Hester Linden had never in her life asked Silas Oakhurst for anything she did not intend to get.

He knew this. He had known it since he was eleven years old and she had cornered him at the church supper and informed him that he would be carrying chairs. So when the phone rang at seven on Saturday morning and her voice said, without preamble, "Silas, I need the three-foot jars delivered to the top barn by nine, and I've told the Marsh boy to meet you there," he did the only sensible thing. He said, "Yes, Hester," and went to find his boots.

The Linden orchard lay a mile and a half up the river road, on a long, steep, south-facing hill that the family had been planting since before the town had a post office. In October it looked like something out of a painting somebody had been too generous with. The trees ran in rows up the slope, heavy with fruit, their leaves gone to copper and gold and a dozen shades of rust. Ladders leaned in the branches. Wooden crates stood in stacks along the lanes. At the crest of the hill, beside a gray timber barn with its doors flung wide, a long trestle table had been set out under a canvas awning, and on it, in neat rows, waited a hundred jars of last year's cider.

Silas parked the truck by the barn and sat for a moment with his hands on the wheel.

The back of the truck was full. Three of the tall ash-glazed jars he had unloaded on Friday, wrapped in blankets, along with a dozen mugs for the cider table and a crate of small bowls that Hester had ordered for the fair. A decent morning's delivery. He could do it in twenty minutes. He could be gone before anyone had finished their coffee.

He was not, of course, going to be gone before anyone had finished their coffee. He knew that. He had known it when she hung up.

"Silas!" Hester stood in the barn doorway with her white braid over one shoulder and a clipboard clutched in a gloved fist, looking as satisfied as a general who has seen her flank turn. "Right on time. Put the jars on the left table. Not that left. The other left. I'll want the mugs by the urn."

"Morning, Hester."

"It is a lovely morning. You'll want to enjoy it." She did not move from the doorway. "I've got twenty-two pickers on the hill. Half of them are children. You'll find the Marsh boy in row nine, I put him on the Cortlands. He won't speak up, so someone needs to tell him he's allowed to eat an apple."

"I'm delivering jars."

"So you are. And then you'll carry some ladders." She said it comfortably, the way one might say it would probably rain. "Row nine. I'd go now. The light's very good."

He unloaded the truck in eleven minutes flat. He did not look up the hill. He was extremely proud of that.

He lasted until the last crate. Then he found himself standing at the edge of the lane with his hands in his back pockets, looking up the slope at row nine, where the Cortland trees stood in a long gold file and a single figure in a camel-colored coat was balanced on the third rung of a ladder with one arm full of fruit.

Silas stopped breathing.

It was not the coat. It was not the tousled hair, or the careful, concentrated tilt of the head, or even the way he reached into the leaves with those long fingers, as delicately as he had once touched a string. It was the whole of him, bright against the hillside, in a light so clear and gold that every apple on the tree looked lit from within. It was the sheer, ordinary fact of him: there, in the orchard, in the morning, picking fruit.

He had imagined it, once. Years ago. A different life, a different hill. He had been very good at imagining things he could not have.

He walked up the row.

Lucien heard him coming and glanced down, and nearly dropped an apple. "Silas."

"Hester told me you'd need a hand."

"Hester told me that she'd put me on the easiest row in the orchard and that I'd be finished by ten." He held up the sack hung across his chest, which was perhaps a third full. "I'm not sure that's how it's going."

"She lies." Silas caught the ladder's side rail and leaned against it, steadying it. "Pick from the outside in. Don't twist. Lift and turn. You're bruising them."

"I'm not."

"You are. Look."

Lucien looked at the apple in his hand. A soft brown thumbprint was spreading across its flank. His mouth went rueful. "Oh."

"They bruise easy, Cortlands." Silas reached up, and, without thinking, closed his hand around Lucien's, around the apple, to show him. The angle of the wrist. The lift. The slow quarter-turn that let the fruit come away from the spur with a soft, clean snap. "Like that."

Then he realized what he was doing and took his hand away.

Lucien said nothing. He turned the apple over in his own fingers and put it in the sack, very carefully, and a faint color rose along his cheekbone that was not entirely the cold.

They picked.

It was easier than it should have been. That was the dangerous thing. They worked along the row in a companionable silence broken only by the thud of fruit into sacks and the faraway shriek of children, and Lucien began, after a while, to hum. He didn't seem to know he was doing it. It was a low, absent murmur, the line of some slow melody, and it drifted down from the leaves like pollen. Silas, holding the ladder, did not say a word, and did not breathe more than he had to.

Around ten the sky began to change.

It began at the edge of the valley, a smudge of blue-gray over the far ridge, thickening as he watched. The wind came up out of the south with a sudden smell of wet stone. The leaves of the Cortlands turned their pale undersides up, all together, with a sound like an enormous sigh.

"That's rain," Silas said.

"It was clear a minute ago."

"It does that here." He looked at the sky, and at the long open hill, and at the barn a hundred and fifty yards away across a field of wet grass. "We should get the sacks in."

"I have twelve pounds of apples strapped to my chest."

"I can see that."

"I can't run with twelve pounds of apples."

"You will."

The first drops hit like thrown pebbles. Then the sky simply opened.

It was not gentle rain. It came down in a warm, silver, sideways rush, the kind that falls from a sun that has not yet finished shining, and for the space of three heartbeats the whole orchard was a blaze of wet gold. Children shrieked. Pickers scattered with their sacks overhead. Somewhere a ladder fell with a clatter.

Lucien was already off the rung, one arm hugging the sack, the other clutching the frame of the ladder, and Silas, who had meant to say something sensible, found his hands had already moved.

He took off his canvas jacket. It was a heavy, ancient thing, the color of a wet fence. He caught the lapels in one fist and flung it up over both their heads, and it caught the wind and ballooned.

"Under," he said. "Come on."

"It's your coat"

"It's raining, Lucien!"

Lucien ducked under. They were suddenly, absurdly, standing shoulder to shoulder in a small, dim, canvas-scented tent of heat and noise, with water drumming overhead and the whole hillside roaring around them. Silas held the coat up with both arms. Lucien, a head shorter in the angle of the cloth, turned his face up to him, wet and startled and bright with something that looked, God help them both, like joy.

"The barn," Silas said.

"The barn."

They ran.

It was a hundred and fifty yards of slick grass and blown leaves, and it was a good deal slower than either of them would have admitted. The ground was already soft. Lucien's sack thumped against his ribs. Silas, trying to keep the coat above both their heads and keep his own balance as well, had to lean close, and close became closer, and every few strides their shoulders knocked together with a hard, warm, rain-damp jolt that went through him like a struck note.

A puddle opened at their feet, a wide brown lake in the lane, brimming with the fallen petals of leaves. Lucien did not see it. His boot was already coming down.

Silas dropped the coat with one hand and caught his wrist.

It was the lightest of grips. Fingers wrapped around the bone, thumb on the quick pulse beneath the skin. He pulled, and Lucien came over the puddle in a long stumbling stride, laughing, and landed against Silas's shoulder hard enough to jar them both.

And they were laughing.

He did not know how it had started. It was a ridiculous thing, two grown men in a downpour with an apple sack and a coat, one of them nearly in a puddle, the other with water running off his nose. But Lucien had his head back and his mouth open and a sound was coming out of it, a real laugh, loud and unguarded and cracked down the middle with disuse, and it went through the roar of the rain like a bright bright blade. Silas had not heard that laugh in nine years. He had thought, in the dark of some very long nights, that it might have been a thing he made up.

He was laughing too. He could not stop. It shook him to the ground.

They got to the barn with their sides aching. They stumbled in under the huge overhanging roof of the apple shed, a long, open-sided building with a floor of packed earth and a hundred wooden crates stacked to the rafters, and it smelled of cold fruit and wet wood and the sharp, sweet breath of cider. The rain thundered on the shingles. Light came in gray and gold through the gaps in the slats. A few other pickers had taken shelter at the far end and were shaking out their coats, but they were a long way off, and the noise swallowed them.

Neither of them let go.

It was a moment before Silas noticed. His hand was still wrapped around Lucien's wrist. Lucien's fingers had turned, somehow, in the scramble, and closed around his forearm. They were standing in the dim, sweet air with their breath coming fast, and the laughter had stopped, between one second and the next, as if a lamp had been turned down.

Silas could not look away.

Water ran down Lucien's face. It beaded in his lashes. It darkened the camel wool at his shoulders, and plastered his hair against his forehead, and ran in a thin bright line down the side of his throat, where his pulse beat visibly, fast and light. His lips were parted. His eyes were very wide, and very gray-green, and for once in nine years they were not guarded at all. They were looking at Silas. Just at him. As though there was nothing else in the world to see.

He thought, with astonishing clarity: I know exactly what is going to happen if I do not move.

He did not move.

The rain beat. The cider smell rose. Somewhere in the long dim shed a crate shifted and settled with a soft, wooden sigh. He felt Lucien's fingers tighten very slightly on his arm. He felt, down the whole length of his own body, a slow, painful, gathering heat, as though a kiln that had been banked for nine years were being quietly stirred.

"Silas," Lucien said. It was barely a breath.

The word undid something. He knew he was leaning in. Not far. An inch. Less. He could see the single drop of water that clung to the corner of Lucien's mouth, and he was aware that every nerve he owned had narrowed to that single place. He thought of a wall. A bank of coals. A boy with a cello case and a quick shy grin, who had said, it got into my coat, I said it was a friend.

He thought: And then you left.

It was not an accusation. It was only a fact, and it dropped through him like a stone through still water. And at the bottom of the water, very quietly, lay everything he had spent nine years not saying.

He drew a breath.

He let go of Lucien's wrist.

It was the hardest thing he had done in a very long time. His fingers opened one at a time, as though each of them had to be argued with. The loss of the warmth was almost audible. He stepped back, a single pace, onto the damp earth, and the cold air rushed in between them.

"Rain's stopped," he said.

It had not. It was still coming down in sheets. But his voice had come out rough, a husk of itself, and he heard Lucien hear it, and neither of them looked at the sky.

"Yes," Lucien said. His own voice was barely there. "So it has."

He was still holding Silas's forearm. After a moment, with an effort that was visible, he let go. His hand fell. It hung at his side, open, and trembled, just a little, and he did not hide it.

Silas looked at the hand. Then, helplessly, at the face.

There was no anger in it. There was nothing he could have braced against. There was only a stunned, quiet, wondering look, a look of a man who has been walking in a dark house and has just, for an instant, felt a window. It lasted a heartbeat. Then Lucien looked down, and the lashes came across it like a curtain, and he turned his head, and looked out through the slats at the streaming hill.

"Hester's going to be unbearable about this," he said, after a while.

It was a joke. It was almost steady. Silas, to his own surprise, felt a short helpless breath of laughter in his chest.

"She'll have planned the rain."

"She'll say she did."

"She might have."

They stood side by side in the dim apple-scented shed, not touching, with a hand's breadth of air between their arms that hummed like a plucked wire. Neither of them said anything else. The storm ran down the hill in a long silver curtain, and the light came through it gold, and by and by a faint rainbow stood up out of the river fog at the bottom of the valley, pale as breath, and hung there in the wet air as if it had no idea what it was doing.

Silas watched it, and did not look at the man beside him, and was aware of him with every inch of his skin.

When the rain finally eased, twenty minutes later, they went out into a world rinsed clean and shining, and Hester Linden was waiting at the foot of the barn ramp with two cups of cider on a tin tray and an expression of such serene, angelic innocence that Silas felt his ears go hot.

"There you are," she said. "I was so worried."

"Were you," said Silas.

"Terribly. Drink this. You're both soaked." She handed them each a cup, and her blue eyes moved, very briefly and very precisely, from one face to the other, and she said nothing at all, which was the most terrifying thing she could have done.

Lucien took his cider with both hands. He stood looking down into it, steam rising around his face. And then, not looking up, so quietly that Silas might have imagined it, he turned his left hand over and looked at his own wrist, where, in the red-gold light, a faint pale circle of pressure still lingered on the skin.

He did not say anything.

He only held it there, in the open air, as if it were something very fragile that someone had given him to carry, and drank his cider in silence while the rainbow faded.