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Kate sat opposite Eileen and glanced around the kitchen, her attention lingering on the wide opening into the adjoining room. “I’ve been meaning to ask you about the farmhouse. Did you and your husband change much of it when you lived here?”

Eileen followed her gaze. “More than we ever planned to. The house was sound when we bought the place, but it had been patched and altered for years. We started with the things that genuinely needed doing, then one job kept leading us to another. We didn’t have the money to pay somebody every time we found a problem, so we learned as we went. My husband became reasonably good at carpentry. I became reasonably good at telling him when his carpentry needed doing again.”

Kate smiled, but she was studying the room now. “I thought this part had changed. The opening is too wide for the original layout, and there are places where the floorboards run differently. I notice things like that before I mean to.”

“You would have had plenty to notice when we first moved in.” Eileen rested her hands around her coffee cup. “The kitchen was smaller, the room next door was separate, and there was plumbing in places no sensible person would put it. We spent years working on the house and the orchard at the same time.”

“That must have been difficult if you were living in the middle of it,” Kate said.

“We weren’t, at first. There’s an old cabin farther into the orchard. My husband and I lived there while we got the farmhouse into a state where we could move in.”

Penny stopped coloring. “There’s a cabin?”

Eileen turned toward her. “There was the last time I looked. It’s only small, and the trees have grown around that part of the orchard since we lived there.”

Penny’s eyes widened. “A secret house?”

“I suppose it might feel like one now.”

“Is it like the house where the three bears lived?” Penny asked. “The one Goldilocks went in?”

Eileen laughed, and her gaze met Wes’s across the table.

Wes knew exactly why.

His bear, predictably, was delighted. Perhaps there were bears there. She cannot possibly know there weren’t.

Wes concentrated on his coffee.

“I never found three bears living in it,” Eileen told Penny, although the amusement stayed in her eyes.

“Maybe they were outside,” Penny said.

“That is entirely possible.”

Kate caught the look Eileen gave Wes and glanced at him, curiosity flickering across her face.

Wes kept his expression neutral. There would be a time to explain why Bear Creek contained more bears than most towns could reasonably expect. Sitting at the Harlands’ kitchen table while Penny discussed Goldilocks was not it.

Alan was thinking about the cabin for a different reason. “There was an outbuilding marked on the survey when we bought the place. I assumed it was an old shed because we couldn’t see anything from the main track.”

“That’ll be the cabin,” Eileen said. “There should have been a little brass key with the others when I handed everything over. Although whether the lock still works is another question. The door used to stick when the weather was damp even when we lived there.”

“I know the key you mean.” Alan looked toward the drawer where they had put the collection of odds and ends that came with the property. “I wondered what it belonged to.”

Penny had already abandoned her crayons. “Can we go and see the secret house?”

Janice looked at Eileen rather than immediately answering. “Is it safe enough to walk around?”

“The path will be fine, but I wouldn’t let Penny onto the porch until someone has checked it. The cabin was old when we left it, and nobody has been maintaining it.”

“I’ll take a look first,” Wes said. That took him even farther from the orchard he was supposed to be running, but curiosity had joined the less respectable reasons for staying. He remembered hearing about the cabin years ago, although he had never had cause to go looking for it.

Penny was already pulling on her coat, and Alan went to the drawer for the key.

They left their coffee behind and followed Eileen into the orchard. The morning was cool enough that their breath showed faintly when they first stepped outside, although the sun had begun to reach between the trees. Fallen leaves lay thick beneath the older rows, damp from the night and bright against the grass.

Eileen led them away from the main track. “We thought we’d live in the cabin for a few months,” she said as they walked. “Nearly four years later, we finally moved into the farmhouse. There was always another reason to wait. Something needed finishing, or harvest arrived, or winter came and we decided we might as well stay where we were until spring.”