“These look good,” Jon said, appearing beside her with a canvas bag already heavy with produce.
She nodded absently. Her attention had drifted across the walkway to a hand-painted sign above a table covered in neat wooden baskets overflowing with perfect strawberries. The berries gleamed in the sunlight, too red to ignore, arranged so carefully they seemed almost ceremonial.
Strawberry Sisters Farm.
Margaret stopped moving.
Even after 15 years, anything to do with strawberries still caught at her. The memory was never far away. The girls playing in the backyard patch Jon had tended for years. Sarah’s constant fascination with bugs and snails around the roots. Sophie’s serious insistence that every berry be picked only when it was truly ready. Stella’s delight in eating more than she carried back inside. It took so little to bring them back. A smell. A color. The sight of fruit in a basket.
“Oh, look at those strawberries,” Margaret murmured.
She stepped toward the stand before she had fully decided to.
A young woman stood behind the table arranging the baskets with quick, efficient hands. She looked about 21, with strawberry-blonde hair pulled back into a ponytail and the kind of open, practical expression you see in people used to long days and real work. Her movements were precise. Not hurried. Not decorative. She knew exactly what she was doing.
“These are beautiful,” Margaret said. “Are they grown locally?”
The young woman looked up with a bright, easy smile.
“Yes, ma’am. We grow them organically about 30 mi east of town. My sisters and I run the farm together.”
The word sisters made something quick and cold stir beneath Margaret’s ribs. She pushed it aside. The world was full of sisters. That alone meant nothing. Still, she found herself studying the young woman’s face more closely than courtesy required.
“Three of you?” Jon asked, though his tone had sharpened in that nearly imperceptible way Margaret had learned to hear after 15 years of false hope.
“That’s right,” the young woman said, wiping her hands on her apron. “We’ve been farming together since we were kids. Started as a hobby and just kept growing.”
She gestured toward the far edge of the market where 2 more young women stood talking to an older man in a county agriculture jacket. Even at a distance, the resemblance between them was unmistakable. Same build. Same posture. Same instinctive mirroring in the way they leaned and turned and gestured.
Margaret could hear her own pulse now.
“What are your names?” she asked, trying very hard to sound casual.
“I’m Sarah,” the young woman replied. “My sisters are Sophie and Stella.”
The basket slipped from Margaret’s hands.
Strawberries scattered across the asphalt in a red spill that seemed, for one terrible second, almost symbolic. Jon caught her elbow as she swayed. Sarah was already stepping out from behind the table, kneeling to help gather the fallen berries with easy kindness.
“I’m sorry,” Margaret said, bending too, though her hands had gone almost numb. “I’m so clumsy. How much do I owe you?”
“Don’t worry about it,” Sarah said. “It happens all the time.”
