Bobbi's Shadow

Saturday market made Jackson Orchard look honest.

That was Kath’s private conclusion after three hours under the white tent at the Vernock community square, arranging peaches, pouring cider samples, and watching Lizbeth become the public version of herself.

The square helped the lie.

Vernock’s market occupied two blocks around the old brick post office and the library lawn. Musicians busked under the plane trees. A woman sold lavender sachets beside a man sharpening knives. Toddlers with painted cheeks chased each other between honey jars and handmade soap. The mountains held the town in a blue-brown bowl, and the lake flashed at the end of the street whenever traffic parted.

Everything smelled of coffee, fruit, sunscreen, and dust.

Kath understood, standing there with a branded apron tied over her borrowed shirt, how easily visitors believed in goodness if it was arranged under canvas. The orchard’s peaches glowed in their shallow boxes. The jam jars caught light. Lizbeth had tucked a few leaves between display crates so the fruit looked recently gathered, not sorted, labelled, priced, and hauled in a truck whose passenger floor was sticky with old cider.

People wanted farms to be honest because they wanted hunger to be simple.

They did not want to know who folded the linens after their romantic weekend, who washed the fruit dust from the crates, who gave up her name because a label looked better with the right story.

The public version was astonishing.

Lizbeth laughed easily. She remembered names. She complimented children without sounding false and elderly women without sounding patronizing. She could explain the difference between freestone and clingstone peaches while taking payment, correcting a display, and adjusting the fall of her hair for a photo she had not yet turned toward. Beside her, Colin became almost bearable. Blunt, yes. Gruff. A character. Men from other farms clapped his shoulder. Tourists asked whether he had grown up on the land, and he gave them a version of family history polished smooth enough to sell.

Kath stood behind the table in borrowed boots and a clean work shirt, placing “PACKED BY KATE J.” bags where Lizbeth pointed.

Every label felt like a small adhesive mouth.

“Smile,” Lizbeth murmured without moving her own smile. “You look like you are guarding evidence.”

“Maybe I am.”

“Not at market.”

A woman in a straw hat approached, and Lizbeth brightened toward her. “Good morning. You want the smaller peaches for jam. Sweeter, less water.”

Kath stepped back.

The woman bought six pounds of seconds and asked Colin whether the farm still did pick-your-own.

“Not this season,” Colin said. “Insurance.”

Kath had heard the real answer in the packing shed two days earlier. Not enough staff. Too many broken ladders. Too much risk that guests would see how thin the operation ran beyond the photographable acres.

Colin gave the woman a sympathetic shrug, and she praised him for keeping old places alive.

He accepted this as if praise were a crop he had planted.

Behind him, Lizbeth’s smile slipped for one second.

Kath saw it and knew Lizbeth hated him in that moment.

Then Lizbeth turned to the next customer and became sunlight again.

Across the square, a banner advertised Roanstone Harvest Weekend. MUSIC, CIDER, MAKERS MARKET, FAMILY DANCE. The same words from the road, now fluttering above a sign-up table. A teenage girl in a volunteer shirt taped flyers to a board. Two men argued over a generator cable. Someone tested a microphone and sent a squeal of feedback through the square.

Music, Kath thought, and turned away.

That was when she saw him.

He stood near the coffee cart with a paper cup in one hand, smiling at something the barista said. Tall, lean, sun-browned, with a day’s stubble and a faded denim jacket despite the heat. He had the loose posture of a person who trusted the world to make room for him or enjoyed finding out when it would not. A motorcycle helmet hung from his other hand.

Kath did not know him.

Lizbeth did.

The change in her was so complete Kath almost dropped the flat of peaches she was holding. Lizbeth’s public smile stayed in place, but everything behind it stopped. Her eyes fixed across the square. Her hand closed on the edge of the table until her knuckles paled.

Colin saw it too.

“No,” he said under his breath.

The man lifted his cup in a small salute.

Lizbeth turned away first. “Kath, go get more bags from the truck.”

“We have three stacks.”

“Then get a fourth.”

Colin’s voice cut in. “Go.”

Kath went.

The truck was parked behind the old community hall in a strip of shade. She opened the passenger door and found bags, receipt tape, two empty water bottles, and Lizbeth’s phone in the cup holder. It lit as Kath reached past it.

BOBBI

The screen showed a message preview before Kath could look away.

Did you tell him yet or am I still dead?

Kath froze.

The phone went dark.

Behind her, footsteps crossed gravel. Kath took the bags, closed the door, and turned.

The man from the coffee cart stood at the end of the truck.

“You are not Liz.”

“No.”

“That explains the expression.”

“Does it?”

He smiled. It was a good smile. Too practiced to be innocent, too tired to be entirely false. “Bobbi Crawford.”

Kath held the bags against her chest. “Kath O’Kane.”

“The cousin.”

“Apparently.”

“New?”

“Very.”

“Then a word of advice.” He leaned one shoulder against the truck, not close enough to block her but close enough to make the space aware of him. “Do not believe the first story anyone in that tent tells you.”

“Including you?”

His smile changed. “Especially me.”

Kath liked him less for the charm and more for that answer.

From the square, Lizbeth called, “Kath!”

Bobbi looked toward the sound. Something moved across his face too quickly to name.

“She looks well,” he said.

“You can see her from here.”

“Looking is not the same as seeing.”

Kath thought of Alex’s hands on the suitcase, the careful absence of a question. “No.”

Bobbi’s attention flicked to the phone still in the truck. “Did she leave that there?”

“I am not your courier.”

“Good. Couriers are underpaid and overtrusted.”

“You make jokes when you are nervous.”

“I make jokes when I am awake.” He took a drink of coffee, then lowered it without swallowing. “But yes.”

The admission made him less charming and more dangerous. Charming could be ignored. Fear had hooks.

“Why would you be nervous?” Kath asked.

“Because Colin Jackson is ten yards away pretending not to remember the last time he threatened to break my jaw.”

“Did he?”

“No. Jean came outside with lemonade and he decided dignity required witnesses of a different kind.”

Jean, Kath thought, and filed the detail away: another small intervention disguised as refreshment.

Bobbi looked past her toward the tent. “Tell Liz I am not leaving town until she talks to me.”

“That sounds like something you should not ask a stranger to say.”

“Probably.” His smile returned, but it failed to settle. “Tell her anyway if you decide you dislike all of us equally.”

Bobbi’s gaze returned to her. “Tell her I said hello.”

“Tell her yourself.”

“I tried.”

“Try louder.”

He laughed once. “You really are new.”

Kath carried the bags back before Lizbeth called again.

For the rest of market, Lizbeth was flawless. Too flawless. Her laughter came half a beat early. Her hands moved quickly, fussing with displays that did not need fussing. When a polished black SUV pulled up near the square and a young man stepped out with sunglasses, clean shoes, and the soft confidence of inherited access, Lizbeth transformed again.

“Tom,” she said.

Now Kath understood the other name.

Tom Menteith kissed Lizbeth’s cheek, greeted Colin with practiced warmth, bought three bags of peaches he did not need, and asked Kath whether she was enjoying the valley. He was handsome in an expensive, frictionless way. His shirt looked incapable of wrinkling. His smile was kind and incurious.

“I arrived this week,” Kath said.

“Brave timing. Harvest makes everyone unreasonable.”

“Were they reasonable before?”

Tom blinked, then laughed politely, as if uncertain whether he had been expected to. Lizbeth’s fingers tightened on his arm.

“Kath is settling in,” she said. “Dad has her helping everywhere.”

“Good of you,” Tom said.

Kath looked at him. “Is it?”

Lizbeth moved smoothly between them. “Tom’s family is sponsoring part of Roanstone weekend. The music stage, right?”

“Among other things.” Tom turned to Lizbeth as if grateful for the safer subject. “I wanted to talk to you about that. Dad thinks the orchard dinner could be moved under our tent if your south lawn is still uncertain.”

Colin’s attention sharpened.

Money had entered the conversation without announcing itself.

It changed the posture of every person in the tent.

Colin became broader, almost genial, his hands moving as if the farm around them were already more secure. Lizbeth leaned into Tom by half an inch. Tom seemed not to notice that everyone had begun leaning on him. Even Kath straightened, because money in the air made poor people arrange themselves before they knew whose judgment had arrived.

“Your father is generous,” Colin said.

Tom laughed. “Strategic, maybe. He likes the old-valley story. Roanstone Ridge can do wine and glass and architectural concrete all day, but people still want a real orchard beside the tasting room.”

Real.

There was that word again, bruised by another mouth.

Lizbeth’s hand tightened on Tom’s sleeve. “The south lawn will be fine if the wind holds.”

“Dad worries about presentation.”

“Dad worries about control,” Colin said approvingly.

The two men laughed as if this were a joke and not a shared language.

Kath looked at Lizbeth.

Lizbeth looked at Bobbi.

Bobbi had stopped pretending to drink coffee.

Kath stepped back, holding the empty cider sample tray. Across the square, Bobbi watched from beside the coffee cart. He saw Tom’s hand at Lizbeth’s back. He saw Colin leaning in. He saw Lizbeth smiling up at Tom with all the force of a woman holding a door shut behind her.

Then Bobbi looked at Kath.

For one second, the market noise fell away.

He knows, she thought.

Not what. Not yet.

Only that something stood behind the story being sold in the tent, and Bobbi Crawford was one of the few people not pretending it was scenery.

That evening, back at the orchard, Lizbeth found Kath in the washhouse folding tablecloths.

“What did he say to you?”

Kath did not ask who. “Hello.”

“Do not be cute.”

“He said not to believe the first story anyone tells me.”

Lizbeth’s face went flat.

“Bobbi likes hearing himself talk.”

“He also asked whether you had told him yet.”

The silence came so quickly it seemed to strike the walls.

Kath looked up.

Lizbeth had gone pale beneath her market makeup. For the first time since Kath had arrived, she looked younger than her confidence.

“I saw the message preview,” Kath said. “I did not open your phone.”

Lizbeth crossed the room and slapped the folded tablecloths from the counter.

“Stay out of my life.”

The violence of it was small, cloth falling to concrete, but Kath’s body reacted as if something had shattered. She stepped back.

Lizbeth was breathing hard.

“You do not know anything.”

“I know that.”

“No. You think saying that makes you better than people who guess. It does not. You are still looking. You are always looking.”

Kath looked at the tablecloths on the floor. White fabric, dust at the edges now. More laundry. More correction.

“Then stop giving me things to see.”

Lizbeth laughed, but it broke before it became sound.

For a moment, Kath thought she might cry. Instead Lizbeth crouched, gathered the cloths with furious efficiency, and shoved them against Kath’s chest.

“Fold them again.”

Kath took them.

Lizbeth went to the door, then stopped.

“And if Dad asks, Bobbi did not come near the truck.”

“Did he?”

Lizbeth turned. “You really do not learn.”

After she left, Kath stood in the washhouse with the tablecloths in her arms and the machines thudding around her. Outside, Colin’s voice carried from the yard, cheerful now, talking to Tom Menteith about tent rentals and weather contingencies.

Kath folded the first tablecloth again.

Then the second.

By the third, she understood something she wished she did not.

Lizbeth was afraid.

Not of Bobbi alone. Not of Tom alone. Not even of Colin alone.

Of the place where all three stories touched.