“How much?”
“Jim hasn’t specified a number.” She stood too and came around the table to run her hand down the side of Darren’s face. “He wants this farm to be yours so badly. He just won’t say it out loud. So I said it for him.”
Darren’s emotions tangled up and balled in his throat. He nodded once, because he thought if he did more than that, the tears would overflow. His heart swelled with how much he loved Corey and Jim.
“Farrah won’t stay for dinner,” Corey said next, causing a different kind of pain to radiate through his body. “Do you know why?”
“I—” He cleared his throat. “I’ve spoken to her this week. She’s a bit…distant, but nothing seems too off.” He wasn’t sure if texting counted as speaking, but Corey nodded, picked up a handful of dishes and followed Jim into the kitchen.
He pulled out his phone as Corey and Jim started singing together in the kitchen. Darren really wanted to have a life like theirs, one filled with dinner in the evenings, and songs in front of the sink, and love and laughter all year round.
Farrah answered, and she sounded tired. Maybe that was why she’d been leaving the farm before dinner. “Hey, sweetheart,” he said, his voice almost a coo. “How are you? We’ve been missing you at dinner this week.”
“Yeah, I’ve had tons of yard work to be ready for winter.”
“You really want to retain that beautification award, don’t you?”
“If I don’t win twice in a row, people will think my green thumb is a fluke.”
He chuckled. “So I already ate, but maybe you wouldn’t mind the company?”
She took longer to answer than Darren liked, and that distance he’d commented on roared between them.
He turned away from the kitchen though he could still hear Jim and Corey singing. “I have something I want to talk to you about.”
“Oh, yeah, I have something I want to talk to you about too.”
Relief seeped through him. “Great, so I’ll stop by for a few minutes.”
When he got to Farrah’s, the evidence of her work on the bushes, the shrubs, and the trees lay on the curb. He needed her prowess with a pair of tree shears out at Steeple Ridge.
Or maybe the Bybee’s….
A smile slipped across his face as he mounted the steps. He knocked on the door, and Farrah took her sweet time answering the door. When she did, she wore one work glove crusted with dirt and carried the other. “Hey, I was in the backyard. Bolt kept scratching at the glass.” She gave him a quick smile but stepped out of his reach so he couldn’t kiss her hello.
Until that moment, he’d thought he might have been imagining the distance she’d put between them. She tucked her hair and ducked her head as he stepped inside.
“Everything okay?”
“Mm hm.” But she wouldn’t look at him, and alarms started sounding in his head.
“Yeah, I don’t think so.” He stopped two feet inside her house and shoved his hands in his pockets. Maybe if he’d spent more than five minutes with her this week, he’d have realized a chasm had opened between them. But he’d been busy too.
“Talk to me, Farrah,” he said as she retreated into the kitchen and turned her back to him so she could wash her hands.
She’d told him once that he was impatient and pushy, and he refused to be either of those in this moment. So he waited, silent and still, by the door so he could make a quick escape if he needed to.
The fact that he thought he might need to escape raised another red flag in his mind.
She exhaled, turned, and leaned into the counter. “I think—I need….”
Darren breathed. Tried to calm his hammering heart. Waited for her to continue. At least if she broke up with him now, he’d be able to see her face as she did it. Last time, she’d sent a text that had to be broken up into five messages, berating him for his actions, his audacity, his attitude.
She wouldn’t answer his calls, and he’d ended up apologizing to her voicemail a dozen times.
Farrah walked toward him, gathering up her hair and knotting it into a loose bun on top of her head. “I need to take things one at a time.”
“Yeah, mm-hm. You said that.”
