"Do you know how to farm?" he asked.
"Not really."
"Do you have any experience running a business?"
"I've spent three years explaining how businesses should talk about themselves. I know that's not the same thing."
He stared at her as if she had admitted a plan to travel across the Atlantic in a bathtub. She understood his reaction and, on the drive home, had almost convinced herself to retract her notice. But when she called Frank that night and told him she intended to move into Ruth's house, he did not laugh. He made a long, unhappy sound and said she had better learn to use a ladder properly.
Emily arrived at the farm with four boxes of clothes, a laptop, a mattress strapped into the back of a rented truck, and a folder of receipts that made her stomach tighten every time she opened it. The porch had to be made safe before she could carry her belongings inside. The water heater made a coughing noise whenever the shower ran. The barn's enormous double doors stuck on wet mornings, and mice had made a home in the drawer that held old seed catalogs. None of it resembled the glowing pictures of rural independence she had briefly allowed herself to imagine.
Her first week was spent cleaning. She hauled spoiled feed bags out of the barn, stacked salvageable lumber beneath a tarp, and discovered that old wire fencing seemed to reproduce whenever she turned her back. She found Ruth's pruning shears in a biscuit tin and cleaned the blades until they opened smoothly. In the kitchen she taped a sheet of paper to the refrigerator and wrote every repair the house needed, placing a star beside anything that would become expensive if ignored. There were so many stars that she eventually stopped counting them.
By the end of the second week, her hands were blistered and her bank balance had fallen below fourteen thousand dollars. She had no business yet, no harvest worth selling, and no indication the land would ever earn enough to pay its own taxes. Frank visited one Saturday with a box of nails and found her staring at a patch of rotten porch railing.
"You can still sell," he said. "There's no shame in deciding something costs more than you can carry."
"I know."
"Do you?"
Emily turned toward the orchard, where late spring light lay across branches tangled with wild growth. "Not yet," she admitted. "I need a little longer before I know."
He helped her replace the railing without another argument. It was the first practical kindness she had accepted since returning. Emily felt embarrassed by how relieved she was to have somebody else hold the board while she drove in the screws, but Frank only asked whether she owned a better hammer. Later, eating sandwiches on the porch steps, he told her the local commercial orchard had been struggling with disposal costs and that somebody named Grant Ashby might need a place to send rejected fruit.