In the next room, Lily was already awake. He could hear her moving around, the soft thump of her feet on the hardwood."Dad?""Out here in a minute, baby. Get your coat."She appeared in the doorway of his room, wearing her mother's old fleece—the sleeves rolled up three times and still too long. Her hair was in two braids she'd done herself, tight and even, better than anything Marcus had ever managed. He tried learning after Clare died.They walked out into the dark together. The orchard spread out before them in neat rows: 212 peach trees on 12 acres of Calhoun County soil that had belonged to a Carter for three generations. Marcus's grandfather cleared this land. His father planted most of these trees. And Marcus was watching them die.The frost had already started settling. It came down fine and white, almost beautiful if you didn't know what it was doing to the bark. Marcus walked to the third tree in the seventh row, the one that had worried him most last spring. Now he touched the trunk on the southwest-facing side, and his fingers found the cracks he'd been dreading: sunscald.What he learned made him angry: the solution was almost laughably simple. White latex paint. Reflect the sunlight. Keep the bark cool and dormant. That was it.Nine trees dead last winter, five the year before, two the first year. At this rate, the math was unforgiving: four more winters and there wouldn't be an orchard left. Four more winters and Lily would be 14, watching her father lose the only thing her grandfather and great-grandfather had ever built.Marcus stood in front of that dying tree for a long time without moving. Lily waited beside him, the flashlight steady in her hands, and she didn't ask questions because she'd learned when to be quiet and when to push. After a minute, she leaned her head against his arm, and that small weight was what broke him out of it."Come on," he said. "Let's get ready for school."The morning routine was a machine they'd built together over three years. Marcus scraped the burned part off the toast while Lily counted out lunch money from the jar on the counter—quarters, dimes, nickels stacked neat. She was $1.75 short this week because he'd had to buy a new belt for the irrigation pump, and she didn't complain. Just wrote herself a little IOU on a scrap of paper and put it in the jar with the coins."You don't have to do that," Marcus said.