“Stop,” he says. “Just for a second. Just look.”
So I look. The world is quiet here, the only sound the drip of meltwater from the branches, the faint creak of the trees shifting in the sun. I lean into Lane’s side, just enough to share his heat, and he doesn’t move away. His hand slides down to my waist and holds it there.
I think to myself, not for the first time today, that I love him.
It’s a strange thing, loving someone like Lane. There’s no grand revelation, no thunderclap or swell of music. Just the slow gathering of every ordinary moment: the way he wipes his boots before coming inside, the way he remembers how I take my coffee, the way he fixes the things I never notice are broken. All the small, invisible acts that stitch a life together.
He looks at me now, and the sun finds his eyes, making them less storm and more sky. “What?” he asks, soft and low.
“Nothing,” I say. He knows I love him, and I know he loves me.
He lets the silence ride for a while, then presses his lips tomy temple. The touch is brief, but it anchors me to the spot, makes the rest of the world fade away.
“We should get back,” I say, when I trust myself to speak.
He nods, but doesn’t let go of my hand. “In a minute.”
So we stand there, two ghosts in the orchard, and wait for the world to change again.
When the wind picks up, it smells less like winter and more like promise. I inhale deep, and it burns, but in the best way.
This is what comes after: the thaw, the hunger, the waiting for what might be. I squeeze Lane’s hand, and he squeezes back.
I could do this forever.
The world returnsto normal with the arrival of the courier. I hear the grind of tires, then the long-suffering bell at the front gate. Now that the house is resting, the outside world creeps in.
I leave Lane to his trees. The walk back to the house is all slosh and suction—boots heavy with mud, steps echoing hollow on the stone porch. I pause to wipe them on the coir mat, a habit Whitby drilled into me. The foyer is warmer, the air flushed with the scent of yeast and wood polish. There’s a man at the threshold, hat in hand, wearing the blank expression of someone paid by the hour to be invisible.
He holds out a parcel, wrapped in brown paper, the twine so tight it puckers the corners. The address is in a script I don’t recognize at first—my own name, but in the slanted, continental style that makes every letter look like it’s leaning into the future. Paris postmark, no return address. The waxseal is cracked but still carries the ghost of an emblem—something avian, maybe a crow or a magpie, picked out in black.
I sign where he points. He vanishes down the walk before I can thank him. The parcel is cold against my hands, but there is a surprising weight to it—something solid, not just paper.
I don’t open it right away. I take it to the library, cradling it like an egg. The library is changed since winter. Whitby insisted on a spring cleaning, so the windows are streakless, the carpet beaten and left unsullied by Lane’s boots for at least one week. The light is harsh, but it makes the room feel real, not just a monument to books no one reads.
I set the parcel on the desk and study it. My hands shake, but only a little, as I slide a letter opener through the paper. The wrapping peels away in a single, deliberate strip. Inside is a shallow box, the color of dust and old vellum, stamped with a crest I do not recognize.
I lift the lid. Inside, nestled in tissue, is a small bouquet—no, not a bouquet, but something pressed flat and arranged with the kind of precision that suggests it was done in a moment of absolute attention.
Holly and hemlock, side by side, tied at the base with a black ribbon. The leaves are dry, but not brittle; the berries retain a dull shine. The air inside the box is faintly resinous, as if the scent of the branches is trying to outlast the memory of the hands that bound them.
Beneath the foliage, a folded sheet of paper. I ease it out, careful not to disturb the arrangement.
The handwriting is elegant, a script learned under duress and now deployed with a kind of lazy confidence. I read it aloud, though there is no one hereto hear it.
I breathe easier with you two near, but this will have to do for now, until we’re all together again.
No signature,but it doesn’t need one. The line is pure Larkin—half boast, half plea, all theater.
There is something else at the bottom of the box. I lift the tissue and find a small square, thick watercolor paper, edges torn with a ruler. It is a painting of Hemlock House in spring, the trees limned with new green, the pond a haze of blue. The perspective is from the orchard’s edge, as if the viewer is hidden in the boughs, spying on the house from a place of exile or longing.
At the bottom right, the initials are tiny, but clear: LH.
My throat goes tight. The painting is neither skilled nor naïve; it is simply true, in the way that only someone who has studied a thing for years can make it. The windows are too small, the roofline bowed, the east chimney still wearing the bandage of its last repair. The grass is rendered in wild, uncontrolled washes, but the effect is exact, almost cruelly so.
I set the painting on the desk, propping it against the inkwell. The library looks different now, like a diorama, the whole room organized to serve as a backdrop for this one small view.
I sit in the old leather chair, the one that groans if you shift your weight. I pick up the holly and hemlock bouquet, turning it in the light. The ribbon catches on my thumb, a snag of silk against skin. I let it untwist, watch the way the leaves refract the afternoon sun onto the desk. The green is sodeep it almost looks black, the white blooms of the hemlock bleached and papery.
