Chapter 7

Briar

The pre-harvest dinner happened on the first Sunday of October, same as always.

My grandmother had started it decades ago when the farm was bigger and the family was louder, and back then it apparently lasted until midnight with half the orchard crew invited. I wouldn't know. By the time I was old enough to sit at the table, it was just the four of us, and it had the feeling of an obligation nobody wanted to cancel because canceling it would mean admitting something.

We ate at six. My mother made the same things she always made. My father sat at the head of the table and we talked about nothing in particular, and outside the windows the apple trees were heavy and orange in the last of the afternoon light.

It was fine. It was always fine.

We were halfway through dinner when my father put down his fork.

"I've been thinking about the festival season," he said.

Nobody responded. That was how it worked—he'd been thinking, which meant he'd already decided, which meant this was an announcement rather than a conversation.

"Isolde will handle the external negotiations this year. Brand meetings, the regional rep, the buyers. All of it."

Isolde nodded, the way she did when she already knew what was coming.

"Briar will handle internal operations."

I looked up.

"Internal operations" meant the pressing schedule, the equipment, the labor coordination. It meant staying on the property and keeping things running while someone else represented the farm to the outside world. It was the part of the business that nobody saw.

"I've put together a plan for the east orchard," I said. "The yield estimates are up twenty percent and I've been in contact with two regional buyers who—"

"We need someone who represents the Harlow name," my father said.

He said it the same way he'd say anything. Evenly. Without heat.

But it landed exactly the way it was meant to.

I turned to look at my mother.

She was looking down at her plate. Her hand was resting on the edge of the table, fingers moving slightly against the wood, the slow back-and-forth of someone who has found a small repetitive motion and is using it to stay very still.

She knew.

She'd always known. She sat at this table at every one of these dinners and she knew exactly what was happening and she had, for as long as I could remember, decided that not saying anything was easier than what saying something would cost her.

I put my fork down.

I pushed my chair back and stood up.

"Fine," I said. "Then I'll represent my own name."

I walked out of the dining room.

My father said my name. Just once, the way he did when he expected it to be enough.

I didn't stop.

The front hallway was cool after the warmth of the dining room. I went out the front door and stood on the porch and breathed.

The orchard was right there, same as always, running out from the edge of the lawn in rows that my grandmother had planted and my father had extended and I'd spent half my life in. The trees were full. The early varieties were past peak—they should have been pressed already—and the mid-season ones were right at the window, heavy and ripe and waiting.

Nobody had been out to start the picking.

There was a plan for that too. My plan, the one I'd tried to bring up at the table, with a timeline and a crew schedule and a projected output that was, on paper, the most efficient the east orchard had been in six years.

My father had not asked about the east orchard.

I sat down on the porch steps.

The air smelled like apples and cold coming in from the north, that particular combination that meant October was settling in properly. It was the smell I'd grown up with. It had always meant something good was about to happen—harvest, the festival, the first batch of cider going into barrels.

Right now it mostly just smelled like October.

My phone buzzed.

Emrys: You eaten?

Two words.

Not how did the dinner go or what happened. Not are you okay, which would have required me to say yes or explain why not.

Just: had I eaten.

I looked at the text for a second.

Briar: Barely.

The reply came fast.

Emrys: Burrow's open. I'm here if you want.

I read it.

Then I stood up, went back inside long enough to grab my keys from the hook by the door, and went back out.