The moving truck arrived on a Tuesday and it was too big for the farm road.

Eren had rented the thing from a company in Söke, a long-bed diesel with a hydraulic lift gate and enough room in the back for a family’s whole life. His parents had spent two days packing the Zekeriyaköy house while they had the chance meanwhile. Most of what they owned fit in half the truck.

The other half was Grandma Sofie’s rose bushes wrapped in wet burlap and strapped to wooden pallets, because the old woman’s garden weighed more than the old woman and she had supervised the loading from a plastic chair on the driveway like a general watching troop deployment.

The dirt was also in the truck. Six bags of it. Sofie had insisted on that too.

"The last turn is too narrow for this thing," Eren muttered to himself while reversing down the gravel entrance for the third time. The side mirror caught a stone wall and he stopped an inch before it became a problem. "Should’ve rented the smaller one.."

The rental company in Söke was a family operation run by a man named Deniz who kept a parrot in the office and called every customer "brother" regardless of whether he’d met them before. Eren had been there three times in two months and Deniz had started giving him a loyalty discount, which was a first for a truck rental place but apparently not unusual when you rented vehicles as often as Eren did these days.

He’d rented the Nissan for the hospital trip, a flatbed for the solar panel delivery and now this monster for the family move. At some point Deniz was going to ask him what he actually did for a living and Eren had no idea what he was going to say.

Emily was on the front porch in the morning sun with her legs stretched out and a glass of the sour-cherry juice the doctor had limited to one per day. She had the glass resting on her belly because her belly was big enough to be a table now and she used it as one constantly.

"You’re going to hit the wall," she called out.

"I’m not going to hit the wall."

"You’re very close to the wall, silly."

He hit the wall. Just the mirror. A small crack in the plastic housing. He decided nobody needed to know about this and kept reversing.

His mother Jane climbed out of the passenger side before the truck fully stopped and looked at the property and her mouth opened. Jane was fifty-four and still moved like she was thirty and had spent the last six months taking care of Sofie in Zekeriyaköy while telling the entire neighborhood that Eren was "travelling for work." She wasn’t great at lying but the neighbors were polite enough not to push, mostly because Jane fed them homemade cake every holiday and people didn’t interrogate women who fed them cake.

"This is the farm?" she said.

"This is the farm."

"Eren this is not a farm." She pulled her shoes off on the porch even though the porch was outdoor stone with dirt on it, because Jane took her shoes off at every entrance she had ever walked through in her entire life. "Where did you get the money for this?"

"I work hard, Mom."

"You work hard." She looked at the twenty-five acres of coastal property sloping toward the Aegean and the stone farmhouse and the outbuildings and the barn and the solar panels Toris had installed crooked on the south roof. "In what? You left your job months ago."

His father Can came around from the driver’s side pulling two suitcases. Can was sixty, retired from a district bank branch he’d managed for twenty-two years. He expressed love through practical questions and offering money. He looked at the property, looked at the sea in the distance, looked at the stone walls and said the first thing that came into his head.

"How much tax are you paying on this."

"Dad, can you look at the ocean for one second before you start with the taxes?"

"I looked at it." He set the suitcases down on the gravel. "Beautiful. How much tax."

The family had immigrant blood on Can’s mother’s side. Eastern European roots that went back a few generations, which was why half the names in the family confused Turkish bureaucrats. Sofie was Hungarian-born. Jane was a Romaniot name from three generations back. The Teya surname itself came from somewhere nobody in the family could trace anymore and Eren used to shrug when people asked about it at school.

Eren helped Sofie out of the truck cab. The step down was too high for her legs and she wouldn’t admit it, so he put his hand under her elbow and she pretended it wasn’t there. She was ninety-one and the cancer was in her lungs and some mornings she couldn’t make it down the Zekeriyaköy stairs without stopping twice. Her cane hit the gravel and she held still for a moment and breathed.

The sea air was different from Istanbul’s exhaust. Eren watched her chest rise deeper on the second breath than it had on any breath he’d heard from her in months.

"Better air," Sofie said without looking at him.

"Better air," he agreed.

That’s not going to be enough though.

Selena came out of the kitchen carrying a tray of fresh bread and tea before anyone had moved a single box inside. She was wearing the loose green dress she wore on cooking days and her hair was tied back and she smiled at Jane and offered the tray. Jane, who had spent thirty years being the one who served food in every room she entered, froze because someone had beaten her to it for possibly the first time in her adult life.

"You must be the mother," Selena said in her slow careful Turkish. She’d learned it off the television the same way Mel had. Her accent was strange and musical but the words landed fine. "The kitchen is ready. I made space for you."

Jane looked at Selena’s ears.

Eren had told his parents about the elves months ago in the Zekeriyaköy kitchen. He’d used simple words and half-truths and they’d listened and nodded and he could tell they believed about sixty percent of it. But believing something your son tells you in a kitchen and seeing a tall green-haired woman with pointed ears offer you bread on a Turkish farm were two completely different things.

Jane looked at the ears for about three seconds. She looked at Eren. Then back at the ears. Her right hand drifted up toward her own ear and then dropped.

"Thank you dear," Jane said and took the tea with both hands.

That was the most controlled reaction Eren had ever seen from his mother. This was a woman who once screamed for six minutes straight because a street cat got into the bathroom through the window. His father had timed it on his watch.

Can saw the ears too. He didn’t say anything. He picked up the suitcases and walked inside with the face of a man who had decided to process things in his own time, which was how Can handled every surprise. He would come to Eren with questions eventually and they would all be about logistics and money.

Over the next hour the farm introduced itself whether Eren wanted it to or not.

Lyra came out of the bakery shed with flour on her hands and her cheeks went red the instant she saw new faces and she almost walked into the door frame because Lyra walked into things when she got nervous. Toris was on the roof adjusting the satellite dish and waved down with a wrench. Oldir leaned against the tool shed with a leaf cigarette and didn’t look up because Oldir didn’t look up for anything short of a fire.

Even with most of the elves keeping to the back buildings there was no hiding the noise. Somebody was hammering wood in the second barn. Two tall figures were carrying water tanks across the east field and their pointed ears caught the morning sun. A group of three elves were digging a trench near the well for the new irrigation pipe and one of them kept stopping to examine the plastic piping like it was the most fascinating thing he’d ever held. It probably was. Jane watched them from the porch and Eren could see her counting the ears.

"You told us about them," she said quietly. "The village people with the ears."

"Yeah."

"I thought they’d be shorter." She watched two of them carry a wooden beam past the south wall like it weighed nothing. "And greener maybe. I don’t know why I thought greener."

"That’s not how elves work, Mom."

"I know that NOW."

Can came back from a solo inspection of the south side with his hands in his pockets. "The second barn has a cracked foundation," he said. "And somebody’s fixing it with wood supports. That won’t last."

"I know. I’m getting a proper contractor in next month for the concrete work." Eren leaned against the porch railing. "The east side needs a proper road eventually and I want greenhouses in the north field by spring. For the trade business."

"Trade business."

"Specialty produce. Spices, herbs, things that don’t grow anywhere else on the market. Kalina handles the export side."

Can raised an eyebrow. "Your old boss Kalina."

"Business partner Kalina."

"The woman you screamed at on the phone so loud your mother heard it from the garden."

"That’s the one. We worked it out."

The property had two hundred and sixteen elves on it but most of them were staying out of sight for the day. Jane needed a slow introduction. She’d handled the ears and the tall bodies and the fact that her daughter-in-law chopped vegetables like a professional knife thrower. But dumping two hundred of them on her in the first hour was a recipe for the bathroom-cat incident happening again at much higher volume.

But the wolves were the wolves and nobody could keep them hidden when something new showed up.

Rury came around the corner of the barn at a trot, spotted three unfamiliar humans and skidded to a stop on the gravel. She was the size of a small horse and her amber eyes were doing that curious head-tilt she always did when she found something new to evaluate.

Jane dropped the teacup. It shattered on the stone step and her hand went to her chest.

[New ones. They smell like the tall one.] Rury’s ears flattened forward with interest. [Smaller though.]

"Rury, back." Eren scratched behind her ear and she leaned into his hand, two hundred kilos of predator going soft under his fingers. "These are my parents. Family. Not food."

[I know what family is.] She sounded offended. [I wasn’t going to eat them. They’re too bony.]