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CHAPTER 1

Kate

“Are all of those Grandpa’s apple trees?”

Kate Harland slowed as she turned off the narrow road and onto the gravel drive, which looked just as her father had described on the phone. Penny had been watching for the orchard ever since they left the main road and started climbing into the mountains, and now she twisted toward the window with her face pressed up against the glass.

“Grandma’s too,” Kate said. “They bought the orchard together.”

“All of it?”

Kate looked past the rows of trees stretching away on both sides of the drive. Some were neat and low, their branches heavy with red and green fruit. Others were taller and older-looking, reaching into one another across the grass between the rows. “I think so.”

Penny considered that. “How are they going to eat so many apples?”

Kate laughed. “They won’t eat them all. Some will be sold, and some will be made into cider and apple juice.”

“And apple pie?” Penny asked hopefully.

“I’m sure Grandma will make an apple pie or two,” Kate said.

“I love apple pie.” Penny sighed happily. “I can’t wait to help pick the apples. Grandpa said he’ll teach me how to know when they’re ready. Grandpa knows a lot about apples.”

“He does now.” Which was part of the reason Kate had spent the last few weeks trying not to worry. She hadn’t always managed it.

When her parents, Janice and Alan, had told her their idea of retirement was buying an orchard, Kate had not kept her doubts to herself. What did they know about apples?

But their minds were made up, and who was she to stand in the way of their dreams? They had done what they always did and thrown themselves into learning. The best varieties. Diseases. How an orchard changed with the seasons. So when they found an old orchard for sale in Bear Creek, she had supported them.

But research only took you so far.

Then the farmhouse came into view around the next bend, and Kate began to understand why her parents had fallen in love with the place. The mountains rose behind it against the clear fall sky. The house itself was built of warm gray stone, broad and solid beneath a pitched roof, with a deep porch running across the front.

Kate could already picture her parents sitting there at the end of a long day, boots kicked off and something cold to drink in their hands while the orchard settled into evening around them. Maybe that was part of what they had seen when they first came here. Not just trees and acreage, but a life they could imagine themselves living.

Kate took in the rest automatically: the porch steps, the back door everyone probably used instead of the front, and the shortest route from the drive to what she guessed was the kitchen.

It was a work habit. She could walk into a house for the first time and immediately start seeing where people would drop bags, where shoes would pile up, which doorway could be knocked through to create a better flow. But she had promised herself she would not do that to her parents the minute she arrived. This was their house, their dream, and she was going to support them.

“Grandma!” Penny shouted.

Janice was already coming down the porch steps, waving. Alan appeared from around the side of the house a moment later in work pants and boots muddier than anything Kate remembered him owning in his previous life.

Penny began bouncing against the straps of her seat. “Grandpa! Grandpa, I’m here!”

“I can see that.” Alan was opening Penny’s door before Kate had even switched off the engine. “Did you bring me anything useful?”

“Me.”

“That was what I was hoping for.” Alan bent into the back seat to undo Penny’s car-seat buckle.

Janice reached Kate as she got out of the car and wrapped both arms around her.

“You made good time,” Janice said. “How was the drive?”

“Fine.” Kate hugged her back. “We stopped twice. The second stop was apparently an emergency.”

“It was,” Penny called from inside the car.