3. The Things Left Unsaid
Chapter three
The Things Left Unsaid
Sloane
Irun the orchard perimeter in the dark at four-thirty because the alternative is lying in the guest room bed cataloguing everything wrong with my life, which I could do in approximately eleven minutes and then what, just lie there for another two hours in the dark thinking about foreclosure notices and strangers in barns?
Three miles, fast, the gravel crunching under my boots in the cold October predawn, the apple trees standing in their rows like they're waiting for something. They probably are. The Honeycrisps don't care about my emotional situation. They have their own schedule and it is non-negotiable.
What I am burning off this morning, specifically, is the fact that I can see Beck Calloway's truck from my bedroom window.
It is parked in the gravel near the barn in the perfectly ordinary way that trucks park, and somehow its presence at six-thirty last night made me feel something unidentifiable enough that I moved to the guest room, which I've been avoiding for completely different reasons, just to stop looking at it.
I am running three miles in the dark because of a truck. This is where we are.
By the time I reach the sorting station, I have achieved something close to baseline human functioning, and I am genuinely startled to find Beck already there at five forty-five, in work boots with actual mud on them, holding two paper cups from the hot chocolate setup I keep in the farmhouse utility room.
I had calculated his arrival at eight. Eight-thirty, possibly. The city-hours estimate, the gentle easing-in timeline of someone who has never met an apple that wouldn't wait.
"I didn't know how you like it," he says, "so I made two options. One plain and one with cinnamon."
I take the cinnamon one without speaking. Drink it. It is, infuriatingly, excellent, with just the right amount of cinnamon.
I resent this information about him.
"East rows," I say, instead of anything else. "Honeycrisps. We're three days behind schedule and they don't negotiate."
"Lead the way."
I lead. He follows. I am, despite myself, hyper-aware of him behind me, the sound of his boots on the frost-stiffened grass, the way he moves through the rows without the hesitation of someone encountering an orchard for the first time.
He reaches up and cups an apple, checking the color at the stem end, pressing gently at the shoulder, feeling for the give that means ready.
"These are past ready," he says. "They're practically filing paperwork."
"I don't kid about fruit."
"Is that a personal policy or more of a philosophical stance?"
"It's a fact. Apples have a deadline. They're the least whimsical agricultural product in existence."
He starts picking. His technique is good, not born-on-a-farm good but trained good, the careful hands of someone who has learned to handle living things and takes the responsibility seriously.
He cradles each apple before it goes in the bin.
I notice this and immediately stop noticing it because noticing things about Beck Calloway's hands is not on my approved activity list.
I pick faster. He picks faster. We do not acknowledge the race we are absolutely running, and by ten in the morning we have cleared two full rows, which is a day's worth of solo work, and I am furious about how much easier this is with another person and also furious that I'm furious about that, because that seems like a character flaw.
"Good pace," he says, reaching for his water.
"Standard pace," I say, which is a lie. It is an excellent pace and we both know it.
Thursday girls' night at Iris's gallery is the one social commitment I keep because Gemma would physically retrieve me from the orchard if I skipped, and also because fresh apple cider tastes better when you're complaining to people who love you.
I bring my own cider. I always bring my own cider.
This is not a statement, it is just practical.
Iris's gallery is warm and smells like linseed oil and the specific good-candle she burns on Thursdays.
She's hung a new series along the east wall, bold harvest colors, oranges and deep reds, and I recognize the orchard in the shapes even though she's painted it abstract.
Luna's portrait of Captain in colored pencil is displayed near the gift shop entrance with a small card reading "Artist: Luna, Age 8, Price: $45" and it has three red sold dots on the frame, which is genuinely more than most of the adult work.
Gemma arrives in Theo's Cornell sweatshirt, which she has been wearing with the satisfied energy of someone who has claimed territory and is pleased about it.
Her engagement ring catches the gallery light.
Theo picked it because it matched her eyes and also, apparently, the supply closet label color at the clinic, which is such a specifically Theo Langley detail that I experienced an emotion about it and then went outside to check on the barn cats for ten minutes when she told me.
Margot is already there with her Harvest Moon Festival clipboard, her spreadsheet color-coded in six shades of autumn, her smile doing the thing it has been doing lately where it stays slightly too fixed for slightly too long.
She rearranges the gallery brochure display twice in the first five minutes, and I watch her do it and think: something is fraying, and she is working harder to cover it than usual.
I do not say this out loud. Margot will tell us when Margot is ready, and pushing before then is not kindness, it is just impatience wearing a caring expression.
The topic arrives the way inevitable topics do: gradually and then all at once.
"So," Gemma says, with the conversational energy of someone who has been holding this in since Tuesday, "the dead husband's secret best friend materializes with a legal claim. That is giving a very much soap opera season finale."
"It's giving 'get off my property,' which is what I said."
"Is the claim legitimate?" Iris asks, because Iris always goes directly to the practical question, which is one of the reasons I love her.
"My lawyer is reviewing it." I take a long sip of cider. "The signature looks correct. The documentation is professional. But Jamie never said his name to me. Not once. Eight years of marriage and I have never heard of Beckett Calloway."
The sentence sits in the warm gallery air between all of us.
"What else didn't he tell me?" I ask, and my voice comes out flatter than I intend it to, which is how I know the question has more weight behind it than I'm letting show.
Iris is careful when she speaks. She is always careful with me in the way that people are careful when they suspect you are closer to the edge than you're admitting. "He seems like he genuinely wants to help the orchard."
"Jamie seemed genuine," I say. "Consistently. Comprehensively. Right up until he didn't."
"Not every man is Jamie," Gemma says, steady and direct, the way she says hard things, without softening them into uselessness.
"No," I agree. "Some of them are more creative about it."
Margot, without looking up from her color-coded festival timeline: "He has strong professional references. Former clients in Portland rate him highly. No outstanding debts, no criminal record, and his landscape firm had genuinely excellent reviews before he left."
The three of us stare at her.
"What?" She makes a small note on her clipboard. "Due diligence is foundational event planning protocol. He's going to be running the orchard booth at the festival. I needed data."
This is the most Margot thing that has ever happened, and I feel a rush of affection for her that I am absolutely not going to express out loud because then we'd have to have feelings about it.
My lawyer calls at eight-fifteen.
I am sitting on the farmhouse porch with a second cider and the specific end-of-day exhaustion that comes from hauling, sorting, and performing functional human interaction for twelve consecutive hours.
The call is seven minutes long. At the end of it I know the following: the partnership agreement is legitimate, the notary stamp is verified, and the fifty thousand dollars Beck wired to Jamie's account eighteen months before the accident is documented in bank records.
Fifty thousand dollars. For equipment. For renovation. For the orchard future Jamie was always claiming he was planning for.
Spent on personal debts. Credit card balances and the poker losses I didn't fully know about and at least two other things my lawyer found in the records that I am not thinking about right now because I can only process one structural betrayal per evening.
I sit with this for a while. The trees are dark shapes against the darker sky. Somewhere in the equipment shed, one of the displaced barn cats is delivering a monologue about her grievances.
Beck took the leap with genuine money, and Jamie took that money, and neither of them told me, and I have been running this place on fumes and stubbornness while a man in Portland waited for a partnership that was quietly being used to cover my husband's secrets.
I have two options and they are both terrible, which is, I have learned, the standard format for important decisions.
I walk to the barn. Knock on the loft door. It opens faster than I expect, like he was awake, which means he was probably carving something because I have noticed that Beck Calloway's hands need to be making something at all times the same way mine need to be hauling something.
He has a whittling knife and wood shavings on his shirt and an expression of genuine surprise at seeing me, which softens almost immediately into something more careful and more guarded, like he is trying not to read too much into the fact that I knocked on his door voluntarily.
"The agreement's legitimate," I say. "You're staying."
Something moves across his face, relief that he is not entirely successful at keeping professional, and I watch it happen and think: he was actually worried.
He thought I might find a way to end this.
The fact that he was worried means this matters to him beyond the legal claim, beyond the forty percent, and I do not know what to do with that information so I put it in the mental filing cabinet labeled "examine never. "
"Thank you, Sloane."
"Don't thank me yet." I lean against the door frame because entering his space feels like a boundary I'm not ready to negotiate.
"The bank is foreclosing in six weeks. We have forty acres of unharvested apples, a cider press I fixed with baling wire and creative language, and a festival booth we have not started building.
This is not a partnership so much as a mutual survival situation. "
"That's one framing."
"The other framing is that I'm the orchard and you're the only thing standing between it and a bank that does not care about three generations of Mackenzies or the fact that my grandmother planted every Honeycrisp tree in the east section by hand.
" I look at him steadily. "So pick whichever framing motivates you more. "
"Honestly, both of them are working pretty well."
I almost let him make me smile. I redirect at the last possible moment, which takes more effort than it should.
"Ground rules stay active. We work, we harvest, we demonstrate financial viability to First Federal by November fifteenth.
After that, we figure out what the actual partnership structure looks like going forward. "
"Completely agreed."
"And Beck." I use his first name for the first time.
It sits in my mouth differently than I expected, short and direct, like a word that knows exactly what it is.
"Whatever Jamie promised you, whatever picture he painted of what this place was going to be, don't assume it's the full story. Jamie was gifted at painting pictures."
He is quiet for a moment. When he speaks, his voice has dropped to something quieter and more genuine than the easy conversational register he defaults to. "I know."
I cannot tell if he means he knows what Jamie was like, or he knows something specific that I don't. I decide not to ask tonight because tonight I have hit my limit for new information about my dead husband's secret life.
Upstairs. Guest room. The bed that is not my bed but is also not the other bed, which is also not quite a solution but is the closest available approximation of one.
I pull the foreclosure letter from my back pocket and read it again, all the way through, because I believe in facing documents directly even when they are trying to end my life.
Then I open the nightstand drawer.
The separation papers are where I put them eighteen months ago.
Unsigned on Jamie's side. Signed on mine, dated two weeks before his accident, the ink slightly smudged on my signature because my hands were shaking when I did it.
I was going to hand them to him when he got home from the station that night.
I had a whole speech prepared, practical and not cruel, the speech of someone who has been making difficult decisions her whole life and has gotten good at the delivery.
He didn't come home.
And now I am the brave widow. The hero's other half, saving what he left behind, carrying the legacy with both hands while the whole town watches and admires my devotion.
I am the woman in the mural by association, the grieving heroine of Willowbrook's favorite real-life story, and not a single person in this town knows I was about to walk out the door.
I close the drawer. Crack my knuckles, one by one, the way I do when I need something to do with my hands that isn't crying or throwing things. Set my alarm for four-thirty.
The orchard doesn't care that I'm complicated. It just needs harvesting.