“You’ve had a decade, woman,” she heard Noelle grumble under her breath.

Hannah nodded, though. “Let’s all sleep on it, I’ll do some more finessing to the parts of the plan that don’t hinge on you, and we will talk about this in a week.” Hannah hugged her, hard, and she held on tightly.

“I need you to know that it means the world to me that you asked, Nan,” she said, a couple of tears falling into Hannah’s hair.

“Whatever,” Hannah said, wiping away her own tears. “Anything for Carrigan’s. Now let’s get back to work. We can’t sell trees from the library!”

Chapter 7

Chapter 7

Noelle

The weeks before Thanksgiving were busy enough for Noelle to feel her introversion stretched, but even as she lost herself in the hustle, she couldn’t turn off her brain. She missed Cass, she couldn’t ignore how hard Miriam was busting her ass, and she worried that Hannah was burning herself out. She was itchy with stress about things she couldn’t fix or change. She found herself more than once out in the back acreage, taking care of trees she could mostly control.

There was a stand of young saplings she was coaxing into full health after a scorching summer. During the off-season, she read and spoke to botanists around the world about the effect of global warming on pine tree growth. She was trying various ways of adjusting the planting season to meet their new reality. Still, if she lost this crop, there would be a very lean year soon, so Noelle was doing everything she could to get them through.

The day after Miriam presented her plan, Noelle patted one particularly scraggly little tree on the top. “Good girl,” she whispered. It never hurt to remind the trees that you loved them.

Shoving her gloved hands under her arms for warmth, she looked around. It was almost laughably perfect outside, crisp and cool but not the biting cold that would come as winter set in. The air smelled like woodsmoke, wet earth, and pine. At the very back of the property, she could hear the stream that ran down from the mountaintop snowmelt, bubbling happily in the background. She breathed deeply and felt every muscle in her body relax, for the first time since Cass died.

Nothing about losing her was easy, and her choice to leave part of the farm to two people who’d walked away when they had been needed the most still irked Noelle. She didn’t want to be mad at Cass, but she couldn’t help it.

Admittedly, Miriam wasn’t as bad as Noelle wished she was. She also fit better at Carrigan’s than Noelle would have liked.