Chapter One

The frost came early the year the surveyors did, and afterward Ren Calloway could never quite separate the two in her memory: the white lawn and the white truck, both arrived overnight, both behaving as if they had always been there.

She watched the truck from the propagation house, through panes her grandfather had puttied the spring before she was born. Two men in orange vests stood at the bottom gate with a tripod between them, patient as herons. They did not come in. They did not need to. Whatever they were measuring could be measured from the road, and that told her most of what she needed to know about it.

Her mother was at the long bench, potting on hellebores with her sleeves pushed up. She did not look at the window. "They were here Tuesday as well," Ada said. "Don't give them the satisfaction."

"The satisfaction of what?"

"Of being watched." Ada firmed the compost around a crown with two thumbs, a gesture Ren had seen perhaps a hundred thousand times, and set the pot on the finished side. "Measuring is free, Ren. It's everything after the measuring that costs somebody something."

The nursery had been Calloway & Daughter for sixty-one years, the daughter changing as required. It was the last one left in the Carse Valley, which was not a distinction the valley had awarded so much as one it had arrived at, the way a family arrives at an eldest. Eleven glasshouses had become seven, then five; the five had held. People drove out from three towns for Ada's hellebores and stayed to ask her the things garden centers charge to be wrong about.

By November there were stakes with pink ribbons along the fence line, and Ren had learned the word compulsory, which she decided was a lawyer's way of saying winter: coming regardless, survivable with preparation. What nobody told her, and what the whole year ahead would be needed to teach her, was which of those her mother intended to be. The winter, or the one prepared for it.