My father called three days after graduation-I remember because I was sitting outside my small off-campus apartment in New Paltz, eating leftover pasta from a plastic container, scrolling through job listings I could not afford to relocate for. The air that May afternoon smelled like wet grass and the exhaust fumes from the highway down the road. The screen of my phone, lying on the metal patio table in front of me, lit up, and the word “Dad” immediately tightened my stomach.

Douglas Fry did not call to catch up.

All phone calls with him felt like an annual performance review for a manager who was already disappointed in me. “I have something for you,” he’d said, foregoing a greeting, “Drive up Saturday.” There was no congratulatory comment about my degree, only a directive. Their main home sat on fourteen carefully maintained acres of maple trees and ancient stone walls just outside of Rhinebeck.

Garrett’s black BMW was parked in the driveway by the time I got there.

I could hear the distant sound of laughter through the open kitchen windows. Mom gave my cheek a perfunctory peck as I entered, keeping one hand on Garrett’s shoulder the entire time, as though pulled toward him by some inexplicable gravitational force. It wasn’t until after we had finished our coffee that Dad pushed a thin manila folder across the table toward me.

“Your inheritance advance,” he’d announced. Garrett had smirked into his tiny cup of espresso before I’d even had a chance to peek inside. The contents included property deeds, tax documents, maps of the land, and my name.

The property was called Briar Hollow Farm.

It consisted of two hundred acres on the edge of the Hudson Valley-with a decaying farmhouse, dead soil, broken fences, and nearly a decade of unpaid property taxes.

“You’re giving me a farm?”

I’d asked slowly. “Not good for much else,” my father had shrugged.

Garrett’s laugh this time had been more open, almost derisive.

“Seriously, Siena, this place is probably perfect for your environmental thing.” My environmental thing. My entire degree, reduced to two words that felt like the dismissive epithet of a playground bully.

“Sweetheart, Garrett’s career necessitates the apartment in the city. This place,” my mother had offered with the sort of sympathetic expression that accompanies doling out participation trophies, “well, perhaps you can start some sort of hobby business.” The idea of my future reduced to a hobby business lingered through the night.

I drove to the property the next morning on my own.

Briar Hollow looked… cursed. A slight sag to the main house, a partial collapse in the barn roof, overgrown weeds reclaiming the gravel drive, the fence posts leaning drunkenly toward the dying grass-all spoke of despair. But beyond that desolation lay a sea of rolling fields, stretching under a pale blue sky. And for a brief moment, standing there in the crushing silence, I felt something akin to stubborn defiance.

Everyone in my family already seemed to believe that this place was a failure, a reject, too pathetic to keep-something to be palmed off on me.

Fine. Let it be mine then. Entirely and completely mine.

I moved in two weeks later with only a mattress, borrowed tools, my twenty-seven thousand dollars in savings, and an utter, abject ignorance of what I was doing. I came within an inch of breaking over the next year. In the winter, pipes burst and the plumbing froze.

Raccoons nested in the attic space, creating an inferno of nocturnal noise.

Water dripped through a hole in the kitchen ceiling into pots that I’d placed across the room every night. My days consisted of a morning job at a local garden supply store in Kingston and afternoons spent tearing down rotted fences, clearing dense thickets of invasive plants, and educating myself about soil science through public library books and a torrent of YouTube tutorials. My hands cracked and bled; my back was in so much pain some nights that I’d choke back tears in the bathtub to prevent anyone from hearing me. Garrett had stopped by once that summer.

He’d worn pristine loafers that sank into the mud near the dilapidated barn, his eyes surveying the scene like an inspector at a crime scene.

“You’re really going to live here?” he’d asked. “For now,” I’d replied.

He’d shaken his head slowly, as if baffled. “Dad thinks you’ll sell it within the year.” “Maybe Dad’s wrong,” I’d said, gesturing toward the desolation of the fields.

He’d laughed then, a soft, pitiable sound like someone overhearing a child say something embarrassingly naive.

Then he’d gotten back into his car and driven away, not offering a single hand in the dismantling process. By October, my parents no longer bothered to ask how the farm was progressing. Not out of disinterest, as I would soon realize, but because they’d never been interested in the first place.