Tessa thought about it.
She thought about all the things a mother is supposed to consider. She thought about modeling and example and what an eleven-year-old understood about adult relationships and what she did not. She thought about Mick. She thought about how careful she’d been, since Mick died not to expose her daughter to anything that might shake her sense of safety.
She thought about the man downstairs whistling off key as he washed the dishes he hadn’t been asked to wash.
“He’s going to drive home tonight,” she said, smoothing the hair off Makayla’s forehead. “But he’ll be back tomorrow.”
“For dinner?”
“For dinner.”
“Okay. Mom”
“Yes?”
“I love him.”
Tessa kissed her daughter’s forehead because she could not, for a moment, trust her voice.
“I love him, too,” she said finally. “Sweet dreams.”
Makayla was asleep before she reached the door.
She walked him to his truck a little before ten, because he had to be at the Beecham ranch at six the next morning and because, as he said quietly when he kissed her one last time, he didn’t trust himself to stay another half hour.
She watched his taillights until they disappeared. She’d barely sat down in her rocking chair before Brown Dog flopped on the porch beside her.
“You,” she said to him, “are a busybody.”
He thumped his tail twice.
She bent down and scratched between his ears, and they sat together for a while, listening to the crickets and a wind moving up out of the south. Eventually, Brown Dog yawned and ambled back across the property line to Arlo’s porch, where Arlo was sitting, watching her without making a show of it.
She lifted a hand to him.
He lifted one back.
With a smile and a sense that all was right with the world, she went inside and went upstairs to bed.
The next week was busier than she could’ve predicted. Reno had his surgery on Thursday and came home to Dillon’s in a knee brace the size of a small tree, full of opioid-driven opinions, which Dillon shared in the form of long-suffering text messages that made her laugh out loud.
She drove over Friday night with a casserole and found Reno propped up on the couch with a paperback legal thriller. And in less than a minute, he’d asked her exactly what her intentions were toward his brother.
She told him the same thing she’d told Dillon.
Reno laughed so hard he choked on his ice water and Dillon had to thump him on the back.
The Maddoxes invited her and Makayla to dinner on Sunday to thank them for helping with Hope’s birth and for giving Murphy a good home. Pete shyly gifted Makayla a worn Western saddle that had belonged to his daughter when she was about Makayla’s age, and Makayla cried, and Marla sent them home with a pie.
Charlotte and Tessa the following Monday and signed the final contract with the New York bridal store, which had agreed to every one of Tessa’s amendments, and they celebrated with the mediocre champagne sold at the Cobbler Cove Grocery, and which always tasted, to Tessa, like victory.
On Tuesday, Lincoln Sutter called Reno while Tessa was at Dillon’s house to confirm that the dismissal of Stillwater Basin Energy’s claim was now final and unappealable. He also mentioned lightly —in exaggeratedly casual passing—that Craig Westerfield had been transferred to a posting in Alaska.
Tessa and Reno both laughed until they nearly cried. Dillon merely smiled in cold satisfaction.
On Wednesday morning, she walked outside in her nightgown and her pink rubber boots, with a cup of coffee in her hand, expecting to settle into her chair for her morning ritual.
There were three chairs on the porch.
