Chapter 1: Pruning Season

In January, when the snow lay thick across the hills, Walter Brindle walked out to his orchard with a pair of shears and a granddaughter who did not want to be there.

"It is freezing, Grandpa," Maisie said, stamping her boots. She was fifteen, newly arrived from the city, and quietly furious about everything: the move, the silence, the way her parents had whispered about sending her here for the winter.

"Cold is the point," Walter said. "Trees sleep now. You can only cut when they sleep."

He led her down the rows. There were forty apple trees, gnarled and silver, each one planted by his wife, Edith, the spring they married. After she died, he had kept the orchard going out of habit, the way a man keeps winding a stopped clock.

He showed Maisie how to find the dead wood, how to angle the blade, how to cut just above a bud so the branch would grow outward, not in. "You are not hurting it. You are telling it where to go."

She snipped halfheartedly at first. Then, as the afternoon wore on, something in her shoulders loosened. The work was slow and quiet and oddly satisfying. Each cut felt like a small decision made correctly.

"Why do you cut so much?" she asked. "It looks like you are taking everything away."

"If you leave every branch, the tree spends itself on leaves and the fruit comes out small and sour." He smiled, gazing at a tall tree with a split trunk. "Your grandmother used to say that the hardest thing in the world is deciding what to let go of."

Maisie was silent for a while. Then she said, in a voice almost too small to hear, "I did not want to leave my friends."

"I know."

"I am scared everything will be different when I go back."

"It will be." Walter set down his shears. "But different is not the same as lost."

They finished the last tree as the sun sank orange behind the ridge. Their breath hung in clouds. Their fingers ached.

In April, the orchard exploded into blossom, a white and pink tide that smelled like honey and rain. Maisie stood among the trees with a mug of tea, her face sunburned, her phone forgotten in her pocket.

"Grandpa," she said. "Can I come back next winter?"

Walter looked at the branches, so fresh and bright against the sky, and for the first time in years he felt Edith standing beside him.

"I was hoping you would ask," he said.