“I was never the true source of her hatred.

She had been fighting a war against my dead mother since before I was born.

I simply inherited the bitterness along with the orchards.”

We did not sell the land.

We reopened the old water mill with the help of neighbor families, and we tended the orchards, and I kept the sawmill, and we did not become rich, and we did not need to.

We married the next spring, quietly, only the people who had stood by us in attendance — Mrs.