Maeve Higgins read the email twice before she set down her coffee, and the second reading did not soften it. The Covington Foundation was withdrawing its grant to the Gardens' summer nature program, effective immediately. Forty-two thousand dollars, gone in four sentences, signed by Margaret Covington, who had shaken Maeve's hand at the Harvest Gala in October and told a room of two hundred people that Maeve was the best thing to happen to Oakhaven in thirty years.
The grant had paid for the bus that carried forty children out to the creek every Tuesday, for the dip nets and the field guides and the water testing kits, and for the two part-time naturalists Leo hired each June. It had paid for the whole thing since 2015.
The carriage house office was warm already. Late May in the Shenandoah Valley meant a humidity that pressed the boxwoods flat and made the window unit rattle without cooling anything, and the forecast carried a thunderstorm watch until eight that night. Maeve read the message a third time.
There was no reason in it. There did not need to be.
She picked up the desk phone and dialed the number under Margaret Covington's name.
"Good morning, Covington Foundation."
"This is Maeve Higgins, at the Oakhaven Heritage Gardens. I'd like to speak with Margaret, please."
"Ms. Covington is in meetings all morning. May I take a message?"
"You can tell her I received her letter. And I'd like to know which of those four sentences she wrote herself."
The pause lasted long enough that Maeve heard the other woman breathe. "I'll pass that along."
"Thank you."
She had barely set the receiver down when the phone rang again. Ruthann Pike, whose daughter had gone through the program two summers running.
"Ms. Higgins, I'm sorry to bother you. I put Addie's registration in the mail Friday and I just wanted to make sure it landed."
"It landed, Ruthann. Sixty-two of them landed."
"Oh, that's good. She's been talking about the creek survey since January."
Maeve looked at the email on her screen. "If anything changes, you'll hear it from me first."
She hung up and left her hand on the receiver. On the corner of the desk sat the folder Leo had left there Monday: sixty-two registrations, better than half of them on scholarship, and eight seasonal offer letters waiting on her signature and his. In the corner behind her, the safe held eleven letters tied with a blue ribbon, the one asset she had not spent.
Wednesday. At two o'clock, David Chen was due with two trustees for a walkthrough he had announced on Monday the way other people announced the weather. She had told herself, in the office at night with the letters open in front of her, that the cost of all this would land on her and no one else. That had been a comfortable thing to believe for two weeks.
She called the Historical Society. Clara Bellweather answered on the second ring.
"You sound like a woman standing in a draft," Clara said.
"The Covington Foundation pulled the summer program. All of it."
The line went quiet. Maeve could picture her at the window desk, reading glasses pushed up into her white bun. "Whitfield Covington and Arthur Thorne played golf together every Thursday for forty years," Clara said. "And Margaret has never done a single thing in her life without knowing who was watching."
"I know."
"Have you told Leo?"
"Not yet."
"Tell him before Sheryl Potts does. Sheryl has rung every telephone in this town since Tuesday."
Leo came in at ten past nine with soil on his forearms and a clipboard under one arm, talking before he was through the door.
"Last two came in," he said. "Devin Rhodes, and a girl from Luray named Kayla. She has her lifeguard certification and she can name every oak between here and the park line. Eight slots, eight names, fifteen dollars an hour. I was going to bring you the letters this afternoon so you could sign them."
Maeve stood up and closed the office door. Leo watched her do it and stopped talking.
"What," he said.
She pointed at the chair by the bench and said it plainly. "Sit down."
"I don't want to sit down."
"Leo."
He wouldn't look at her. "What."
She handed him the printout. He read it standing, and she watched it move across his face — the fast first pass, the slower second one, the place where his jaw set.
"Forty-two thousand dollars," he said.
"Yes."
"That's the entire program. That's the bus, and the water testing kits, and the field guides, and eight paychecks. Devin's got a baby coming in August. Kayla drove up from Luray for that interview."
"I know."
"Did they give a reason?"
"No."
"Did you ask?"
"I got the assistant. I'll keep asking until I get past her."
He laid the paper on the bench and put both palms flat on either side of it. Then he said the thing he had been holding. "This is about the acreage."
"Leo."
"Don't do the calm voice on me."
"I'm not—"
"Everybody in town knows. Sheryl Potts put it on the front page. Julian Thorne wants five acres, you told him no, and now the Thornes' friends have come for my kids."
"There's no way to prove that."
"Whitfield Covington's been on the Gardens' board since before I was born."
"He's emeritus now. He still takes the calls."
"Same thing with a softer word." Leo laughed once, with nothing in it. "You knew when you opened it."
"I suspected when I opened it. There's a difference."
"That's a nice distinction for Kayla from Luray."
Maeve had no answer for that one. Out on the east slope the mower started up, and it ran for a while, and neither of them spoke over the noise.
Leo straightened. He picked up the clipboard and held it against his chest. "I called all eight of them Friday. Two already turned down other work. Devin told his landlord he'd have the money by June."
"I'll write the letters myself. I'll call every one of them tonight."
"Sure."
"And I'll find the money. There's the Harvest Gala, there's the endowment—" She stopped, because the endowment had lost money three straight years and Leo knew it better than she did. "I'll find it."
"You said that about the greenhouse roof."
"That's not fair."
"No," Leo said. "It isn't."
She had been to the Food Lion on Route 11 on Sunday, and a woman she had known for a decade had turned her cart down the cereal aisle rather than say good morning.
Leo looked at her then, and it was a look she had never had from him before. For four years he had looked at her like she was the person who had handed him his life. Now he looked like a man doing arithmetic on the back of an envelope.
"There's one more thing," he said. "End of August, the kids make the apple butter. They take a jar home to their families. For some of those kids, that's the whole summer right there."
Maeve said nothing.
"This fight you're having with the Thornes," Leo said. "Was it worth this?"
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