Stories for the hours after dark.

The tide went out at four, and by five the orchard had surfaced again: forty rows of white trees standing in the wet sand, their branches crusted with salt the way other trees are crusted with frost.

Nell had been told, the way every child in Carrow was told, never to walk among them after dark. The trees were not dangerous, her grandmother said. They simply remembered things, and some of the things they remembered were not kind.24

She went anyway. She was seventeen, and the letter in her coat pocket had been written in her mother's hand, and her mother had been dead for nine years.

The sand held her footprints for a moment and then let them go. Behind her the lamps of the harbour were coming on one by one, small and yellow and very far away. Ahead, the first tree leaned toward her as if it had been waiting.

“You're late,” said a voice from its branches.9

Nell stopped. A boy was sitting in the crook of the trunk, his boots dangling, a lantern hooked on the branch beside him.