“You had him sign this while he was on morphine.”
The rage that rose in me then was something primal, something I hadn’t felt since I watched a fox try to steal into our chicken coop when the children were small. I’d chased it off with a broom and the kind of fury that comes from protecting what’s yours.
“He was lucid,” Brandon insisted. “He wanted us to have a fresh start with the business. There’s a developer interested in the land.”
“Developer for a luxury housing community,” Melissa explained, her eyes bright with the prospect of money. “They’ll pay seven million. Mom, we can all start fresh.”
Fresh—as if the life Nicholas and I had built was something stale, something to be discarded. As if the legacy of Canton Family Orchards, our sustainable farming practices, our refusal to sell to the big grocery chains that would squeeze our workers, our annual donation of ten percent of our crop to the local food banks, was nothing compared to the prospect of cookie-cutter homes for wealthy weekenders from Philadelphia.
