She’d redlined the contract by noon. After lunch, she strapped her camera around her neck and drove to the Foster Ranch, where Jenna had generously offered her barn for photo shoots. Two of Charlotte’s gowns were hanging in garment bags in her back seat, and she spent three hours photographing them against weathered wood and hay bales in the afternoon light.
The images were stunning. She knew it with the bone-deep certainty of someone who understood composition and light the way Dillon understood animals. She uploaded the best shots to Charlotte’s Instagram that evening and watched the likes and comments roll in while she heated up soup in Fern’s kitchen.
This was the work that made her feel like herself. Or rather, the new self she was building from scratch in the wreckage of every identity she’d ever borrowed. She was good at this, and it was hers.
Thursday afternoon, with the business fires temporarily banked and the animals tended, Tessa found herself doing something she hadn’t expected.
She was reading Fern’s books.
It started practically. She’d gone looking for information about chickens—specifically, how long the broody hen would sit on her egg and what, if anything, Tessa was supposed to do about it. She found a battered copy of Storey’s Guide to Raising Chickens on the shelf beside Fern’s reading chair. It was bristling with sticky notes in Fern’s loopy handwriting. The margins were filled with annotations: Gertrude does NOT like this feed. Check Hattie’s comb for mites every week. The red hens always go broody in spring—let them, they’re happier that way.
Tessa sat down in Fern’s chair—a sunken, overstuffed armchair upholstered in fabric covered with enormous sunflowers—and read the whole book, notes and all. She reached for the next book on the shelf, The Merck Veterinary Manual. She didn’t read the whole giant text, but she read all the sticky notes and marginalia. Dillon says 2cc not 3—C. Meow is a small cat. Biscuit’s hocks better today—the boy knows his stuff.
The boy. Fern had called Dillon the boy. Tessa smiled and kept reading.
She picked up the notes next. Fern had kept a shelf of spiral-bound notebooks—not diaries exactly, more like farm journals. Daily entries about the animals, the weather, what she’d planted, what bloomed, what died. Interspersed were observations so sharp and funny that Tessa found herself laughing aloud in the empty house.
March 14: Loretta ate the UPS man’s clipboard. He was not amused. I was.
April 2: Bonnie and Clyde chased the Methodist minister off the property. He’ll be back. He always comes back. More’s the pity.
June 19: Makayla’s birthday. Made her a cake. She blew out the candles and wished for a horse. I could hear it in the way she closed her eyes. That girl needs a horse the way she needs air, and her mother will never see it.
Tessa’s laughter died.
She turned pages more slowly now, reading entries that spanned years. Fern’s observations about Makayla were threaded through the farm notes like a second story running beneath the surface.
September: Makayla started violin. She’s good at it. She’d be good at anything Tessa told her to do. That’s the problem.
November: The girl came to Thanksgiving in a dress with a Peter Pan collar and patent leather shoes. She sat with her hands folded and said please and thank you and didn’t spill a drop and didn’t touch a single animal the whole visit. She’s nine years old. Nine-year-olds are supposed to be loud and messy and run around with the dog. What has Tessa done to her?
The words landed like a slap.
Tessa closed the notebook. Opened it again. Kept reading, because she owed Fern that much—owed her the honesty of hearing what the dead woman had actually thought instead of only remembering the criticism.
February: I tried to talk to Tessa about letting Makayla ride the horses. She looked at me like I’d suggested setting the child on fire. I handled it wrong. I always handle Tessa wrong. I get frustrated and get sharp and she gets polished and polite and we end up further apart than we started. Arlo says I should try being kind instead of right. Arlo is a wise old fool and I should listen to him more often. I probably won’t.
Tessa set the notebook in her lap and stared sightlessly at the darkness outside. Her eyes burned.
She’d spent a decade believing Fern disliked her. Resented her. Judged her. And Fern had judged her—the notebooks made that unmistakably clear. But the judgment wasn’t born of dislike. It was born of love for Makayla, frustration at her own inability to communicate, and a fear that Tessa recognized with a jolt of painful clarity because it was identical to her own.
Both of them—Tessa and Fern—had been terrified of failing the same child. They’d just been terrified in opposite directions.
Arlo confirmed it that evening, in his sideways fashion.
He’d appeared at the fence line—she was starting to think he had a sixth sense for when she was emotionally compromised—carrying a mason jar of wildflower honey, which he set on the top rail without explanation.
“Fern used to say the best thing about May was the honey,” he said, looking at the mountains.
“Arlo.” Tessa picked up the jar and held it, warm and golden. “I found Fern’s journals.”
He was quiet for a moment. “She’d probably be embarrassed about that.”
“She wrote about Makayla. A lot.”
Another silence, longer this time. Brown Dog leaned against Arlo’s leg and sighed.
“Fern was hard on you,” Arlo said, his voice stripped of its usual folksy deflection. “She knew it. Talked about it more than you’d think.”
