I spent the afternoon thinning peach trees, removing small green fruit so the remaining peaches would have room to grow. For the first time in months, I concentrated on something other than my own pain. Near the end of the day, Hattie showed me a tree everyone had wanted to cut down after a hard winter freeze. Its bark looked gray and lifeless, and its branches were bare. But she scraped a little patch with her thumbnail, revealing bright green underneath. “Brown means dead. Green means she’s living,” she told me. I carried those words home that Sunday night like a warm stone.

The weekends continued. My father eventually had a locksmith install a deadbolt on the outside of my bedroom door, allowing my room to be locked from the hallway whenever I left. My toothbrush and hairbrush stayed in a bag in my car. My mail disappeared before every visit. My car couldn’t be parked on our street when the Ashcrofts came. The texts arrived days beforehand: “Be gone by 11.” Sometimes noon. Once, for a Fourth of July cookout, I was ordered out by eight in the morning. I began recording every weekend in a yellow therapy notebook, adding dates and tally marks until the number passed one hundred.