It feels like a magical little hideaway, far removed from the rest of the farm. I follow the invisible line he points out. If it was there, it would run directly through the centre of the tree, cutting it in half.

‘Legend has it that a few hundred years ago, long before any of Evergreene’s ancestors owned this land, a boy from this farm was in love with a girl from my farm, but their warring parents forbade anything from happening between them. They secretly met here one autumn, at the point where the properties connect, each bringing a piece of fruit from their respective farms, and both had chosen an apple. They swapped and ate by the light of the moon, and plunged the cores into the earth, where they grew combined, two seedlings sharing their lives to become one huge tree, the only form of togetherness the lovers could ever share.’

‘Aww. You seem like the last person on the planet who’d believe romantic old fairytales like that.’

‘I was just telling you the story behind it. I didn’t say I believed it.’

‘Yeah, but you do. I can tell.’

A grin lights up his face. ‘It’s a nice story. I think if you find a tree that’s stood here for as many years as this one, it’s got to have some history behind it. Why shouldn’t it be a nice fairytale? Evergreene used to say that the apples were poisoned and they died out here, and the tree grew from the seeds in their stomachs when their corpses finally rotted into the earth.’

I laugh at the way his eyes light up. ‘Now that’s more like it.’

‘But my dad always told me the nicer version, so that’s what I’ll stick with. Life is miserable enough without taking the joy out of fairytales too.’ He walks over to the tree, dumps his rucksack on the ground, and sits down on the moss next to the trunk, his back against the aged bark. He looks up at me through his eyelashes and pats the ground beside him.