“A dairy farmer, huh? Does this mean I get free milk?” She leaned forward, elbows on her knees, and the shift in topic wasn’t subtle, but it worked. Her gaze drifted over her front lawn to his truck parked at the curb. The sunlight caught theprominent dent in the passenger door, damage that had been there so long she barely noticed it anymore. “Out of curiosity, if you’ve had that kind of money saved up all this time, why haven’t you fixed your truck?”
Dylan followed her gaze and laughed at her inquiry. The tension that had briefly built between them dissolved completely, and the knot in her shoulders loosened by a fraction.
“The reason I had the money in the first place is that I don’t spend it on things that don’t need fixing,” Dylan explained, his tone matter-of-fact. “That dent doesn’t affect how the truck drives. It’s cosmetic.”
Kinsley nodded, understanding the practicality behind his reasoning. It was quintessentially Dylan. He had never been concerned with appearances, always prioritizing function over form, and it occurred to her that this quality was probably what made him a better businessman than anyone in the family had given him credit for. While the rest of them had been busy with degrees and careers and reputations, Dylan had been quietly saving, planning, and waiting for the right opportunity to come along.
“Trust me, the down payment was just a fraction of the total cost. The real investment is in the upgrades.” Dylan sat up straighter, his enthusiasm overriding whatever suspicion had been lingering in his eyes moments ago. “You should see the place, Kin. The milking system is so outdated it might as well be from the Stone Age. The vacuum pump needs replacing, and the milk lines are ancient. The current setup can only handle about forty cows at a time, but the rotary parlor I’m looking at would double that capacity. And the tractors are practically antiques at this point. They burn more fuel than they should, and replacement parts are getting harder to find every year.”
He went on, describing his plans for the property with a level of detail that surprised her. New fencing along the north pasture.A refurbished cooling system for the milk house. Solar panels on the barn roof to offset the electrical costs of running the parlor.
He’d done his homework, and it showed.
This wasn’t a whim or one of Dylan’s impulsive leaps. He’d been thinking about this for a long time, studying the numbers, learning the industry, waiting until he could walk into a closing with the confidence that he wasn’t throwing his money into a hole.
Kinsley sat and listened to her brother’s excitement about his future, and for a while, the warmth of his enthusiasm was enough to push everything else to the margins. He was confident that this next step was an investment, not a money pit, pointing out more than once that the land alone was worth the purchase price. The two hundred acres of fertile soil and established pasture in this part of the state would only appreciate, regardless of what happened with the dairy operation itself.
“Will you have time off in the foreseeable future?” Kinsley asked. She wanted to ask about Lydia, about how her best friend fit into this new chapter of Dylan’s life, but she wasn’t ready to hear the intimate details. They were two adults, and she’d already decided she had enough on her plate without adding that particular complication to the mix. “We do have a Vikings game to go to next month.”
“I’ll have to play it by ear.”
“If you want an early start on paying down that loan, I know someone who’d buy your ticket for double the price. Wally over at the medical examiner’s office is a die-hard fan. He’d probably throw in free autopsies for life.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Dylan said with a laugh. “Though I’m not sure how often I’ll need autopsy services as a dairy farmer.”
“You never know. Cows can be surprisingly vindictive.”
They both polished off their beers, though neither moved from their spots on the porch. A comfortable silence fellbetween them, the kind that only siblings could share, filled with unspoken understanding and the accumulated weight of a lifetime spent growing up in the same house.
The evening had begun to cool in earnest now, the shadows stretching long across Kinsley’s neglected lawn, and the sounds of the neighborhood settled into the quiet rhythm of a Saturday winding down. Somewhere a few houses over, a sprinkler kicked on with a rhythmic ticking, and the smell of someone’s charcoal grill drifted through the air. They remained that way until the ring of Dylan’s cell phone cut through the stillness.
“I should get going. I told Mom to call me when Dad got back from helping Noah put together a trampoline in the back yard.” Dylan stretched his legs and let out a contented sigh as he gazed up at the sky, which had deepened from pale blue to the dusky lavender of early evening. “You know what’s funny? When I was traveling after high school, all I wanted was to get away from Fallbrook. Couldn’t wait to see what was beyond those city limit signs. Spent two years bouncing around the country, working odd jobs, sleeping in my truck half the time. And now here I am, putting down roots in the same soil I was so desperate to shake off my boots.”
“Life has a way of bringing us full circle,” Kinsley murmured as she intentionally knocked her shoulder against his. The gesture was small, but it carried the weight of everything she couldn’t say. “I’m proud of you, Dylan.”
He bumped her shoulder back and stood, brushing off the seat of his dress pants. He retreated into the house, collected his jacket, and returned to mess up her hair before descending the porch steps.
She wasn’t ready for him to leave, but she wouldn’t stop him. He deserved this moment, the excitement of telling the family, the pride of having done something big on his own terms. She was grateful that he’d chosen to share it with her first, even if shesuspected that choice had been partly motivated by the instinct that something was wrong with his sister and he’d wanted to check on her without saying so outright.
She stared at his truck as he pulled away from the curb, the dented passenger door catching the last of the evening light. She remained in place with the quiet that followed.
Family was a precious thing in her increasingly complicated life.
Tomorrow would come soon enough, bringing with it fresh worries and old secrets to protect. But for now, the porch was warm, the evening was gentle, and her brother was about to become a dairy farmer. She allowed herself a small smile at the thought and held onto it for as long as it would stay.
9
Kinsley Aspen
July
Monday, 10:07 am
“I’d kill you if you ever recorded me without my permission,” Joey Bell warned, his adolescent voice cracking with rage. “I mean it, Iris.”
Kinsley’s finger hovered over the volume dial, tempted to increase it despite the poor audio quality. The vintage recorder sat on her desk, its scuffed plastic casing and various buttons a relic of a time before digital files and cloud storage made this kind of device obsolete. The tape inside turned with a faint mechanical whir, the sound barely audible beneath the voices coming through her headphones.
“Don’t be so dramatic, Joey.” Iris Bell’s voice emerged, carrying the confidence of a seventeen-year-old who believed herself untouchable. “You should be a good brother and let me practice. How else am I supposed to learn how to gather information for my journalism career?”
