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Rowan could close her eyes and remember the confectionery-sweet scents of creamy cape jasmine and mock orange blossoms. Edie taught her how to prune her beloved fuchsia rugosa roses, and how to make tea with the rose hips that swelled after the blooms were spent. She nourished the garden with homemade compost tea, and Rowan learned the hard way thatthattea wasn’t the kind meant to be sipped by humans. Edie embraced the inhospitable environment and surrendered to the ecology of the land rather than trying to change it. It had been a very early and very lasting lesson for Rowan, and every day it informed the decisions she made in rehabilitating the Brady property.
Grandma Edie had been a scholar of nature. A scientist without the title, an academic sans academia.
Much of Edie’s knowledge was also peppered with bits of folklore and superstition. Planting peppers should never be done while angry, otherwise they’d grow too spicy to eat. The bees were always to be greeted with a verbalhello,and make sure you’re polite, mind. Don’t forget to apologize to the herbs as you snip them so they grow back lush. And Rowan wasneverto harvest cucumbers during her monthly cycle. Back then, Rowanhadn’t known what a monthly cyclewas,but as an adult, she’d never forgotten Edie’s nuggets of wisdom.
That first spring after Edie died, twelve-year-old Rowan watched helplessly as even the hardiest plants in the garden shriveled from sea spray and neglect. Her mother barely had interest inher,much less in helping with Edie’s plants. By that autumn, much of the garden had given over to sandy, barren soil that turned to mud when it rained.
Like the garden, Rowan withered. Sybil’s disinterest in her was brought into even sharper focus without Edie around to dilute and deflect it. Rather than lingering outdoors as she always had, Rowan holed up in Edie’s old bedroom, reading her planting journals and mildewed gardening magazines, and watching reruns of the oldMiss Marplemystery show she’d loved.
When Rowan finally tried tinkering in the garden the subsequent spring, Edie’s rugosa roses were the only thing she managed to bring back from the brink. But it hadn’t been by any skill on her part. It had been the intrinsic stubbornness of the plants themselves. A defiant, prickly insistence onlife.
Every day, she’d worn Edie’s floppy old hat. The hat had a faint white ring around the khaki rim, as salt-stained as everything else was. That salt, though—it wasn’t salt from the ocean. It was salt from the sweat of Edie’s labor in the little garden. Proof she’d existed, pushed herself hard, and used her body well.
Rowan became like those rugosa roses. Resilient and determined to thrive, despite the shitty circumstances of where her roots had been put down. Plants became an obsession and an escape. By the time she turned fourteen, she’d read every botany and horticulture text in the local library. In tenth grade, she began soliciting pamphlets from biology programs at major universities in all the adjacent inland states. Green places. Places not tainted by salt and sadness.
The summer after eleventh grade, Rowan applied forscholarships at the schools with the best botany programs. She sailed over every academic goal she set for herself with grace and grit, relentless in her pursuit of knowledge, enrichment, discovery.
During Rowan’s second year of college, Sybil sold the crumbling little house on the coast to a developer who’d wanted the land. She hadn’t even told Rowan until months after the place had been razed. But in a rare act of thoughtfulness, Sybil had taken a picture of Edie’s rugosa roses in full fuchsia bloom before the place was turned to rubble, and mailed it to her.
There hadn’t been a return address on the envelope.
Rowan rubbed her nose hard and told herself the stinging weight behind her eyes was from the icy air.
“Sorry I’m late, boss,” Harrison said behind her.
She’d been squatting to get at low vines, and she shot to her feet. A vine snagged her knit hat off her head as she stood. “Christ, Harrison,” she snapped.
“Sorry.” He snugged work gloves down between his fingers.
Like bread crumbs, the trail of cuttings must have led him right to her. His approach had been silent, a remarkable feat considering the brittle brown vegetation littering the ground.
He kept a conspicuous distance from her.“Probably best if you don’t touch me again,”she’d said to him the night of the festival at Three Birds. Those had been the last words she’d said to him, until now.
“I’m not your boss.” She extricated her hat from the brittle vine, impatiently tugging it back onto her head. “And you’re not an employee here.Andstop apologizing. I’m sure you have something better to do right now.”
“Fresh air and hard work are what I need. This is the only place I want to be.” His tone sounded unconvincing.
“I’m sorry for you, then. I’d much rather be somewhere warm.”
That was a lie.
He looked away and squinted down the row. “Nate sent me out here, if that makes you feel any better.”
“Oh.” It didn’t make her feel any better. “Sentyou?”
“You may not be my boss, but technically, he is.”
“That’s not true either.”
A stale laugh made his breath plume visibly in front of him, and he shook his head. “Fine. It’s your turn to babysit me today. I’m pretty sure that’s what this really is.”
Rowan frowned and looked down. One of her bootlaces was loose. “Bring any tools with you?”
He lifted his coat back from his hip to reveal a leather belt holster with a pair of shiny new pruners clipped into it. “Ready to work,” he said.
Rowan gave in, using an unfinished vine as a crash course for him. It looked like a giant tumbleweed suspended in midair. “These woody vines? We call them canes. The thinner canes need to be cut away from the catch wires. All we want left is the two thick, horizontal branches along the bottom wire here. They’re called cordons.” She reached in and pushed aside some of the twisted mess to reveal the thick T-shaped branch underneath.
“What happens after this?”
