Prologue
William Josiah Robertson IV was supposed to be the answer to those problems. He was supposed to grow up a little rough and tumble, with a big laugh and an easy charisma and a deep well of natural leadership and courage; he was supposed to face the world with the cheerful, boyish audacity that would, in time, yield a proper Bill Robertson, of the sort who was meant to inherit the farm.
But from the first, the youngest William Robertson was a Will, not a Bill.
Where he was supposed to be rugged and stalwart, he was sensitive and soft; where he was supposed to be strong and hale, he was scrawny and weak, easily injured, often ill.
He was smart, that much was true, but smarter than anyone wanted him to be, or knew what to do with.
“Too smart,” as his father had commented whenever Will made a suggestion that he particularly didn’t like.
His parents had hoped for a Bill Robertson with charisma and panache, a head for numbers and business and the bottom line; instead, Will was awkward and offbeat, with a head more suited for charting the meadow plants visited by various species of butterfly.
He tried, though. Will tried. He did his best to grow into the man his family needed him to be. But the older he got, the more obvious it became to everyone that there simply wasn’t a Bill Robertson within him.
When Will left Glenriver at eighteen, in the middle of a night he’d spend the next sixteen years attempting to forget, he’d known two things for certain.
The first was that he’d never be Bill Robertson, not if he spent his whole life trying.
A Bill Robertson, after all, was meant to find himself a nice June, or Jessica, or Jillian, with an eye towards settling down and producing the Bill Robertson to come; no matter what else happened, that would never be Will.
He’d known that about as long as he’d known anything, and while he’d done his best to do his familial duty and look away from it, he didn’t figure there was any point in pretending anymore.
The second thing Will knew, as he walked down the farm’s long gravel driveway for the last time, was that it would be the last time.
Eighteen years was enough to spend trying and failing to bloom in the wrong sort of earth; he wouldn’t ask an apple tree to grow in soil that couldn’t drain, that left it so drowned by what it was meant to draw in, to live on, that its fruit rotted on the branch.
Will left it all behind—the town, the farm, the weight of his family’s expectations.
The ways in which it had all gone wrong.
But no matter how far he got from that long, gravel driveway, from the ancient outbuildings half-rotted with decay, from the old farmhouse and the long, neat lines of gnarled apple trees, he could never quite outrun the looming specter of Bill Robertson.
Even decades later, long since settled into a life more suited to the person he is, some nights Will can almost feel the man that he was supposed to be hovering behind him, breath harsh against the back of his neck, waiting with dwindling patience for Will to turn around and face him.