Autumn rests the tips of her fingers on Sasha’s watch. “Really think. How long has it been?”

  Sasha pulls her hand back, gut twisting. “Maybe we shouldn’t talk about this,” she says. “I don’t—”

  “We have to.” Autumn is gentle even in her ruthlessness. And Sasha can’t think. It wasn’t so long ago, was it? “It isn’t safe here. You’ve seen the phantom fires. We’ve heard from Wyn that the children like him are disappearing. So I’m sorry, but it’s time to wake up.” Autumn keeps her hand where it is, open between them, in case Sasha decides to reach out again. “Do you remember your thirtieth birthday party? The first one I ever skipped?”

  “Of course I do,” Sasha snaps. “That was my last birthday. That just happened.”

  It just happened. Hadn’t it?

  She scrabbles, searching back. She doesn’t want to do this; she just wants to sit in comfortable silence with Autumn and not do this.

  How long has the road been closed?

  “No,” says Autumn, who stood on the banks of the river like a mirage just days (weeks? months?) ago and found her way to town all on her own. Found her way back to Sasha. “I tried to call you after that. For a while. But you never called back. I used to wonder…but it wasn’t that you were mad at me or done with me.”

  “Never.” Sasha hears it from below her. Far below her, she sees the two of them, huddled in that window seat. “I could never be done with you.”

  “It was something worse.” Each word rings like a slap. Sasha’s floating, up in the crook of the gable.

  A tendril of rosy hair, curling over her neck.

  Don’t say it, Sasha begs.

  “Sasha. Your thirtieth birthday—that was twenty-nine years ago.”

  Autumnal Interlude

  Autumn

  May 1983

  The night after graduation, Sasha and Autumn abscond to their tree house, accompanied by a flurry of fireflies and a tin of Autumn’s first batch of homemade weed brownies.

  “Tell no one,” Autumn says with mock solemnity and pops the lid on the tin. Cocoa fills the air.

  “I’ll take it to my grave,” Sasha promises.

  Sitting cross-legged, facing each other in ritual, they toast the future with tiny squares.

  It’s a celebration of two things: Autumn’s summer job at Ezra’s Bakery and Sasha’s imminent departure for art college. The idea of a Last Summer is difficult to swallow, but hopefully Autumn’s special brownies will be the salve. At the very least they are one last “first” that Autumn and Sasha can share before Sasha ventures into the wide world and forgets all about her. They’ve never had edibles; may as well try them together.

  Senior year was nothing like the others. The pressures of the real world consumed all. College acceptances, marriage proposals, whirlwind travel plans: it’s the liveliest their graduating class has ever been. There are even a couple of hush-hush pregnancies in the mix, but the town is so small, everyone knows who got who pregnant. (Barb and Bobby; Johnny and Stacey.)

  Even the Clearwaters, whose inheritance of the orchard has been assured since birth, aren’t immune to the hype and fervor. At the eleventh hour, their English teacher begged Lil to apply to the University of the South. Lil scoffed, of course. She’s attending the nearest college with an agricultural focus, for as few years as she can so she can return to the orchard. But Sasha’s lackadaisical extracurriculars—student council, drama, the photography studio—suddenly paid dividends in the form of a robust and well-rounded college application. She has caught her bright future like a falling star. Ever since her acceptance letter to SCAD arrived, she has glowed.

  No one offers Autumn many options. Except Dad, who hopefully mentions the neighbor’s son, George, is single again. He says it like she doesn’t know George, like she didn’t attend all of her school years with him. George, who peed on the bus during second grade. George, who asked Lil to junior year homecoming (she went to spite everyone who laughed at him over it). She has no real college or marriage prospects, just a summer job at the bakery lined up. Everyone is changing around her. Except her.

  “It’s not free, even with the scholarship,” Sasha admits. She’s scribbling out her financial options for the years ahead. “Mom isn’t really able to do much. But I think I can get a part-time job. Maybe a few part-time jobs. In a diner or something. I can wear an apron. Like you.” Autumn laughs. But as she watches Sasha calculate the fixings of her future, she is swept away with a now-familiar dread: soon they will be in very different worlds.

  Autumn eats another square and flops back on the ages-old wood. It complains like an elderly man with bad knees. “I’d go if I had something I wanted to study.”

  “Well, you’re good at everything you like.” Sasha reclines too so their heads brush.

  “I don’t know. Our teachers said I lack drive.” She digs out her pack of cigarettes, flips it open, considers the neat cylinders within. “Maybe I’ll try to quit smoking. Develop some drive that way.”

  “Great idea. Healthy.” Sasha steals her pack and pockets it, grinning. “I’ll help save you from yourself.”

  “My hero.” Autumn rolls onto her side to look at Sasha. It’s the easiest thing in the world, looking at Sasha. Sasha is the favorite book she keeps on her bedside table forever, partly in case she wants to read it, partly to use as a coaster. She’s the smell of a favorite food Autumn wants to come home to after a long day. Food. Now she wishes she had fries, not just brownies.

  On second thought, third thought, Autumn eats another square. Wind kicks up and Sasha’s shirt flutters. The top button is a tug away from coming loose, and Autumn’s fingers warm with the idea of pressing it safely back in.

  Sasha moves her arm so Autumn can burrow against her shoulder.

  She pats Sasha’s stomach. “I have a confession. These brownies aren’t making me feel anything.”

  Sasha opens a toffee eye at her and grins. “We must just not have eaten enough.”

  It takes under an hour for the tray to vanish, empty and discarded against the tree trunk.

  A rookie mistake. Because when the brownies hit, it’s with a vengeance. “Am I ever going to see you?” Autumn is distantly aware that she is asking Sasha a question she has sworn to herself was the secret of her own heart. It’s not a burden she intended to place on Sasha. But it’s too late, and she can’t get her hands working well enough to scoop the inquiry back into her mouth. “What if you meet other people you like better?”

  “Oh, poppycock.” Warm and fond, Sasha drags both hands through Autumn’s hair, wraps her fingers around the back of her head. “No one else would make me brownies this good. I think I feel them a little.”

  “I’m serious,” Autumn protests, but she’s smiling as she socks Sasha’s shoulder. “Don’t be cute.”

  “Can’t help it.” Sasha catches her fist, laughing. And then holds onto it.

  “I mean, like—like—there will be people. To choose from. So many people who…study more. And you’re so…Bobby Kaplan is obsessed with you. And Chuck Harlowe.” She pauses suddenly, heated suddenly—and afraid. “You know that, right? They’re desperately in love with you.”

  “That’s just talk.” Sasha laces their hands together. “Your fingers are so cold.”

  “I have poor circulation.”

  Sasha’s thumb plays over the back of her hand.

  “But am I?” Autumn asks again. Her words taste like syrup. The air is so sweet, and heavy. Maybe this is why Van Gogh painted swirls in the sky; Autumn feels swirls all around her.

  “Are you…what?” Sasha asks, eyes glinting with mirth. Her pupils are as huge as ponds. “A wood nymph? A scamp? A Pippi Longstocking? Yes. Yes, you are.”

  “Am I ever going…?” Words are heavy too. “See you again. Am I ever going to see you again? Are you going to just…?” There are fireflies in the trees, and Autumn feels tender kinship with them because there is a light on somewhere in her too, and she cannot turn it off. It burns in her and is reflected in Sasha’s eyes. She props herself up so that she and Sasha are nose to nose. “Will you forget me?”

  Autumn thinks Sasha says no. She thinks maybe she starts crying a little, and Sasha coos and wipes at Autumn’s eyes. And kisses her. Sasha kisses her mouth.

  All Autumn knows is they are lying close, whispering, and then they are kissing.

  They say things. They kiss more. Autumn has lain down in the red-hot embers of a banked fire and found them to be a warm bed. She has discovered that the thing that’s meant to burn her only wants to hold her.

  And then Autumn floats, outside of time, above it, and also possibly wrapped inside it like it’s a warm blanket. Their conversation feels more like telepathy than talking, and Autumn can’t quite grasp what they’re talking about, but she knows it is as rich as fertile soil where good things grow.

  Guess what I’m thinking, Sasha says and Autumn can’t remember what she said, but Sasha exclaims that you’re right, that’s exactly it, how did you know?

  But after that critical moment—Autumn’s memory goes blank. The rest of the night is lost to her. Too much weed, Sasha would bemoan in the morning. We should have paced ourselves.

  In the gray dawn light, they stumble out of the tree house, at once deadly ravenous and too nauseous to even think about food. The high flickers in and out like a faulty bulb for hours more. Autumn is shaky with fear and confusion. She half jokes that she doesn’t remember, she sees the effect of her lie—the mistake—flinch over Sasha’s beloved face, and they never talk about it again.

  “I always wondered if I should tell you.”

  ***

  December 1989

  “I meant to ask,” Boris says softly. “About your…life.” They’re lying in bed together, closer to morning than evening. Autumn still tastes the expensive wine the other graduates shelled out for—because if graduating culinary school that day taught their cohort anything, it was how to long for tastes beyond their means. Bottom-shelf wine and discounted cheese may never be good enough again.

  “What’s there to ask about?” she murmurs against his neck, too tired to move. “We’re all together for like…80 percent of my days, so you already know everything. School, work, nap, school.”

  He graduated today too; they’re two of a close-knit group of five, bonded by gas-powered fire, the blue of the crème brûlée torch. It’s what she needed, after Mom and Dad retired and left town in an RV, after Autumn closed the doors of her bakery to see if she could cut it in the wider world. At twenty-five, she abandoned it all to finally do what everyone else she knew did at eighteen: better herself. Pursue higher education of some kind.

  Culinary school can be a lonely and cutthroat place, but she met Angie. Boris. Bruno. Tabitha. Together, they survived, scrimping money, working night shifts at diners to get in all the real-life kitchen experience they could. Now, they are their own kind of family.

  “Hey.” Boris nudges her. “Are you falling asleep on me?”

  “Mmmmm no. What was the question?” She tilts her head up at him.

  “I never asked about your life, before school,” he says. She sees, for the first time, a tiny freckle in his iris. His tone sounds like he’s angling toward something, but she’s too drowsy to figure out what.

  “You know about the bakery.” She misses those ovens, the blue KitchenAid mixer from Lou. She misses the smell of sourdough. She misses the gruff noncompliments of Ezra, the former owner of the bakery and her first true culinary teacher. The swears he expelled when a batch didn’t rise, the shoulder pats he gave when her work pleased him. The kiss he dropped on her forehead when he left the bakery to her at twenty-one and moved to Florida.

  “Oh my god, you’re going to make me ask.” He buries his face in the pillow. “I mean like…are you…? Was this…?”

  “You want to know if this was my first time? You scoundrel!” Autumn pokes him, and he laughs, still a little tipsy, a little bashful.

  “I know, I know.” He colors, the blush she now knows goes all the way down his chest. “Sorry. I just want to make sure I was a gentleman.”

  “Oh stop. You know you were.” Boris and Autumn aren’t even the closest of the group, but tonight was a celebration. He has beautifully long eyelashes, and he loves her the way the rest of them love her: easily, without expectation. So there it is. With him, she hasn’t so much lost her virginity as crossed it hurriedly off the list with a sense of relief. They’d listened to a record. He kissed her out of her clothes and folded his futon back into a bed.

  “I’m fine. I liked it. A good first,” Autumn says, a little surprised to discover it’s true. She has wondered if Sasha was the exception or the rule. But maybe love and attraction aren’t that simple.

  “I know it was your first time with…a man.” He trails off, staring at the ceiling, where cracks branch off from the corner, like the roots of some spindly tree. “But did you ever…?”

  “Ah.” Autumn rolls onto her back too. “No, this was my first time. I’ve never done that with a woman either.”

  He watches her. “You’ve wanted to.”

  Autumn nods. She isn’t ashamed. She refuses to be; she’ll paddle forever, keeping her head above that cruel cold water.

  “Your friend. The one whose birthday you go home for.” Once again, Boris’s aim is startling and true.

  “We only kissed once,” Autumn admits. His sheets smell like them. He still has an arm around her, and even though she’s lying on it, he hasn’t asked her to move. Just strokes her side, reassuring her that she isn’t alone. “We were high. I don’t remember it all.”

  The trip went bad, Autumn hyperventilated and her paranoia took over the rest of the night—Do you hear that, Sasha? Someone’s out there, I swear I hear whispering in the trees—

  “So she was straight all along,” Boris guesses.

  Autumn laughs. It’s dry, cold. Unlike her. “Oh no. She went off to college. Had her great awakening. She’s out and proud. She has a real-life girlfriend and everything.”

  While Sasha embarked on her self-discovery, what had Autumn done? Nothing. Autumn stayed. Once or twice, she returned to the tree house alone and tried to summon her memories, if only to understand it. She even kissed George, the neighbor’s son, and let him take her on five placid dates, not enjoying it, and wondering if it made her a—

  For a long time, Autumn couldn’t even say the word for a woman who likes kissing women. Her parents proudly voted for Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, and Michael Dukakis, and loudly proclaimed they had multiple gay friends they’d met on the road, and yet it took years for Autumn to say the word “lesbian.”

  Meanwhile, Sasha is kissing more women—beautiful, smart ones with sharp minds. Sasha comes home, and Autumn is still her funny little friend who can only stammer that she isn’t really seeing anyone.

  “Who needs it,” Sasha said breezily, like it was easy. “No one deserves you anyway.”

  “So she’s gay. But you aren’t together,” Boris cuts in, his forehead creased with confusion.

  Autumn can’t dispute it or explain it, so she pushes her face into his chest again.

  Wait. Autumn wanted to burst the first time Sasha came home talking about the girls she was kissing—the first time one of them seemed to stick—the first time she had an official girlfriend. And the second time. And the third. Wait, I’m still in the tree house. You only just kissed me. How can it be too late when you only just kissed me? There’s a hint of new distance between them. They can’t lounge as carelessly on Sasha’s bed when there are girlfriends. But Sasha still tortures her with arms slung around her neck, like it means nothing to Sasha to touch Autumn so casually. And Autumn touches her too, helplessly. Why are they doing this to each other?

  “I get it.” He brushes a tender kiss against the crown of her head. “I had a similar situation. My best friend growing up. Paul, he—he and I—we used to—” Boris breaks off, swallows, tries again. “He’s married, actually. Nice girl. Got a cute kid.” She reads in his face a multitude of heartbreaks, written in languages she doesn’t even know. “I don’t think he wants me in his life anymore.”

  Boris is a great friend to her. They talk a lot after that because he also likes kissing boys as much as he likes kissing her. Maybe, he says, it’s not all that black and white for some people. Maybe, Autumn decides, she is an unfinished tapestry. Maybe she is free to keep unraveling and weaving as she discovers the new patterns of herself.

  “I always wondered if I should tell you.”

  ***

  April 1995

  Autumn paces the tile floor, and perched on their kitchen counter, Victoria watches skeptically.

  “I don’t get why it’s such a big deal. It’s just a birthday,” she tells Autumn. They’re in the apartment they share, their one-bedroom home high in the Chicago sky like a bird’s nest built in the tallest tree branches. It’s been a year together, and Autumn still can’t believe her luck.

  Victoria wears earthy perfumes, magic, feminine musk that turns heads, and has sharp eyes, always slightly unreadable, her mind too fast to quite reach. She was top of her class in college, her future as landscaped as a French garden, the polar opposite of Autumn’s lackadaisical mix of hopes, distant inclinations, and spontaneous choices. When they met, they were certainly unlikely. Victoria was twenty-five, working in finance and stopping for coffee at the nearest bakery—where Autumn happened to work the morning shift. She came more and more often for the free pastries Autumn couldn’t help pressing into her hands. Autumn falls with her whole heart, captivated and honored just to be near her. It’s tangling with a dragon, beautiful, dangerous, clawed—beyond her. Autumn never understands exactly why Victoria picked her and can only be grateful for it.

  “I like your silly T-shirts,” she’d tell Autumn, crowding her against the sink, wearing nothing but one of those T-shirts, She-Ra emblazoned on the front. “I like the way you bite your lip.”

  But the more time they spent together, the more Autumn lost her sense of helpless enthrallment in favor of something far more dangerous. Because Victoria, she has discovered over the past year, is secretly shy under her intelligence and red lipstick. She’s like a cat, content to curl in Autumn’s lap and demand her fingers in her hair. Sweet and brittle at turns, and awkwardly goofy, like she’s still learning how to let go and be—Autumn is flush with first love.