“Why couldn’t she just tell me?” The question came out raw and unvarnished and not at all like the composed, polished woman Judith Northcott had raised.
“Same reason you couldn’t tell her, I expect.” He adjusted his glasses. “You two were more alike than either of you wanted to admit. Both stubborn. Both scared of getting it wrong with Makayla. Both so busy being right you forgot to be kind.”
He paused. “The honey was her idea, by the way. She told me to give you a jar when you got settled in out here. I’m supposed to tell you it’s a peace offering from her. Even if she isn’t around to hand it to you herself.”
He walked away before she could respond. Which was merciful, because she didn’t have words for what she felt—a grief more complicated than losing Mick, because it was grief for something that had never existed. A relationship that might have been, if two stubborn women had been a little less proud and a little more brave.
She stood at the fence holding the honey until the light changed on the mountains and the evening turned cool. Then she went inside, set the jar on the kitchen table, and began preparing the animals’ evening medications.
The next afternoon, Dillon’s truck rolled up the drive at three o’clock. Makayla was already on the porch steps waiting—she’d started positioning herself there on the days he came, Brown Dog beside her, watching the road with an anticipation that made Tessa’s chest ache in ways she was running out of excuses to ignore.
He stepped out carrying a bag from the farm supply store in Apple Pie Creek.
“These are for you,” he told Makayla, handing it over without ceremony or preamble.
Makayla opened the bag and pulled out a pair of cowboy boots. Real ones—pink leather with a low walking heel, a pointed toe, and darker pink stitching scrolling across the shafts in a pattern of roses and vines. Beneath them, folded carefully, was a pink straw cowboy hat with a braided cord band.
The sound Makayla made fell somewhere between a squeal and a shriek. It scattered every chicken in the barnyard and made Loretta to stick her head around the corner of the barn to investigate.
“Pink boots!” Makayla clutched them to her chest as if someone might try to take them back. “And a cowboy HAT! Mom! Mom, look!”
Tessa stood in the doorway. She looked at the boots, the hat, and the man who’d brought them. Dillon stood with his hands shoved deep in his pockets, shoulders hunched slightly forward, looking at the gravel and the barn and the mountains and everywhere in the world except at Tessa, as if he knew he’d done something that meant far more than he’d intended and was hoping no one would notice.
These weren’t practical. Green muck boots were practical. Wranglers were practical. Pink cowboy boots with rose stitching and a matching hat were a gift. The kind of gift a man gives when he’s been paying attention. When he’s noticed what a child dreams about and decided, against every wall he’s built around himself, to make the dream real.
Makayla yanked off her sneakers and pulled on the boots right there on the porch. She jammed the hat on her head, tilted it at an angle that would do any rodeo queen proud, and marched down the driveway with her hands on her hips and her chin tilted up and a grin so enormous it rearranged the entire geography of her face.
Tessa watched her daughter and felt two things crash into each other with the force of colliding trains. The first was a wave of warmth toward Dillon that she could not afford, could not contain, and could not pretend wasn’t happening. The second was a sharp, uncomfortable recognition that echoed Fern’s journal entries with devastating precision.
This man—this stubborn, blunt, emotionally guarded veterinarian—was seeing Makayla more clearly than Tessa had allowed herself to see her in years. He’d looked at Makayla and seen not the violin prodigy, not the straight-A student, not the carefully groomed product of Tessa’s anxious parenting. He’d seen a kid who wanted cowboy boots.
Fern had seen it too. And Tessa hadn’t. Or maybe she had, and she’d been too afraid to let it in.
“You shouldn’t have,” she said from the doorway. Her voice came out softer and more unsteady than she’d intended.
Dillon finally looked at her. His blue eyes held something raw and cautious and nothing at all like the blunt, cocksure man who’d told her at the funeral she couldn’t tell a steer from a stump.
“Every kid in Montana needs boots,” he said. “It’s practically a law.”
It was a deflection and they both knew it. She let him have it because the alternative—naming what was building between them, acknowledging what his presence three times a week and his gifts and his quiet, steady care were constructing around her and her daughter—was a door neither of them was ready to open.
“Thank you,” she said.
He tipped his hat and headed for the barn.
Makayla ran after him, pink boots flashing in the afternoon sun, chattering about everything and nothing—the broody hen and her egg, how Dolly’s bald patches were getting smaller, what Brown Dog did that morning, a dozen breathless observations delivered at the speed of a child who had stopped monitoring herself for the first time in her careful young life.
Tessa watched them walk into the barn together and gripped the doorframe until her knuckles went white.
She was in trouble. Real trouble. The kind that couldn’t be managed with a polished smile and good posture.
Falling for a man herself was something she could control. But watching her daughter fall for one—watching Makayla bloom under Dillon’s attention like a flower that had been waiting too long for sunlight—that was something else entirely.
That was terrifying.
8
A French braid was the hardest thing Dillon had ever attempted, and he’d once performed an emergency C-section on a cow during a thunderstorm by the light of a single truck headlamp.
