She showed me the heirloom chrysanthemums, the Henriette dahlias, the zinnias. “That’s all I’ll ask you to remember for today,” she said. “A few at a time, over time, does the trick. Now help me cut. The best harvesting times are very early morning and night. The heat of the day shocks them, shortens their life. We want them to last several days cut, if not even longer.”

A pair of sharp scissors in my hand, I cut where she told me to and set the stems in buckets of water. We worked quietly for a little while, and then I confessed, “I read about you in the newspaper.”

“When?”

“Before I came. An article from a long time ago.”

“They like to romanticize us,” she said.

“Like a fairy tale,” I said softly, more to myself than to her.

But she heard me and agreed.

“Very much like a fairy tale. Yes. Fairy tales are full of orphans and mistreated children. The movies make them romantic, but the original stories are not. And there’s nothing romantic about giving a home to young people who need one. It’s a necessity, and it’s something Terry and I like and are good at.”

“So, a new fairy tale,” I said. “Except with ghosts.”

She brushed a white curl off her forehead with a gloved hand and paused. “Are there no ghosts in fairy tales?” We thought and thought and couldn’t think of any. Not in Snow White or Cinderella. Not in Sleeping Beauty or Rumpelstiltskin or Rapunzel. Not in the Twelve Dancing Princesses or The Goose Girl.

Night was falling. Soon it would be too dark for us to keep cutting and filling the buckets.

Julia wiped her hands on her work apron. “So, now we load up the wheelbarrow and take them to the cooler. They’ll chill overnight and then, first thing in the morning, I’ll arrange the bouquets.”

Together, we carried the buckets of flowers to the worn wheelbarrow, all wood and rusted metal, and fit in as many as we could. I followed her around the tunnel and to the back of the house, until we reached a shed that housed a walk-in refrigerator. After setting the buckets on the shelves, we made another trip with the rest of the flowers, and then we were finished.

We closed up the shed and headed back toward the house. I took everything in as we walked together. The cold, wet air. Two ghost children on the green, pretending to have a picnic. The darkness and sky and the moon above the rocks.

“Coming back in?” Julia asked me at the side door.

I shook my head.

“Good night then, Mila,” she said.

“Good night.”