At forty-nine, Nell Whitmore has spent twenty years identifying what's wrong and correcting it. She's a veterinary surgeon. It's what she does.

Then she inherits her great-aunt's apiary in Calder, Vermont, and everything she knows stops working.

The will carries a condition: maintain all six colonies through one full growing season—late March through October—or the property passes to the Calder Land Trust. She cannot sell without destroying them. She has until October.

The problem isn't the legal requirement. The problem is that a colony cannot be fixed. It can only be attended to. And Nell Whitmore, in twenty years of clinical work, has never learned to simply attend.

Owen Deering has kept bees on the adjacent property for thirty years. He knows the distinction she doesn't yet have words for. He teaches her what she asks for. He confirms what she's reading correctly. He does not tell her what she's also learning — and if he's honest, he's not certain he could explain that part either.

Because something else is arriving across the season. It comes in the particular weight of a hive in hand, in the sound of a colony finding its own way, in the quality of presence two people build without deciding to. Nell won't name it until she's already deep inside it.

And by then, it will be October.