Read the First Chapter of Glasshouse Summer

Imani Clarke's debut romance found its readers slowly, through one bookseller, one book club and a great many borrowed copies. Glasshouse Summer follows Nell Harrow, a botanist, and Theo Castellane, a restoration architect, through one summer spent saving an 1887 greenhouse in a small Virginia town. We chose this opening because it does what the best romances do, and makes you care about the building and the argument before anyone thinks about a kiss.

Chapter One

The greenhouse had eleven hundred panes of glass, and on the morning Nell arrived, three hundred and six of them were broken.

She knew because she counted. She stood on the gravel path with her duffel bag still on her shoulder and her rental car still ticking behind her, and she counted every empty frame and every starred crack and every pane that had slipped in its putty and was hanging on by habit. It took her twenty minutes. The town of Averill, Virginia, population 3,100 according to the sign, went about its Tuesday around her. Somewhere a dog barked at nothing.

Three hundred and six. She wrote it on the back of her hand in ballpoint because she had packed her notebook at the bottom of the bag, which was a mistake she made on every trip and would make again.

Then she went inside.

The air changed at the door. It always did in glasshouses, even ruined ones. It went soft and heavy and green, like walking into a held breath. Light came down through the roof in long slanted bars, some of it clean and some of it filtered through forty years of grime and pollen and the white chalk of birds. The central aisle was brick in a herringbone pattern, heaved up in places by roots. Iron benches ran along both sides, rusted the color of cinnamon. On them sat the survivors.

Nell set her bag down very slowly.

There were ferns everywhere. Maidenhair gone wild in the damp corners. A tree fern in a cracked terracotta urn that had to be older than her grandmother, its fronds unrolling at the top like the necks of violins. Someone, a long time ago, had loved this place with real knowledge, and the plants had kept that knowledge after the people forgot it.

"Well, look at you," she said to the tree fern. "Look at all of you."

She had been told, by her mother and two former roommates and one man she had dated for eight months in graduate school, that she talked to plants more than she talked to people. This was true, and she did not see the problem. Plants told you exactly what they needed, and they did not pretend to be fine when they were dying.

She walked the aisle with her hands in her pockets so she would not start touching things. At the far end, where the building opened into a tall octagonal room under a glass dome, she stopped.

A fig tree was growing up through the floor.

It had come through the brick and kept going. Its trunk was as thick as her waist. Its roots had lifted a section of the aisle into a small frozen wave, and its branches pushed up past the iron ribs of the dome and out through three missing panes into the open air. There were small green figs on it. It had fruited, alone, in an abandoned building, for who knew how many summers, with nobody to see.

Nell put both hands flat on the bark before she could stop herself.

"Please don't," said a voice behind her.

She turned. A man was standing in the doorway of the octagon with a tape measure clipped to his belt and a tablet in one hand. He was tall and dusty and wore the specific expression of someone who has been up since five and has already had one bad phone call.

"Don't what?" she said.

"Lean on it. I don't know yet what it's holding up." He came forward and crouched by the lifted bricks, running his thumb along a crack in the mortar. "Or what it's pulling down."

"It's a fig tree. It's not pulling anything down. It's alive."

"So is the thing that's going to put a crack through the east wing foundation by August." He stood and offered his hand. "Theo Castellane. I'm the architect."

"Nell Harrow. I'm the botanist."

"I know. The board sent your résumé. You wrote your dissertation on ferns."

"On spore dispersal in fragmented habitats," she said. "But yes. Ferns."

He almost smiled. She saw it happen and then saw him decide against it, which annoyed her more than if he had simply smiled.

"How many broken panes?" she asked.

He glanced at the tablet. "Three hundred and five."

Nell held up the back of her hand.

He looked at the ink, then up at the roof, then at her. He walked out of the octagon and down the central aisle, head tipped back, and she followed him, and neither of them said anything for a long minute. Near the potting benches he stopped. One pane in the lower roof had a single fresh crack running corner to corner, bright and clean as a hair.

"That wasn't there yesterday," he said.

"It's the heat. The frames expand in the afternoon and contract at night. Every day you leave the glass like this, you lose another one." She had not meant to sound pleased about it. She was not pleased about it. She was pleased to be right, which was different.

Theo wrote something on the tablet. "Three hundred and six," he said. "Noted."

"The tree stays," Nell said.

"The tree is a structural problem."

"The tree is the only thing in here that's been doing its job."

He looked at her for a moment in the long green light. Somewhere above them the glass ticked in the warming air, a small bright sound, like a clock being wound.

"We have one summer," he said. "One budget. And a building that's cracking while we stand here arguing."

"Then we should probably stop arguing."

"Probably," Theo said.

Neither of them moved. Outside, the dog was still barking. The fig tree held up whatever it was holding up, and the sun climbed, and the three hundred and seventh pane began, very quietly, to think about it.

Glasshouse Summer by Imani Clarke (Rosewater, 352 pages, $18.99) is out now.