Page 32 of Under the Orchard’s Spell

She drops the rest of the carrot and dusts off her hands. “Yeah. I know there’s a big problem at hand and digging around the past isn’t going to help.”

I level a stare at her. Challenging my aunt is not something I enjoy doing—or, for that matter, ever do. At the same time, this seems way too important to just let go. “But you clearly know something. And if you—”

Val pounds a fist against the table and Logan and I both jump. “No. What I know is that you need to focus on what matters if you want to save this farm.”

Then she crosses her arms, expression pinched, and leans back in her seat so far I think the antique backrest might snap in two. The shift is swift and immediate. Something has shut down behind her eyes, like a door slammed, locked, and boarded over.

I’ve always known Val to be obstinate, sometimes a bit harsh, but I’ve never seen this kind of cold finality from her. Not in the dozens of arguments she and my uncle had about irrigation schedules or pruning rotations. Not even when she found out Martin had stopped chemo without telling her.

I glance at Logan. He’s watching Val, brow furrowed, but he seems to feel my gaze because his eyes track to mine. A long moment passes in which we negotiate a silent conversation. His chin lifts, like, It’s up to you. I shake my head to say, It’s really not. After he considers for a beat longer, he nods.

“Fine,” I say, putting up my hands. “We’ll let it go.”

Val unwinds her arms and leans forward on her elbows. “Good. Then we can discuss some solutions to your two problems.”

“I have only two?” I ask, trying to lighten the tension that’s still thick in the air.

She snorts and slides a few journals aside so she can grab up a waxy pear.

“Two big ones,” she says, rubbing at the white coating. “The packing house won’t buy fruit like this.”

That much is obvious, although I’m not happy to hear it said out loud. The packing house has strict quality controls, and I wouldn’t try to sell them cull fruit anyway. I have a legacy reputation to uphold.

“And second?”

“It’s spreading.”

I probably could have predicted that, too, although it’s deeply worrying. As Uncle Martin would have said, the wind blows hard in this valley, and you can’t quarantine it, no matter how hard you want to try. “How can you tell?”

“The pattern in the trees. Though, we won’t know how fast ’til you watch it awhile.”

I let out a tiny sigh. Also, not good. At the same time, it was already going to be a bit of a long shot to get all the fruit down, especially considering my inexperience and Val’s injury. “So, when we pick, we’ll focus on the unaffected trees.”

Val frowns and drops the problematic pear. “Sure, but you can’t start for at least a few weeks.”

The implication is clear: By the time we start picking, the rest might have turned. Or at least enough to severely cut down my harvest. Possibly by so much I won’t be able to afford the minimum payments on my debts.

The bills.

The thought has my spine straightening, as though I can feel that closed door to the office. The ledgers I haven’t opened since Liv left. The stack of envelopes stamped with words like URGENT and OPEN IMMEDIATELY. My head starts to spin.

Prioritize the possible, I remind myself. The rest will fall into place when you’re ready.

It’s good advice. I’ve repeated it often to harried-looking men with ties askance and women in wrinkled blouses, with papers scattered everywhere as they furiously click between tabs. The issue is that in those cases, the problems were solvable—reports to file, emails to send, forms to fill out.

Mysteriously diseased pears aren’t like spreadsheets and emails because I don’t know what is “possible” to prioritize. We could change up the sprays, but it’d just be guesswork. I could hire a pesticide consultant, but that will cost money I don’t have and, besides, it’s unlikely they’d know more than Val.

I swallow and shut my eyes.

Uncle Martin trusted me with his legacy and now he’s gone and I can’t be the reason it all falls apart.

“Maybe it won’t keep spreading,” I say.

“ ’Course it will,” Val says with the overconfident pessimism of a disgruntled team lead complaining about new performance metrics.

“The disease is new,” I argue, opening my eyes to meet her confidence with my own. “It’s only affected a few trees so far. There’s no guarantee it will spread to the rest, or even much more at all. We can hope for the best here.”

Val rolls her eyes. “You sound like Martin when he’d had one too many whiskey sours.”