He winces. “How did they get so…gray?”

  “But I’ll bring something over,” she compromises. “That’d be nice.”

  He chuckles. “I’m actually reasonably okay at using the grill these days. I’ll make rib eye.”

  “Deal.” She pushes off the tree. “Shall we? Lots to do before you poison me tomorrow.”

  Looking immensely satisfied with himself, Jason follows her into the festive chaos.

  ***

  Much like the bustling town outside, the bakery is full of activity. Sasha takes in the aromas in a daze. Clearly, Autumn has thrown herself into festival preparations. From the looks of that list she gave Jason, it’ll take every hour she has left to get it all done in time. As for Sasha—she checks her digital watch, but it only blinks blank zeros up at her. Again. She gives it a couple of slaps, sighing. If the crowds Lil is optimistically expecting really do show up, Sasha will be running the ferry six times a day at least, not to mention trying to get the riverboat ready for the grand-finale fancy dress thing they have in mind.

  For now, she loiters in Autumn’s kitchen, lulled by spices and the whir of the convection oven. Autumn has given her the very simple job of stirring some sweet-smelling goo with a wooden spoon, and she swirls it absent-mindedly. The back door is open several hopeful inches, just in case a small and mysterious guest happens to reappear.

  “Doesn’t it feel a little strange to be getting ready for this cutesy town froufrou when there’s so much shit going on? The fires?” Sasha wonders aloud. The instant it’s out of her mouth, she wishes she hadn’t said it, hadn’t even thought it. It was this kind of seasonal tradition that kept the sinews of the town from atrophying completely. Don’t prod it, something in her urges. But she has to find out what Autumn is keeping to herself. Or at least invite her to share.

  Autumn puts down her scoring knife. She has been working miracles as Sasha stirs her goo. Beyond Sasha, cities are being built in brown sugar and egg, and row after row of sweet-smelling confections are leaving the oven. Even now, she’s devoted to carving leaves out of raw pie crust, to top each and every miniature pecan pie.

  “You’re right,” she says and brushes her hand against her hair, tightly bound under a net. “It’s strange to be celebrating…under the circumstances.” Sasha could see how hard Autumn was trying when they’d lingered outside, talking to Lil and Jason. She’s holding herself together with candy floss. Her smile is full of cracks. Sasha knows without her saying that she’s thinking about Wyn and Neel.

  Sasha scoops super sticky marshmallow fluff into her mixture as the plot thickens here on the stovetop. “You think the Pecan Festival might bring the kids to town?”

  “It’s more likely to scare them,” Autumn says, and her knife presses too hard. An easy fix, but she curses, balls up the misshapen leaf, and tosses it into the trash. “But Wyn says he’s been to the library, right? So he must not be too afraid. I don’t know. I don’t know.” She stares down at her baking sheet.

  “Pip…” Sasha turns her back to the stove to face Autumn. She keeps her voice very gentle. “I—you know you can always talk to me, right? If there’s something bothering you, I mean.”

  Autumn picks at the baking sheet. She spreads flour here and there in the corners, where it tends to clump. The back of her head tells Sasha nothing. Until the tense set of her back falls and she lets out a shaky breath. Autumn slumps across the room and pushes her face into Sasha’s shoulder. “I’m that obvious?” comes her voice, muffled against her shirt.

  Sasha loops an arm around her automatically, rocking them a bit. With her other hand, she reaches back to take whatever she was stirring off the heat. “You’ve just been a little quiet since we got run out of the woods.”

  “Here I thought I was being coolly aloof.” Autumn tugs the netting off her hair and her messy bun droops down over one ear. “I’m bothered,” she says eventually and extricates herself just enough that she can talk, so that her eyes aren’t just a blue squint under Sasha’s chin. They are as full and expressive as always. “And I want to tell you. I want to tell you everything.” Autumn chews her lip. “I will,” she adds. “I just need a little time to finish processing. Soon—I’ll tell you everything.”

  “Hey. That’s okay.” They are very close together, near enough that Sasha can breathe the faint fragrance of Autumn’s skin. Sasha shows her the blank hours and minutes on her digital watch. “All we have is time.” And because she is on an emotional roll that day, coming up double sixes with every brave conversation she starts, she says, “You know, I think there’s going to be a party out on the river at the end of the festival.”

  Autumn peeks around her at the goo, left cooling midsimmer on the stove, and they disentangle so that Autumn can reach the thermometer that waits on the counter and stick it in the pot. She hums her approval, exchanges the thermometer for a spatula and gives the sludge a few encouraging stirs. “I heard about that. It’s a lot of responsibility for you and your riverboat. Will you need a crew, Captain Clearwater?”

  “Sure will.” Though a crew was not what she’d been about to ask for. Once again, they’d dodged each other, the latest feint in a long dance. Sasha holds the pot for her as Autumn steers the contents into molds.

  Autumn salutes with her sticky spatula. “Then count me in as skipper.”

  Nodding, Sasha shoves down her disappointment. All they have is time.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The morning sky is so low and dark, the air so close, that the day feels over as soon as Sasha enters it. The night before, after she and Lil left the bakery for home, she tossed in strange, sweat-soaked dreams. Mom came to her, through the house, spectral feet treading the familiar creaking path up to her room. Her legs were grimy, trailing reeds and waterlogged muck. She knelt down beside the bed, and they stared at one another. Sasha tracked the golden flakes in her eyes, like twenty-four-karat debris. Mom opened her mouth, and dark water dribbled over her lips. In a death-roughened voice, she said something to Sasha that she never had in life. Meet me in the orchard.

  On the nightstand, Sasha’s digital watch still shows a jackpot of zeros. Maybe she slept in, or maybe she didn’t, but Lil is not in the house when she goes downstairs. So whether it’s to go find her, or to simply shake the dread of the dream, Sasha throws on her khaki chore coat and goes out the back door.

  “Lil?” Her voice seems to snatch on the branches. There’s no answer. Sasha strolls. The atmosphere feels sharp and too warm. It almost sizzles in her nostrils, like the clouds are full of lightning. Absently, Sasha checks the nets, stuffing pecans in the giant pockets of the coat. Some magnetism tugs her deeper. There’s a warning in her gut. She was never welcome here, she chides herself. This isn’t her place. Not this far in, not without Mom or Lil.

  But the dream.

  Gradually, Sasha realizes she is walking toward something, through pecan trees that grow larger and more gnarled with each step. It’s like she’s struck an artery and is now being sent into the heart of it, toward Mom, or the mother of the trees. She hasn’t come here before. She knows, intuitively, that the barn is away to her left, and the wood and the railroad tracks somewhere far beyond that. There is no grass in this part of the orchard, the shade too great. Here, there is only dust and dry brush under her sneakers. It feels almost as if someone were calling her, but the sound is just barely beyond perception. Lil?

  “Coming,” she murmurs to the orchard and turns—

  There, tucked into a grove is a perfectly round pool of water. Above it droops the largest and oldest pecan tree she has ever seen. Framed by tree roots, the pond is like jet. Not a single leaf floats on its surface. Cold emanates from the water. And everywhere, scattered around and in it are nuggets of gleaming gold. Sasha leaps back, her first thought that some heirloom from their grandmother’s jewelry box has ended up broken and scattered out here. But as soon as she bends to collect the pieces, she’s frozen. It’s not rings, or links from a necklace. It’s—what? Stunned, Sasha sits down on one of the mossy roots to stare into the pond, transfixed. How has she never seen this place before? She hasn’t, has she? Her boot has crushed one of the golden things, and at the sensation, she moves it hastily. Beneath her foot is a glittering constellation of broken—pecan. A pecan, made of gold. They shimmer overhead, ripening from tender green to metallic gold in the tree.

  Sasha grapples hopelessly with the unreality of the scene. There is something incredibly lovely, velvety, about the water. This pond is a twisted thrill in her chest, a shipwreck right here in the orchard. Heart pounding, she reaches to brush the pool with her fingers, just to make a ripple…

  “Sasha.” The tremor in Lil’s voice breaks through the haze. Her sister’s tones are known instinctively to her, learned over a lifetime of a tandem heartbeat. And right now Lil is terrified, calling for Sasha to leap up and run.

  It’s meant to shock her, the first screech of a siren. But she isn’t shocked. It hits her like an alarm clock that’s been ringing for a long time, right at the back of her skull. As if Sasha has been listening to her sister say her name in that way, in this place, for forever.

  Her script is just as set. Her hand remains poised above the water. “Lil.”

  “Don’t. You shouldn’t.” Lil’s stumbling. So rare, to see Lil, in her independence and fire, stumble. “You shouldn’t. Get back. Please?”

  “Why?” Sasha stays where she is, frowning at her. “What is this?” The air has turned dreadfully cold, sending a shiver through her.

  “Nothing,” Lil says too quickly. “Nothing for you to worry about. Mom—”

  She cuts herself off, but Sasha understands her. Mom. This is one of their secrets. Mom and Lil, always talking quietly together in corners of the orchard. Mom and Lil, pulling each other aside, changing the subject when Sasha’s around. This is a secret. From her.

  The rage is so bitter she tastes it in her mouth. “I should be surprised,” Sasha snarls at her. “I should be completely thrown by the fact that you would have hidden whatever this place is from me our entire lives.” She scoops up the shattered nut and tosses it at Lil like golden confetti. Dirt shoves itself under her nails. “And Mom too. But of course I’m not. Of course you did this.” Hot tears trace her cheeks. “And then you still resented me for leaving! Who wouldn’t leave?”

  “So simple when you say it.” Lil falls to her knees beside the pond at Sasha’s elbow. Close enough to yank her away. She’s restraining herself again. As if Sasha doesn’t see perfectly well how Lil reins herself in around her. All the time, holding back. All the time, hiding. “What else was I supposed to do? You shouldn’t be here.”

  “I should be in New York.” Sasha wishes Lil hadn’t sat down so near her. It’s suffocating here, between tree and water. “Why not?” she asks at last. “In what logical universe is there a place that is okay for you and for Mom and not okay for me?”

  Lil is staring at the water, not Sasha. “Of all the parts of the orchard, Sasha, I swear…this is the one part I’m supposed to protect you from.” She wipes at her eyes. “There’s only one, okay? Two of us, sure, but there’s only one person who takes this task. I can’t—I can’t—” She shudders and a ripple moves in the water along with her. “I can’t share it with you and be sure you’re safe. No one is safe. Not even me.”

  “Safe from what?” Sasha snaps. “What is this place?” She picks up the nearest golden husk. “What are these?”

  Lil looks at it. Her hand twitches toward it, a silent plea. “Put it down. Go back to the house. There’s a million trees—just leave this one.”

  “Tell me now,” Sasha grits out, each word a hard huff of breath, “Or I’m going back to the house, walking out the front door, and never coming back.” It feels terrifyingly true.

  “Maybe it’s better.” Lil’s face is flushed and wild. “All I wanted for so long was for you to come home, but this isn’t supposed to be part of it. The one thing, Sasha, this is the one thing I can’t share when there’s so much else I need you for.”

  Maybe it’s better.

  Maybe it’s better?

  Well, hell, maybe it is, then.

  Numb, Sasha stands. She’ll be the last passenger on the last ferry. Maybe Autumn will go with her. Otherwise, she leaves with nothing at all.

  Lil watches her stand, and some dull horror visibly steals through her body. She looks away, but not before Sasha catches tears slipping down her face.

  “Wait. Please.” Kneeling beside the pond, Lil trembles. And Sasha feels the most stubborn part of Lil, the unshakable bedrock on which her sister is built, crack. “Of course I resented you leaving,” Lil breathes out in a hush and the water shivers. “Do you really think I never wanted to go? Do you think I never wished I could? When you left. And Jason left me. I was alone, I was so alone—” She clamps a hand over her mouth. The whites of her eyes shine like a threatened deer.

  “You made your own loneliness,” Sasha bites out, the last spark of her fury in it. But at her sister’s sob, she droops back down beside her, into the silty dirt at the pond’s edge.

  Lil turns to her, tears still shivering on her eyelashes. “Sasha, I want—” She cuts off. “Want is…not simple. I want you to be safe. I want you to stay. I want to tell you, but I want to honor Mom.” She scrubs at her eyes. She looks young again, exhausted from a day of fighting her way through school, fighting with Mom—because they used to fight back then, didn’t they? Even when Lil was determined to take over the orchard and follow in Mom’s footsteps, it was never smooth between them. Sasha was the peacemaker, left out of their flaring rages. And their secrets.

  She should have to search harder for her next words, but they’re there, waiting for her. “Mom wasn’t fair to you, Lil,” she murmurs. “Maybe you don’t have to do this job the way Mom did. You can… Maybe we can let her go.”

  Like she let us go.

  They aren’t words to say aloud, but they are something Sasha knows, a deep gut-truth. The pecan from the tree is still in her fist, and she opens it to look. When Lil called those years ago, to let her know that Mom was gone, that she died in the orchard, it’d been a solace to know she passed close to what she most loved. But now…

  No one is safe.

  “Mom ate one,” Sasha says distantly. “This place killed her.”

  “Yes,” Lil admits. “This is where she died.” She takes a steadying breath, touches the ground to find herself. “And I don’t know why. She always told me not to eat a pecan that grew from this tree. So finding her here was”—her face blanches—“awful.”

  Sasha can’t speak. For Lil to have found her here, alone—it is beyond speaking.

  “The pond is something eternal. Before language, before creatures,” Lil says, fixing her eyes on the water, like she can only go so long without finding it. “The pond feeds the tree its waters, and the tree feeds the pond its pecans. They’re one. A replenishing cycle.”

  It feels like a story Sasha heard long ago. Maybe she heard Mom tell Lil one night, when they thought she was asleep. Maybe it was whispered into her dreams.

  “But what about the ones that don’t make it into the pond?” Sasha asks, gesturing at the scattering on the bank. “What if people eat them? They’re poison?”

  “Mom said that they’re an offering.” Lil sounds skeptical, despite herself, despite devoting her life to this strange service. “The tree is an arm the pond reaches out to us. They’re a—gift.”

  Sasha feels its weight in her hand. “Or a trick?”

  “I don’t know exactly. I think Mom…” Lil trails off. “I have ideas. About what Mom thought. Because of…well. What Mom did.” She turns to Sasha, slow and exhausted. “I think I know what she would have wanted when she ate one. But it overwhelmed her. She always said the gift was too great for anyone to bear. Maybe”—she hitches a breath—“maybe she did it on purpose. Maybe at that point, she wanted to be overwhelmed.”

  They stare into the pond together for a few cold moments.

  But Lil’s eyes are soft on the side of Sasha’s face. She’s never seen her fearless sister quite so scared.

  “Is it overwhelming you?” Sasha asks.

  Lil doesn’t say a word; she drops her gaze to the pecan, innocently glinting in the sun. Yes, Sasha hears anyway. A little more every day. Lil is built of stubborn pride and loyalty. She would try to bear the earth on her shoulders, a new Atlas, if the right person asked her to try.

  Silently, Sasha lifts the pecan—at least this pesky thing, she can handle—and tosses it into the depths. Though it was heavy against her flesh, in the pond it is buoyant.

  Swirling through the water like a feather, the golden burden slowly disappears into darkness.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Lil and Sasha load the best nuts of their harvest into the truck, dropping them off with the various vendors who need them—and Lil’s mind lingers in the chill waters of the pond.

  She can’t afford to be distracted now. The Pecan Festival can’t go on without pecans. So Lil fills her truck bed with pecans for selling. Most of the vendors already have what they need. Nan’s for her trail mix, Big Bub’s pecan-infused candles, soaps, scents, and salts. There are raw ones to sell, nut butters to churn fresh. Lil won’t be free to think until it is over.

  But Sasha is with her. They have no time to speak, but they check each other every moment.

  “Wow,” Sasha says, like she can’t help it, when they pull into a spot near town square where they can see it all laid out before them. The fruits of all her labor. Lil reaches out across the dashboard and takes Sasha’s hand.

  Sasha returns the squeeze. “I have to go,” she admits, hesitant. “There’s probably a line a mile long for the ferry.” The town owns two riverboats, and today they need the enormous antique paddle steamer. “I’ll see you…” Considering Lil’s plans with Jason that night, it is hard to say, so Sasha just shrugs, smiling with unusual gentleness. “When I see you.”