On the morning the eleventh month ended, Emily stood with a gloved hand on the rail of the first truck and watched the apples begin to fall. Her jeans were stained around both knees. She had a strip of adhesive tape around one finger where a crate had caught her skin the day before. The man driving the truck leaned out of his window and asked the question he had been asking since the beginning.
"You ever going to tell me what you're doing with all this?"
"One day," she said.
He laughed. "That's what you said in February."
"I know."
He shook his head and eased the truck forward to clear the unloading area. Emily watched him go, then turned toward the barn. On a narrow wooden shelf just inside the door stood six small glass bottles, each labeled by hand in black ink. The liquid in the first one was almost gray.
The second had a strange cloudy layer suspended in the middle. The next three looked progressively less alarming, although Emily knew that their appearance had little to do with whether they were fit to sell. The sixth bottle held an amber liquid that caught the morning light and turned it the color of honey.
She had spent nearly a year trying to make that sixth bottle. During that time she had lost savings, sleep, and most of her certainty about what kind of person she was. She had worked through nights when the barn froze hard enough to numb her fingers, and mornings when she had to throw out everything she had spent the previous week preparing. She had learned more than she wanted to know about bacteria, oxygen, sanitation, permits, and the difference between an exciting idea and a business capable of keeping the lights on. There were days when she believed everyone who drove past laughing might turn out to be right.
The story really began a little more than a year before that eleventh-month Tuesday. At the time, Emily lived in a one-bedroom apartment outside Rochester, more than a long afternoon's drive from Millbrook. She worked for a marketing agency that sold cheerful certainty to companies whose products she rarely believed in. Her job title included the words brand strategy, which sounded impressive enough when her mother mentioned it to relatives, but on most weekdays it meant changing the same three sentences until a client who had not read the brief felt satisfied.
She was good at it. She knew how to make an ordinary object feel desirable, how to write an advertisement around a problem people had not realized they possessed, and how to turn a flawed product into a promise. Her supervisors praised her speed and the ease with which she accepted changes that made no sense. Once, after seventeen rounds of revisions for a company selling disposable kitchen utensils, she stayed at her desk until nearly ten o'clock trying to make the words earth-friendly sound sincere. She finally sent the copy and sat looking at her reflection in the black office window, wondering how long she could keep doing work that made her feel less honest every year.