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“We came from Ireland when I was a boy. Everyone went their own way, eventually.”

He said it with no emotion or regret. It was so matter-of-fact that I didn’t know what to make of it.

“You never understood that,” he added.

He knelt, cutting at the base of one of the plants and tossing the leaves to the ground. He didn’t ever talk about the “us” that existed before. In fact, he seemed to carefully avoid it.

“When I met you, you had Esther and Margaret. Mason.”

His voice changed just a little when he said Mason’s name.

“And here I was, alone in the world. You thought it was sad. But family, for me and my brothers, wasn’t the same. I didn’t really have a real family until…” He didn’t finish.

The knife twisted deeper.

Margaret was right that Eamon was a quiet creature. He spoke only when he had something to say, and he didn’t lace it in false meaning or palatable words. There was something so honest about him that it made me afraid of what else he might say now that he was talking. Like whatever judgment he might render me was bound to be true.

“And the farm?” I asked.

He smiled, but I could see only half of it with his face turned to the side. “Bought the land with money I saved working on the railroad, and the only reason I could afford it was because no one wanted it. The plot was rocky compared to the others in these mountains, but I’d grown up farming in Ireland, where the ground is more stone than earth. It took two years to get it cleared.”

That young Eamon from my memory came back to me, that shy smile he’d had when he appeared at the fence.

He walked ahead, cutting as he went, and we fell into a comfortable silence, working through the morning and then the afternoon with brief spells of conversation that were easier and easier to have. He told me about the first crop he ever harvested here, about buildingthe barn and how he’d bought Callie half-starved at an auction in Asheville. They weren’t so much stories as they were excerpts from a kind of archive. One that made up his life. But when he finally quieted, taking longer to answer my questions, I found I didn’t have much to say. There wasn’t anything I could tell him that he didn’t already know.

The smoke billowed every time we refilled the canisters, and it darkened the air between the tall plants until it looked like dusk. Before I knew it, it was. The temperature cooled and we made it to the last field, my hands black with soot the way Eamon’s always were. My muscles screamed under the weight of the rigging, and when I made it to the end of the final row, Eamon was waiting for me.

I watched as he lifted the end of his shirt, wiping his face with it. Beneath was a plane of sun-gold skin that glistened over the muscles of his back. I could see the indented path I’d traced with the tips of my fingers at the Midsummer Faire.

He took the rig when I reached him, and I stretched my shoulders back, neck aching. The fireflies were awake, floating over the grass, and the house was dark, but the moon was still bright. He hoisted the rig up as I peeled off my gloves and as soon as we reached the barn, he lit the lantern that hung from one of the beams.

He took the lid from the bucket that sat on the chair in the corner, and the light rippled on the water inside. When I looked at him, he tossed me a rag, gesturing toward it. The smell of smoke still permeated the air, the same scent he carried with him into the house each night. It would probably be in my hair for days.

The chirp of the crickets outside was punctuated by Callie’s impatient snorts, and I looked around us, to the empty barn. We’d been working side by side all day, but I hadn’t really felt like we were alone until now.

He unhooked the chains, dumping the ash into the bin against the wall, and I hung both pairs of our gloves on the hook, side by side.

I dipped my sore hands into the water, stretching my fingers beneath the surface. “Can I ask you a question?”

For once, Eamon didn’t stall. “Sure.”

“How did I tell you the truth about me? About where I’d come from?”

He stood from the rigging on the ground, untying the bandana around his neck. “You just told me.”

“When?”

“We were together one night, and you just said out of nowhere that you needed to tell me something. That you couldn’t marry me unless I knew the truth.”

Together one night. The words felt intentionally nondescript.

“I just told you and you believed me?”

He shrugged. “It was too impossible a story not to be true. And it somehow made sense to me. I’d known for some time that there was something strange about you.”

“Like how Nathaniel felt about Susanna?”

“Maybe.” He answered honestly.