of her four husbands hanging in chronological order along the staircase. Technically, Mom and Uncle Martin were half siblings: My mom was my grandmother’s child with her first husband, who passed away. Martin was the product of her second and, as I understand it, shortest marriage.

“Right,” I say.

“The farm’s afflictions were different for as long as each of those husbands were part of the family.”

Okay. Maybe I see where this is going. “How so?”

“There were field mice everywhere in the months she and Martin’s father were married. The soil was always cold to the touch while her third husband was living with us. And when my own father was alive, the trees’ leaves would turn golden for a week, right before the pears were ripe, and sometimes the soil turned up rocks so bright they almost looked like gemstones.”

I sit back, eyebrows raised. Are my crystallizing pears connected to a particular person? I noticed the first signs of them before Logan moved onto the land and after Blake and Liv had already left. And my presence couldn’t have been the cause, because I’d already been here for months.

So, I’m not sure. However, this does explain why Martin kept logs of visitors alongside notes about soil and weather.

“So, where does the curse come in?” I ask.

“Curse?”

“That’s what Val said. I don’t think she meant to.”

“Val said that?” Mom asks, uncharacteristically sharp.