Nicholas lies asleep in his playpen in the warm back kitchen, curled on his belly like a hedgehog. Frieda plays quietly on the linoleum, spooning air to her plush dog. An oblique sky hammers tin through the windows, threatening rain, smearing the magenta hills in mist. Reflexively Sylvia tugs her apron strings, but hesitates. There is nowhere to hide. She can’t run. She’d have to run for the rest of her life. She reties her apron, ties it tighter around her slender waist, smoothing the clean, damp cotton. Her six Mason jars of honey gleam from the thick, whitewashed sill over the sink where she’s kept them the last week to admire during her kitchen routines. Through the slumping window glass she sees Ted has his wallet out, his fare undulating toward the cabbie’s undulating hand, his single, rawboned knapsack dumped on the cobblestones, suspended in her honey’s amber.

Without stopping to think she grabs the flashlight, hung on a nail by the studded back door, and slips it into the deep front pocket of her apron. She leans across the sink and takes her six honey jars, lining them up in both arms, jars clinking with mellow fullness, held tight at her bosom. She turns and with a finger flicks the cast-iron latch to the broom closet, walks through, quickly, past the mops and buckets, and flicks a second latch on the interior, iron-banded door to the wine cellar.

It is utterly black inside, musty, remnants of spiderwebs glazing the top of her head as she stands under the threshold. She steps into the engulfing dark, pulling the door tight behind herself. Feeling blindly with the fingers of one hand, hugging her precious jars, she finds the nearest shelf clear of stuff and sets her honey down. She clicks the flashlight, which hesitantly emits a weak yellow beam over the dank space, the small windowless cell at the heart of their house, the walls earthy, the color of dried blood.

The thin light slides over the dusty shelves peppered with mouse droppings. Ted thought it too cold to keep wine. Maybe mead, maybe cider—for eight hundred years it had never been warm. The cellar has stored only the last owner’s rancid preserves in grimy jelly jars, necrotic heirloom jams, their paraffin tops grayed with age, and a few hoary, vinegared bottles. Since she’s come back from Ireland, she’s cleared two shelves, wall to wall, and lined them with straw, bedding her potatoes, her apples; her crop of onions soon, too, drying now under burlap in the shelter of the barn. Six years, for this: her meager harvest.