Mad Honey

It’s three weeks before Lily’s death, and she’s worried that Asher hasn’t spoken to her for the last 10 days, ever since she told him her secret. She goes to his house, but only Olivia is there, making frames for the next year’s hives. Lily helps Olivia and talks to her about Asher. Olivia confirms that Asher tends to pull away when he’s upset. When he was 15, he began asking to meet his father. Olivia expressly forbade it, and Asher didn’t talk to Olivia for two weeks; however, one day, he bounced back to normal again. Olivia assures Lily that, similarly, Asher will get over whatever their fight is about, but Lily knows the truth: Asher didn’t get over the situation with Braden; he has been meeting Braden in secret.

Lily visits Maya, who is grounded but is planning a “menstruation party,” which she knows her lesbian mothers, Sharon and Deepa, won’t object to. The party is set for four days later, and Lily helps Maya get everything ready on the day of the party, while Sharon and Deepa leave the house to the girls. Lily relaxes into the evening, feeling comfortable surrounded only by other girls, but half the boys’ hockey team, including Dirk and Asher, unexpectedly arrive later in the night. Maya invited Asher without telling him Lily would be there, and Asher walks out angrily when he sees her. Dirk comes on to Lily, but she rebuffs him and heads outside to where Asher is sitting alone. She notices that his knuckles are bruised, but he doesn’t tell her what happened. Lily tries to make up with him, but he leaves, asserting that he doesn’t hate her but hates that she didn’t trust him enough with the truth. Lily excuses herself too and heads home. Later that night, Asher sneaks into Lily’s room. He has forgiven her and asks if she’s keeping any more secrets from him; Lily thinks about her father but still doesn’t tell him. Asher and Lily make up; he stays the night, and they have sex.

In the months after Asher’s incarceration, Olivia and Jordan continue to visit him, and Jordan works on the case with Selena’s help. Olivia and Asher write letters to each other, and at every visit and in every letter, Asher asks when he can get out.

Olivia attends a local farmer’s market where she usually sells her honey and other farm products. This time, however, people avoid her stall. Olivia overhears two teenaged girls discussing Asher in the bathroom, sure that he’s guilty, and Olivia tells them off. She leaves the market without selling a single bottle of honey and, when she gets to her truck, finds her tires slashed, and all the extra stock of honey stored in the back smashed. Mike arrives to take down Olivia’s report about the vandalism, while Selena comes to give her a lift. Back home, Jordan tells them that he tried to talk to Maya, but she was crying so hard at every question that her mothers called off the interview.

At the next visit, Jordan asks Asher if anyone besides Maya can serve as his character witness, and Asher names his hockey coach, Coach Lacroix. However, the conversation reveals that Asher was once suspended from the team, albeit unfairly, which would nevertheless make it difficult for Coach to be his character witness. Asher asks to be put on the stand himself, but Jordan refuses.

Selena comes visiting midweek, as Jordan and she are celebrating the anniversary of a surgery she had some years ago to remove her uterus and ovaries, which led to some complications in recovery. An emotional Olivia confides in Selena that she doesn’t think Asher will get a fair trial. Selena, who is Black, points out that at least Asher is getting a trial; if it were a Black boy, like Selena’s son, in Asher’s place, the cops may just have shot him dead on the spot when he was found with a girl’s body. Selena invites a shaken Olivia to join her and Jordan for dinner. At dinner, Jordan discloses that the medical examiner’s report shows Lily had intracerebral brain hemorrhage caused by head trauma. It could have been from a blow to the head, or from falling down the stairs.

During his next visit with Asher, Jordan brings up the physical evidence of Asher’s fingerprints in Lily’s room, and Asher reveals that he used to sneak into her bedroom some nights, though he hadn’t entered the room that day. He confesses that they had sex, remembering that she behaved strangely after the first time and didn’t speak to him for a while. This worried Asher because Lily tried to kill herself once. Jordan asks for details, but Asher claims that Lily didn’t reveal much, though Asher was the only person she told.

Jordan loses his temper at Asher for lying about being in Lily’s room, though Asher reasserts that he simply stated he didn’t visit the room that same day. Angry, Jordan leaves, accompanied by Olivia, and Olivia remembers Asher punching the wall, wondering if it was after Asher’s fight with Lily about having sex. Olivia asks Jordan if he thinks Asher killed Lily, and Jordan tells her that if she repeats that thought, she can never come to another meeting.

In March, when the weather gets better, Olivia goes to check on the hives, and finds that the colony that she repatriated after the bear attack is entirely dead. She remembers that the bear attack happened on the day of Lily’s death. Despite expecting this outcome, Olivia is upset about the lost colony. Jordan continues to prepare for the case, deciding on Olivia and Coach as character witnesses for Asher. He reviews the record of text messages between Asher and Lily, and discovers an unsent message from Lily supposedly ending their relationship. Jordan moves to have this last message removed from evidence, realizing that if Asher never got the message, the prosecution can’t use breakup as motivation for murder.

Jordan presents Asher with a plea deal drawn up by the prosecution, in which he pleads guilty to manslaughter instead of first degree murder, and spends only 15 years in jail instead of life. Later that night, Olivia receives a call from the jail: Asher has attempted death by suicide. Olivia and Jordan head down to see Asher immediately; Olivia is livid with Jordan, thinking that Asher’s suicide attempt is his fault for drilling Asher relentlessly and encouraging the plea deal. When they finally see Asher, Jordan apologizes to him for not behaving like family and asks him to forget the plea deal.

Determined to get Asher out at any cost now, Olivia visits Braden the next day, who immediately agrees to bail out Asher, though he’s angry that she didn’t tell him about the situation earlier. By the time Olivia drives back to Adams, Asher has been released, and she picks him up and takes him home. They meet with the judge assigned to the case, Rhonda Byers, in a closed courtroom, soon afterward, and she agrees to have the last unsent text message suppressed.

Amid the chapter’s events, Olivia remembers Asher’s birth, when she had to visit the ER a month earlier than her due date and eventually have a C-section because Braden had pushed her down the stairs, dislocating her shoulder in the process. She recalls, too, later having a secret abortion and shedding tears of joy because Braden would never know about the child, and she’d never bring another child into their house.

Four weeks before Lily’s death, she and Maya practice fencing together. It has been a week since Asher stopped talking to her after a fight. Lily cries, confessing to Maya that Asher has been weird ever since they had sex. She worries that there are things about her that can scare Asher off. Maya tries to console her and takes her to an abandoned fire tower. She shows Lily the wall of the tower, where someone once carved the words “Asher + Jeannie,” then later scratched it out and wrote, “F*CK ASHER FIELDS FOREVER” (177). Jeannie was one of Asher’s exes and was heartbroken when he broke up with her; now, however, she’s at Columbia, studying to become a doctor. Maya reassures Lily that life goes on even without Asher.