(An excerpt from Chapter 41)

By the time the cicadas began their second chorus, the air was thick enough to drink. Suvi wiped the back of her hand across her forehead, smearing a mixture of sweat and dust, and then leaned down to gather another flat of strawberries. The sun had begun its slow descent behind the low hills, casting a golden glaze over the fields and throwing long shadows across the rows. It was the kind of heat that didn’t break with dusk but simply changed shape—less direct, more suffocating, as if the ground itself was exhaling everything it had absorbed throughout the day.

She moved slowly now, not because she was tired—though she was—but because she had learned the rhythm of the place, the unspoken tempo of labor that came not from clocking in or out but from listening to those who had done this work for years. There was a kind of reverence to it, a precision born not of efficiency but survival. You didn’t rush the rows. You carried your weight without making noise about it. You bent with your knees, not your back. You shared water, even when you didn’t have much of it.

The others—most of them older, a few her age—didn’t ask why she was there. They had learned not to question when someone showed up at the edge of a field with calloused palms and a quiet mouth. You worked or you didn’t. And Suvi worked. She had learned quickly, her Finnish stubbornness mixing with a deep undercurrent of shame about which she never spoke. It was easier to sweat it out; easier to offer her hands than her story.

At night, in the makeshift bunk she shared with two other women, she wrote. She had a notebook with a leather cover, the pages already beginning to curl from the humidity, and a small audio recorder she kept wrapped in a handkerchief at the bottom of her backpack. She never asked anyone to speak into it. But she listened.

It had started with a song—an old folk tune hummed softly under breath by one of the older women as they washed their feet at the pump one evening. Suvi had recognized it—not the melody, of course, but the ache in it. The way it climbed and fell, like a story being coaxed into the air. The woman had smiled when Suvi asked her about it, not in the way adults smile at curious children, but with something closer to suspicion.

“You collect songs?” the woman asked.

Suvi had answered honestly. “I collect stories.”

The woman had not smiled again, but she hadn’t walked away either.

Now, each night after the fields had emptied and the boots had been lined up outside the door of their trailer, Suvi recorded what she could remember. Not names—never names—but moments. The boy who cried because he missed his dog back in Veracruz. The man who could repair anything with duct tape and had used it to fix the sole of his shoe for the third time that week. The girl, barely seventeen, who had lost two teeth to a fist in the back of a van and still managed to laugh louder than anyone else at dinnertime. They were not case studies. They were not data points. They were not fodder for an academic treatise written by some professor in his ivory tower. They were flesh and blood and bone, and their stories needed telling.