“You’re home?” Autumn gasps, relief filling her.

  “Just got back.” Sasha is smiling; she can hear it in her voice. “What’s going on, Pip?”

  Autumn drops her voice. “Wyn is here. He came to the bakery.”

  “Holy shit. Shit, shit, shit,” Sasha whispers too, pointlessly. “What do we do? I’ll come over. Should I—call somebody? Lou? Town hall? Social services?”

  “Just get over here as soon as you can,” Autumn hisses, craning her neck to see into the kitchen. “I can’t let him go back out there. There’s something bad in those woods. We have to—” She’s cut off as the oven timer starts to sing. “Oh, hell. Just come.” She hangs up on Sasha and scurries back to Wyn, back to the steaming pumpkin chocolate chip bread they’ve made together—

  But the kitchen is empty, the back door letting in a chill wind. Her oven sounds the alarm, and the little boy is nowhere to be seen.

  ***

  Sasha makes it over to the bakery in time for a steaming slice of pumpkin bread, the chocolate chips oozing. Autumn is very quiet, inconsolable, but distant; the grief isn’t even on the surface, but somewhere deep within, inaccessible and hidden from view. Ever since Neel pointed that shotgun, since they went to see Lou, a door has been creaking closed within her, and Wyn’s return to the wild clicked the latch. Though Autumn asked her to come, by the time Sasha arrives, she is definitely an intruder.

  “I should have known he would run,” Autumn says. “I swear, ever since I came back…” But she cuts herself off, casts Sasha an uncertain look, and changes the subject. “May as well have some cake.”

  It’s as she is driving home from the bakery, after making Autumn a cup of tea and giving her a long, not-quite-returned hug, that something connects in her brain.

  Autumn is hiding something from her.

  If she’s being truly honest with herself—since no one else is being honest with Sasha—Autumn has been hiding something since she came back.

  So maybe Sasha can’t use Autumn as the emotional security blanket protecting her from the ongoing conflict with Lil anymore. Sasha is on her own, a small boat in the dark river only she can cross.

  Which is how Sasha ends up awake and in the kitchen at five in the morning, brewing the damn coffee and heating her favorite eye on the stovetop. She’d considered slipping on her work boots and heading out into the orchard to do Lil’s chores for her, but somehow she senses that that would be an invasion rather than a help. Autumn isn’t the only one who keeps secrets from her. So she’s doing what she can. She chops this and that from the refrigerator, as if in a dream, a low blue light beginning to glow on the horizon’s edge out the window. Her skillet is just heating as she hears Lil’s perplexed step on the stairs.

  Lil appears in short order, denim jeans and an olive-green sweater hanging off her haphazardly like she’s heard the commotion and dashed into clothes, like she thinks it’s some unexpected company downstairs.

  For a moment, her eyes consume the entire scene: the diced peppers and onions on the cutting board, the egg carton. Sasha and her heating pan. Lil’s gaze can shred you down to bits. So Sasha one-handedly cracks eggs instead of looking at her.

  “What’s this?” Lil asks, cautiously hovering in the door.

  “Tortilla de huevos,” Sasha says, nodding at the steaming coffeepot. That should pull Lil into the kitchen. Her own hands are full as she combines things in the big mixing bowl, beating plenty of air in. She gets the onions and peppers sizzling in the skillet, measuring out flour for her mixture and whipping it frothy.

  Lil’s face softens, butter in sunlight. “Wow. That takes me back.”

  It’s one of Sasha’s go-to bachelor recipes. She hasn’t made it since New York, but it always reminds her of their harebrained twinscape down to Central Florida. Twenty hours on the bus playing gin rummy, then a midnight wander through the unfamiliar city, squinting from streetlamp to streetlamp at the waterlogged address in the letter from the bureau, which Sasha had stumbled upon looking for stamps at the beginning of that summer. They were only seventeen, but they’d scribbled a note for Mom, We’ll be back in a week or two, and just gone. One of the few times Lil had gone that far from the orchard. During those long hours on the bus, Lil, offhand, had said it barely counted as leaving home if she was with Sasha.

  They headed down through swampy Florida and found the address in the letter. The man they met was their father, and he had been surprised to see them, when he opened the door to two girls who could only be sisters, who could only have come from their mother. But he wasn’t their dad in the way Autumn had a dad, who could pick her up from school and teach her how to ride a bike, and who Autumn ran to with all her problems, her joys, her tears. That was a kind of paternal relationship Sasha and Lil never quite grasped.

  What they had instead was Luis, the cheerful, laid-back man who Mom had loved once, in a faraway dream. He had never seen the town or walked in the orchard. He was Puerto Rican, and Mom had met him on the island, when she went out looking for herself far from home. From the way his eyes filled with tears as he gaped at them in his doorway, it was clear that he’d really loved her, probably fought to keep her, maybe wanted much more than the month or so she’d been able to offer. Because the orchard had pulled her back.

  Luis now owned a successful pharmacy in Kissimmee, and they spent more than a week with him in his neat stucco house. That was where Sasha had learned about tortilla de huevos.

  Lil dips her fingers into the skillet, snags a pepper, pops it in her mouth. “You got the hang of this better than I ever did.”

  Sasha soaked up that time with Luis like a parched plant. She saw so much of herself in him, in his easygoing, puckish energy, his determined lightheartedness, his creativity. Maybe because she felt differently about the orchard—and yeah, about Mom—than Lil did, she’d craved those lessons from Luis just a little bit more desperately. Now, she sautés with one hand and mixes her eggs with the other. “I thought it might be a nice start to your day,” is all she says.

  “It is,” she says, eventually. “Thank you.” And she moves around the counter, taking a seat at the table. “Did you ever reach out to him again? I don’t think I have, since Mom.”

  The skillet sizzles pleasurably when Sasha adds the eggs. “Every once in a while.” In her third year at SCAD, she’d sent him a card when he married the pretty, fun girlfriend they’d met on the trip down there. When her photographs were up at the gallery in Queens, she’d sent him an invitation to the opening on a whim, and he’d called her to thank her and let her know that his wife was going to have a baby soon, so he wouldn’t be able to make the trip. That telephone call had meant more to her than she’d wanted to admit, especially with Mom gone. And, more than that, the soothing knowledge that she had blood out there in the world beyond this town.

  Sasha watches her tortilla. “I was harsh the other day. I’m—sorry.” She was sorry, it was true, but more for the simple fact that they couldn’t see eye to eye on so many things. She wasn’t strictly sorry about the true things she’d said. But the clash of their truths, each deeply held, was terrible.

  After a moment, she hears Lil moving. Her feet padding across the floor. Then Sasha feels her nudge up against the counter. Lil watches the tortilla with her. “Me too. I never want to fight. Not with you.”

  “Well, we are twins,” Sasha points out, grinning at her. “Weekly fights are probably appropriate. But—no more dead air.” As the flourish on the end of this sentence, Sasha hefts the skillet and gives it a mighty toss. It does not really make sense to flip tortilla de huevos, more a substantial egg pie than your average diner-style omelet, but she’s always been one for flair.

  Lil applauds her successful pan flip. “Hey, I never forgot. End of the day, you’re stuck with me. It’s you. And me.” She moves to help clear up what hasn’t been used, filling the eggy bowl where the raw stuff had been with soap and water. “I saw Autumn’s place is back open. Is she here to stay?”

  Sasha serves up slabs of the steaming tortilla, carrying them to their kitchen table. She hesitates. “Autumn is…something is up with her.” As briefly as she can, in their shorthand, she catches Lil up on the children from the abandoned orchards and their talk with Lou. The toothy trap out in the woods. The train tracks. She watches Lil’s eyes fill alternatively with horror and indignation as her gears work. Lil, the fixer, grappling for a solution and failing to find one.

  “I’ve never known there to be secrets between you and Autumn,” Lil says finally. “I mean, it’s Autumn. And you.”

  “She’s holding something back.” It’s so early in the morning, Sasha’s stomach isn’t sure what to think of her breakfast now that she’s made it. She spears a bite. “I think maybe she’s always held things back from me.” Something Lil and Autumn probably have in common, but for the sake of making up, Sasha keeps this thought to herself.

  “I guess she never really said why she came back.” When her plate is empty, Lil doesn’t brush Sasha off, doesn’t dash for the work. Instead, she sets her fork down and leans back, resting her head against the wall, nursing a second cup of coffee. The earth feels steadier under their feet when they are aligned. When her eyes meet Sasha’s, they’re open and readable. “She’ll tell you eventually. Maybe she needs some time, but she always comes back to you.”

  Sasha shrugs, lip twisting. She grabs their plates and lays them in the sink. The sun is up now, shy and rosy over the tree line. In the mudroom off the kitchen, their work boots sit side by side, Lil’s a good deal more worn.

  Sasha steps into hers. “Let me help you out with the harvest this morning,” she offers, trying to make light. “I feel like we have a lot to catch up on.”

  At the sight of Sasha in her work boots, Lil’s whole face glows. She stands hurriedly, for once, the last to be ready to face the day. “Oh, do we ever.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  It’s just like old times. Lil and Sasha haul empty gallon baskets out to set at intervals along the trees and get to work picking through the husks on the ground. There’s no need to bargain with the finicky old shaker today, or even break out the cane poles to rattle the treetops. Pecans fall plentiful enough to the ground. While the daily rigors are old hand to Lil, Sasha folds right back into the rhythm of it. They learned the land young, climbing trees, napping in their shaded branches, the chalky smell of pecan blossoms all around. The orchard’s care isn’t the kind of thing you forget, not after doing it for eighteen years straight. Together, they clear a section of the Elliots—good small pecans that are perfect for baking.

  “Maybe a nice gift for Autumn,” Lil suggests. “At this size, they’re perfect for pies. Barely even need to be chopped.”

  “Good idea,” Sasha says breezily, shading her eyes. “Hopefully all the baking for the festival will be a nice change of pace for her.”

  The worst of the work is simply bending, over and over again. It used to be easier as children, Lil thinks. Closer to the ground. Bones like rubber. Easy to bend and bounce back, all day long. Mom used to send them out in matching coats and boots, and would tell them to stay on one tree at a time and not to leave her sight. Lil and Sasha rarely listened; the world was too big and exciting, so they were prone to wandering off, playing witches in the barn, or cats in the brambles, or lost girls among the trees, gathering pecans for their dinner. Once, they found a baby frog, which Mom grudgingly let them raise in a bowl—for one afternoon before he leaped to freedom from a low window.

  Now, Sasha whistles little snatches of tunes, takes surreptitious breaks to rub her back, and fills her baskets without complaint. Lil moves fast, methodical, with one eye on the fence line as she works. Theon doesn’t show his face, but she still feels his stain.

  The sun is nearing afternoon when they pack it in for the day for hurried sandwiches, showers, and fresh clothes for the ride into town. Sasha’s braid is still wet when they pile in the truck.

  Lil lets Sasha twiddle the radio dial, looking for music, but there’s still nothing but static. Sasha swears she hears Led Zeppelin in the noise, and Lil’s in a good enough mood to let her.

  The energy as they reach the center is palpable. Speakers are being tested, crackling in random jolts. It looks like the entire fire department and most of the church folks are down here today, making this somewhat slapdash festival happen.

  Lil parks at the bakery, where there’s a light on. Autumn is surely in the back. And Jason sits at one of the little red tables, head tipped back into the weakening fall light, until the truck pulls in and he snaps back up, eyes finding her through the windshield. She breathes in, a giddy rush of cool air, and turns off the car. In unpracticed unison, she and Sasha hop out, crunching down onto the gravel parking lot.

  Jason has a mountain of supplies arrayed around him, plus the clipboard. It seems that the picnic table is his current HQ. “Can’t wait for you to see,” he says. His smile is a little long-suffering, maybe from coordinating volunteers all morning. “Things are really coming together out here.”

  “Hey, Jason,” Sasha offers, though she’s glancing back at the bakery. In her hand is a plastic grocery bag full of pecans they’d gathered that morning. “Lil said y’all were hoping to have a party out on the river. Great idea. I’ll get the boat polished up.” The riverboat isn’t terribly big, and the party tends to feel a little cramped, but it’s always served them faithfully before. A closing party on the river is a Pecan Festival tradition.

  “Really? That’s going to be fantastic.” He grins at her, eyes crinkling. “As if you needed another job though.” She rolls her eyes in agreement, and they both laugh.

  The bell over the door chimes and Autumn leans out. She has a bit of a crowd inside, people milling over full display cases, and suddenly everything smells like vanilla and mulling spices. “Am I dreaming, or are there two Clearwaters on my doorstep?” she asks. “I should have made something special for the occasion.”

  If Lil hadn’t known from Sasha that there were bandages under her jeans, hadn’t known about the blood and the wild children, Autumn’s meringue-light smile would have utterly snowed her. “Autumn, thank you so much for taking on a stand on short notice,” she says.

  “‘Short notice’ is kind of this festival’s middle name.” Jason laughs. “Whatever you’re working on right now smells amazing. Makes me hungry.”

  Autumn startles, and for a moment it’s as if she doesn’t even recognize him, she’s so strained and suddenly pale. It must be the toll the past days have taken on her. But Lil can’t blame her. Too many nights alone in the Clearwater house, too many unanswered calls as folks move away have taught Lil the horror that ensues with certain change, when a familiar, beloved place twists itself into a stranger. But Autumn’s spell doesn’t last; her answering smile comes a second later.

  “Thanks.” She rummages in her pocket and pulls out a folded and floured sheet of paper, covered in her messy scrawl: hummingbird Bundt cakes, caramel buns, nutty bunnies, praline brownies, spicy nut mix, cookies, hand pies, maple bars. “This is my final lineup for the festival, but if there’s something you’d suggest I don’t already have listed, just let me know.”

  “You’re my hero.” Lil hands the paper to Jason, who will invariably file it away, alphabetically, numerically, and possibly color-coded. The man likes his organization. “It wouldn’t be the same without you.”

  “That’s me. Local hero.” Autumn’s tone is a little flat. She’s already turning to Sasha, flower to the sun. “Are you going or staying?”

  “I’m with you, kid.” Sasha gives Lil and Jason a little salute, then bounds into the bakery.

  Lil and Jason walk toward the square, where most of the action is. “Cesar has been on my last nerve all day,” he admits. “But the guys built the stage after you left last night in record time. I couldn’t believe it.” Jason takes a deep breath, stopping them just before they reach the middle of the chaos. As soon as they enter the fray, there will be two dozen people simultaneously asking them questions. Facing her, he leans against one of the majestic old trees. “How are you? I feel like I haven’t seen Sasha in forever.”

  “Good. Really good, actually. As of this morning.” Lil tucks her arms around herself. “If you haven’t seen Sasha, it’s because she hasn’t really wanted to be around me.” The respite is nice. Lil doesn’t always think to give herself a respite. “Fighting with her felt so wrong. And I can usually fight with anyone. I can fight with you.”

  He smiles, his thoughts probably going with hers to their most memorable, heated play-fights. Flirt-fights. Even the real, bitter, no-way-back fights. “You and I always kind of liked fighting,” he remembers, winking at her. Those Jason Finch winks will be the death of her.

  “But Sasha?” Lil shakes her head. “It’s not like that. It’s like fighting myself. Knocks me in my most vulnerable places.”

  “Well there’s no one quite as stubborn as you are—except maybe her.” He catches the elbow she aims at his gut, snickering. Then he looks more earnest. “It’s a low-stakes game though. You could say anything to her, and Sasha would still lock herself in a burning house for you and throw the key down the sink.”

  She leans on the tree, shoulder to shoulder with Jason. “Yeah, well. You think I wouldn’t do the same for her?”

  He gives her a very serious glance. “Oh I know you would.”

  They survey their work together. “Hey.” He turns his head to look at her, cheek against rough bark. This brings his eyes very close to her. They’re warm as they run over her face. “Come over for dinner after we get everything set up tomorrow night.” His mouth twists, rueful. “It’ll probably be late, but you know we’ll be starving.”

  She raises an eyebrow, but she’s smiling too big to hide it. It’s dangerous. Stupid. But it’s nice to know the person who always saw the heart of her—even when he seemed to hate her—hasn’t lost his knack for it. “Not if you’re cooking. I remember what you did to those scrambled eggs.”