Chapter 10: Lily and the Birch Tree
Three weeks later, Daniel brought Lily to Marwick.
She sat in the back seat for most of the drive asking questions he didn't fully answer, which she accepted with the particular patience of a child who has learned that adults sometimes need time to find their words.
Thomas met them at the door.
He had baked something — Daniel could smell it from the front path — which seemed both improbable and entirely in character.
Michael arrived twenty minutes later with his daughter Ruth.
Ruth was thirty-one, dark-haired, with her father's careful way of moving.
She shook Daniel's hand and then crouched down to Lily's level and said, "Your dad tells me you chose the flowers for your birthday party."
Lily considered her seriously.
"The white roses.
But someone put a thing in them."
"I heard about that," Ruth said.
"That wasn't your fault."
"I know," Lily said.
"Dad explained."
Ruth looked up at Daniel with an expression that said, clearly, *she's going to be fine.*
They sat around Thomas's table — Thomas, Daniel, Lily, Michael, Ruth — and ate whatever Thomas had made, which turned out to be a very good apple cake, and talked about things that were not the estate, not the documents, not Derek Marsh or Hargrove or Meridian Land Partners.
Michael asked Lily what she was studying in school.
She told him about a project on rivers.
He told her about a field trip he used to take his students on, to a creek in Westfield County, where you could find three different kinds of freshwater crayfish if you knew where to look.
Lily looked at him with complete attention.
"Could we go?" she said.
Michael glanced at Daniel.
"Maybe in spring," Daniel said.
Lily accepted this.
She turned back to Michael.
"Do you know a lot about rivers?"
"A fair amount," Michael said.
"Dad doesn't know anything about rivers," Lily said, with the frank assessment of someone reporting a simple fact.
"That's true," Daniel said.
After the cake, Lily asked if she could go outside, and Thomas pointed her to the back garden.
Daniel watched through the kitchen window as she found the birch tree — the one that had grown too large for the space but had clearly been there too long to remove — and stood underneath it looking up through the bare branches at the November sky.
Michael came to stand beside Daniel at the window.
"Thomas told me your father planted that tree," Michael said.
"I didn't know that."
"Apparently he planted it the year you were born." Michael looked at it.
"Thomas said he was a complicated man."
"That's a careful way to put it."
"Most honest things are careful," Michael said.
They stood there for a moment, watching Lily reach up and touch one of the low branches.
"The estate review will take time," Daniel said.
"Thomas says six to eight months for a full reopening.
It won't be simple."
"I know."
"You're entitled to more than a settlement.
You should know that."
"I know that too." Michael was quiet for a moment.
"I don't need the land, Daniel.
I need—" He stopped.
Tried again.
"I spent sixty-four years not knowing where I came from.
That's what I need.
The rest is paperwork."
Daniel nodded.
Outside, Lily had found a stick and was drawing something in the frost on the garden path.
She was completely absorbed, completely unaware of being watched, completely herself.
"She's going to be all right," Michael said.
"She is," Daniel said.
The fire in the next room was still going.
Ruth and Thomas were talking — Daniel could hear their voices, low and easy.
The apple cake was half-finished on the table.
Daniel looked at the birch tree his father had planted the year he was born, and his half-brother standing beside him, and his daughter drawing in the frost below.
Some things get buried for decades and come back wrong.
Some things get buried and come back, against all reason, as something that can still grow.
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Some secrets don't just hurt the people they're kept from — they hollow out everyone who carries them.
Have you ever discovered something about your family that changed how you understood your own story?
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