The last man out was Harold Beckwith, seventy-eight, gray, dark coat, folder under his arm. He is the surveyor who mapped that lane in 1974. What Roberta never understood was that the gravel behind my property is a registered right of way serving the old orchard, and my husband spent his last four years restoring it. Those thirty drivers were the volunteers who had kept it going since, arriving for the annual survey walk they had done every autumn for eleven years. Harold was Roberta’s father in law, from a marriage she left in 1998 without a word to anyone. He simply said her name once, quietly.

She moved out that spring. Not because of me. Because she had spent twenty-six years arranging a life in which no one from before could find her, and one morning a driveway she had treated as scenery turned out to belong to someone.

The orchard opened to the public last October. There is a bench at the top of the lane with my husband’s name on it, and Harold sits there most Sundays.

She looked at my driveway for eight months and saw nothing but space. People do that with women my age too. What she never counted on was that it had all been mine the entire time.