The Glass Orchard

Chapter One — Frost Line

The orchard did not look like a place where anything had ever gone wrong. That was the first thing Elin noticed, and the first thing she distrusted. Three hundred trees stood in their rows exactly as her father-in-law had planted them forty years ago, bare-limbed now and rimed with the season's first hard frost, patient as something that has learned to wait.

She parked the truck at the edge of the gravel and sat with the engine running longer than she needed to. The house was dark. The lawyer had said someone would leave a key under the mat, and someone had, though the mat itself was new — pale blue, still creased from its packaging, as if the old one had been thrown away for a reason nobody wanted to explain to her over the phone.

Inside, the air smelled the way orchards always did in November: apples going soft in a box somewhere, woodsmoke, the mineral cold of a house that had been empty too long. Elin found the light switch by memory, though she'd only been here twice, both times for holidays she'd rather not revisit. The kitchen came up amber and quiet. On the counter, exactly where she would have left it herself, sat a single brass key with a paper tag tied to the loop.

Cellar, the tag read, in handwriting that was unmistakably her husband's. Only when you're ready.

He had been dead for six months. He had not, as far as Elin knew, left anything for anyone — not a note, not instructions, nothing but a will that gave her a house he'd never mentioned and an orchard he'd sworn he hadn't set foot in since he was nineteen. She turned the key over twice, feeling its weight, and understood with total clarity that she was not ready, and that she was going to open the cellar anyway.