Timmy was always running around half-naked, showing off those muscles. He’d been really interested in Mason when he’d first started working with the Finleys, but Mason had put his foot down and made it clear that there wouldn’t be anything going on between them. He’d been down that road before—developing a relationship with someone who worked on the farm—and seen how it affected his family. He wasn’t interested in creating any more drama for them to deal with.
“This seventy-point rotary parlor is one of the most efficient designs on the market,” Timmy explained. “We’re gonna be saving so much time with this over what we’ve been using.”
He leaned back against the metal bars on one of the pens, stressing his form.
Mason couldn’t help but appreciate it, and Chase noticed.
Shit.
He figured Chase was probably thinking he ran around doing things with the kid even though that definitely wasn’t the case. He found himself caught between feeling like he didn’t want Chase to think anything was happening between them and feeling like he didn’t have a right to have an opinion about what he did around the place anymore.
Mason and Timmy showed Chase around some more, discussing some of the new machines they had for the parlor before Chase stopped and said, “Well, this is going to be quite the assembly line, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, right? Pa’s not thrilled about it, either,” Mason noted. “You know how hard it was to even convince him to go for the other milking parlor back in the day, but he knows it’s the only way to keep up with the market. We don’t have a choice. No one needs a couple hundred cows on a farm anymore. But even though the parlor won’t need as many hands, we’re gonna need more people to run the rest of the process, especially with Pa now. He isn’t really in the best of shape to be running things.”
“Well, I assume everything’s primed for you to be the one who’s running it next, right?”
“That’s the plan.”
“Which you want to do, I assume?”
“Nothing else I’d rather be doing in the world.”
As soon as he said it, he saw Chase’s face relax, and he knew why he’d asked that. He wanted to know if he’d made the right decision in breaking up with him—because that was where he’d always felt Mason belonged. Not that he was wrong about that.
“You’d better be ready.” Timmy swatted Mason’s arm with the back of his hand. “Lord knows none of us are going to be up for managing all this.”
But wanting to manage the place and being able to weren’t the same thing, and it was easy for him to have confidence while Pa was still around to delegate and manage. On his own, he just wasn’t sure what that would look like.
After they finished their tour, Mason and Chase headed back to the horses, which they’d tied to some fencing out front.
Chase stroked his hand across Mercy’s coat, and Mason’s thoughts drifted back to a distant memory, even for them.
“You remember that night?” Mason asked. “How old were we when we thought she wasn’t going to make it?”
“Twelve. Can you believe it?”
“We all thought Dana wasn’t going to have any issues because she was always so strong. But Mercy didn’t go easy on her, and we had to help her along, pull from the legs, just in hopes that one of them would make it.”
“She was this sickly-looking thing,” Chase continued. “Pa said she wouldn’t make it, but we believed in her.”
“No,” Mason insisted. “Youbelieved in her. I helped you and encouraged you because of your faith that she could make it. Because you wanted it so bad, but I was skeptical. You spent every day watching her. And you started to actually make me believe. And then she kept growing and you proved that we were all wrong.”
“I don’t know why,” Chase admitted. “But I thought there was something special about her.”
“There was. You were right about that. She wasn’t ready to go, and you saved her life.”
“Maybe I felt like I needed to return the favor.”
Mason knew he was talking about how his ma had taken Chase in. How she’d believed in him and brought him to the dairy to help out. Ma had believed in Chase, and Chase had believed in Mercy.
Mason tried to stop thinking about those moments that had bonded him and Chase together, that had led them to making that life-altering decision. To taking a step they believed they would never regret—that would leave them together for the rest of their lives. But he couldn’t. Seeing Chase with Mercy, appreciating how much she had grown and the good care that Chase had given her, took Mason back to that happy time when they played, when they laughed, when they loved.
“Come on, then,” Mason said, guiding Louise along toward the woods. “I’m gonna swing by the old shed and grab some screws Jasper needs. He’s trying to repair one of the tractors. I told him I’d grab them before his shift starts.”
They rode through the woods. As they went on their way, they passed the old pond—the one where they would go and play together. It was the one place they could escape the labor on the farm.
The overgrowth had changed over time, the branches of trees dipping low close to the water.
