I didn't sleep. I sat at my kitchen table with the ledger open in front of me, and I watched the clock, and at six in the morning I drove to the bookshop and waited for Maren to arrive.
The step was cold. The bakery across the street was opening, and the smell of bread came across the road, and the town was waking up, one light at a time. The church clock struck six, and then a quarter past, and then half past, and I sat there with my hands in my pockets and my breath coming out white, and I thought about the ledger on my kitchen table, and the name in it, and the date beside the name, and I thought about how ordinary this morning was, and how it was the last ordinary morning Maren would ever have if I got this wrong.
Maren came at seven, in her yellow coat, carrying a paper bag with two coffees in it. She stopped when she saw me sitting on the step.
"You're back," Maren said. "And you look worse than yesterday."
"I'm staying with you today," I said. "All day. Don't argue."
Maren argued. She argued for ten minutes, standing on the pavement with the coffees going cold in her hands, and then she gave up, because I had never once in my life been stubborn about anything, and the sight of me being stubborn now frightened Maren more than anything I could have said.
"Fine," Maren said. "Stay. But you're shelving books."
I shelved books. Cookbooks on the second shelf, novels on the third, the way Maren's mother had shelved them when we were girls and the shop was hers. I remembered standing on a stool in this same shop when I was nine, putting books back in the wrong places, and Maren's mother laughing and fixing them behind me, and Maren rolling her eyes at me, the way only a best friend can. The shop smelled the same. Paper and dust and tea. Nothing had changed. Everything had changed.
I shelved books. I stayed within three steps of Maren all morning, and I watched everything: the ladder, the stairs, the kettle, the door. At ten o'clock, a delivery van pulled up outside, and the driver came in with a crate, and my heart stopped, because the driver was new, a young man I'd never seen, and the crate was heavy, and the top shelf was high.
"Let me," I said, and I took the crate from him, and I carried it myself, and my arms shook with the weight of it, and nothing happened.
At noon Maren made sandwiches, ham and cheese, and she put one in front of me, and I couldn't eat it. The phone rang, and Maren answered it, and a regular customer came in for a paperback, a man I knew by sight, and he asked Maren if she had the new one in, and she said she did, and she rang it up, and the day went on being ordinary around us, as if nothing was wrong, as if the date in the ledger wasn't today, as if Maren wasn't standing three feet from a shelf that was about to come down.
At noon, a shelf collapsed. Not the ladder. A shelf, on the far wall, loaded with hardbacks. It came down with a sound like a tree falling, and books went everywhere, and Maren was standing three feet from it, reaching for a book on the next shelf over, and she did not even flinch.
But the customer who had been browsing beneath it — a woman I didn't know, a tourist in a red hat, Mrs. Delacroix from out of town, visiting her daughter — was not so lucky. A book caught her on the temple. She went down hard. Blood on the floorboards. Someone called an ambulance. The woman was conscious, talking, insisting she was fine, but the paramedics took her away anyway, and I stood in the wreckage of the shelf, with dust in my hair, and I understood what was happening.
The danger was sliding off Maren. Every time something went wrong, it went wrong for someone else instead. The ladder. The crate. The shelf. The orchard didn't care who died. It only cared that someone did.
At two o'clock, Maren went to make tea, and the kettle shorted, and a spark jumped, and the tea towel caught fire, and I smothered it with my bare hands, burning my palm, while Maren stood in the doorway with the fire extinguisher, too slow, too late.
At three o'clock, Maren went to light the old gas heater in the back room, the one she always lit on cold afternoons, and I smelled the gas before Maren struck the match. I pulled Maren back by the arm, hard, and turned off the valve with my burned hand, and the two of us stood in the doorway, breathing hard, looking at the heater, and Maren said, very quietly, "Ada. What is happening today?"
"I don't know," I said. It was the first time I had lied to Maren since we were girls. "It's just a bad day."
The hours between three and four were the longest of my life. I watched the clock. I watched the kettle. I watched the door. Maren hummed while she worked, the way she always does, a song I didn't know, and my burned hand throbbed under the wet cloth, and the light in the shop went gold, the way it does in the late afternoon, and I thought about the shelf, and the kettle, and the heater, and the crate, and I thought about how many ways a day can kill a person, and how I was standing in the middle of all of them, watching, waiting, useless.
At four o'clock, a car came up onto the pavement outside, mounting the curb, missing Maren by inches — Maren had stepped back inside to answer the telephone — and hitting the fire hydrant instead, which burst, and water went everywhere, and the driver got out, white-faced, saying his brakes had failed, saying he was sorry, saying he didn't know what had happened.
I stood in the doorway of the bookshop, with my burned hand wrapped in a wet cloth, watching the water run down the gutter, and I knew.
I couldn't protect Maren. Every time I did, the orchard took someone else. The date demanded a death, and if it couldn't have Maren, it would take the customer, the driver, the tourist in the red hat. It would take them one by one until there was no one left standing near her.
The drive to the greenhouse was dark. The road was empty, the fields black on either side, and my hands were tight on the wheel, and I could feel my heart beating in my burned palm. I thought about the plum on the third shelf, and the apple that wasn't there any more, and the red pen in the desk drawer, and I thought about Silas, sixty years, and I thought about Elias Thorne, and I thought about the choice I was about to make, and I drove on, because there was no one else to make it.
At dusk, I left Maren in the shop, locking the door behind her, and I drove to the greenhouse.
The greenhouse was dark. I unlocked the door and went in with my flashlight, down the central path, to the third shelf, near the door. Maren's apple was gone. In its place, on the shelf, was a single glass plum.
I picked it up. The etching said: *Ada Lindqvist.*
I carried it to the potting bench. I set the ledger down beside it. I opened the ledger to the last page, and I looked at the two names there: *Maren Solberg — 15 October,* uncrossed, and below it, in my own handwriting, *Ada Lindqvist — 18 October.*
I thought about Silas. Sixty years he had kept the ledger, and sixty years he had never once tried what I was about to try. Or had he? I turned the pages back, and I found it: Elias Thorne, with two dates, the second a year after the first. Silas had bought a man a year. I didn't know how. I didn't know what it had cost him. But the ledger had allowed it once, and that meant it could allow it again.
I picked up the red pen. Silas's red pen, still in the desk drawer, still full of ink after all these years. I uncapped it. My hand did not shake.
I stood there for a long time with the pen in my hand, breathing, listening to my own breathing, listening to the glass fruit hanging silent on their wires. The nib was red. The ink was red. The line I was about to draw would be red, the same red as every line in the ledger, the red that meant collected, the red that meant done. I put the pen to the paper, and I drew the line, one line, straight through Maren's name, and I heard the nib scratch, and I felt something give way in my chest, as if a door had opened that I couldn't close again.
I crossed out Maren's name. One line, in red, straight through it.
Then I wrote, below my own name, a new date.
*Ada Lindqvist — 15 October.*
Today.
The greenhouse went very still. The glass fruit hung silent on their wires. The air smelled of soil and rain and something sweet I could not name.
And then, from the shelf behind me, came a sound like a sigh, and I turned, and I saw it: the plum in my hand had cracked. A single thin line, running from top to bottom, like a vein.
I had taken Maren's place. The orchard had accepted the trade.
I stood in the greenhouse, holding the cracked plum, and I waited for midnight. I waited for the sound I'd heard twice now, the sound of glass breaking, the sound of a death being collected.
Midnight came. The greenhouse was silent.
I drove home in the dark. Maren was alive. The customer in the red hat was in the hospital, and she would be fine. The driver was home with his family. The date had passed, and no one had died.
I sat at my kitchen table. I opened the ledger. Maren's name was crossed out in red, in my own handwriting. My own name was there, with today's date beside it, and it was not crossed out.
I was still staring at it when the ledger turned its own page.
I didn't touch it. I watched it happen. The page lifted, slowly, as if a hand were turning it, and settled, and there, on the fresh page, in red ink that was still wet, was a single line.
*Ada Lindqvist — 16 October.*
Tomorrow.
And beneath it, in handwriting I did not recognize as my own, a second line:
*Bring the ledger to the orchard.*
I closed the ledger. I put it in my bag. I looked out of the window, toward the greenhouse at the end of Fenwick Lane, where the glass fruit hung silent on their wires, waiting.
Tomorrow. The orchard was waiting for me.
---