The tea party happened on Saturday.
He’d come by to check Chairman Meow’s blood sugar—it was finally stabilizing—and found Makayla on the porch with a plastic tablecloth spread over an upturned crate, four mismatched teacups arranged in a circle, and a plate of cookies she’d helped Grace O’Donnell make at her bakery in town that morning.
“Will you join me for tea?” she invited him in an ever so proper British accent.
He looked at the tiny setup. The chairs were Fern’s rocking chair—Makayla’s now—and three overturned buckets. Brown Dog was already seated beside one bucket, his tail thumping the porch. Captain lay beside another one with his chin on the bucket’s rim.
“I’ve got calls to make,” he said.
“Just one cup. Please?”
Her eyes were doing the thing. The enormous, pleading, brown-eyed thing that was identical to her mother’s and equally devastating, except that coming from a kid it bypassed every defense he had.
“One cup.”
He lowered himself onto the remaining bucket, which forced his knees approximately level with his chin. He looked like a grizzly bear perched on a thimble.
Makayla poured imaginary tea into his cup with great ceremony. He accepted it with equal ceremony and took a solemn pretend sip.
“Excellent tea,” he said, straight-faced. “Is this the Darjeeling?”
“Earl Grey.” She poured for Brown Dog next. The dog sniffed the empty cup and wagged his tail agreeably.
“Wait.” She disappeared inside and came back wearing a pink plastic tiara and holding something in her hand that turned out to be a matching plastic tiara, purple with fake jewels. She held it out to him.
He looked at the tiara. He looked at the child. He looked at the dogs, who offered no help whatsoever.
“Everyone has to wear a crown for tea,” she said. “It’s the rule.”
“Whose rule?”
“Mine.”
He took the tiara and placed it on his head, where it perched atop his dark hair with all the dignity of a paper hat at a birthday party. The plastic was cold. The fake jewels caught the afternoon sunlight and threw tiny purple spots across his hands.
“How do I look?”
“Regal.”
He drank his imaginary tea. He ate two of Grace’s very real and very excellent cookies. He sat on a bucket with a tiara on his head and a three-legged dog at his feet and talked to an eleven-year-old about which chickens had the most personality—“Hattie is bossy, but Gertrude is sneaky, and the red one is just mean, Dr. Steele . . .”
He noticed with a start that the light had golden and the shadows were stretching across the porch. Good grief. Forty-five minutes had passed and he hadn’t thought about his schedule once.
That was also when became aware that he was being watched.
Tessa stood in the doorway, arms crossed, leaning against the doorframe. He had no idea how long she’d been there. Her expression was complicated—the one he’d started thinking of as her I don’t know what to do with you face. Part wonder, part wariness, part something that looked suspiciously close to tenderness.
Her gaze moved from his face to the tiara on his head, and the corner of her mouth trembled.
“Not a word,” he said.
“I wouldn’t dream of it.” Her voice was suspiciously unsteady. “The purple suits you.”
He removed the tiara with as much dignity as a man could muster under the circumstances, set it on the crate, and stood up from the bucket with a creak that came from both the bucket and his knees.
“Same time next week?” Makayla asked.
“I’ll have to check my schedule, Your Grace.”
