“It’s not the same,” he said. Which was obvious, and also the entire point, but he felt the need to say it anyway. “It’s not a fedora. It’s just a ranch hat. But the color was close, and I figured?—”
He figured what? That he could fix grief with a hat? That a farm hat from Carver’s Western Wear could replace the memory of a happy family trip where her husband bought her a treasured gift?
“I figured you needed one for this new season,” he finished lamely.
He wished he could recall the words the second they left his mouth, because they meant more than he’d intended and she was going to hear every extra nuance of meaning.
She looked up at him.
This was the part of the plan where he was supposed to tip his hat and leave. Make a joke. Say something about protecting this one from the chickens or literally anything inane that would put distance between this moment and whatever was happening in the charged space between her gaze and his.
He didn’t do any of those things. He stood there like he’d forgotten why he’d come. Except he knew exactly why he’d come, and that was the problem.
Tessa tried the hat on.
It fit perfectly. The dove gray suited her face the way he’d known it would, though he would deny under oath that he’d spent any time imagining it. The brim cast a soft shadow across her cheekbones. She looked like she belonged on this porch, on this farm, in this valley—like the landscape had been waiting for her to arrive and put on the right hat.
She stood up. He realized, with the distinct sensation of stepping off a cliff, that her eyes were overly bright and her chin was trembling. Tessa Lawrence, a woman who never cried in front of anyone, was about to cry in front of him.
“You remembered the color,” she choked out.
“It’s just a hat,” he said, which was the biggest lie he’d told since he tried to convince himself she was just another client.
“It’s not just a hat.” Her voice was wobbly. “You know it’s not.”
Hamlet grunted at his feet. In the barn, Loretta let out one of her theatrical brays. From upstairs, faintly, came the sound of Makayla’s violin—Bach that sounded less like a concerto and more like music that wanted to dance.
The world carried on around them as if nothing had changed. The animals needed feeding. The sun was going down. There were chores and phone calls and a contract negotiation to get to.
But everything had changed.
Tessa was looking at him with her new hat and her tear-bright eyes, and he understood with perfect, terrible clarity that this was the moment he’d been running from since the day he’d met her. Not the moment she fell for him. The moment he admitted he’d already fallen for her.
“Thank you, Dillon,” she said softly.
And then she did something he didn’t expect. She put her hand on his arm—just her fingertips, light enough that he could have stepped back, brief enough that it could have been nothing—and the warmth of her touch went through his shirt and into his skin and settled somewhere behind his ribs like a coal that would take a long time to go cold.
She dropped her hand and smiled at him, unguarded and a little shaky and so beautiful it made his whole chest hurt.
“I should go,” he said. His voice came out rougher than he meant it to.
“Okay.”
He walked to his truck and didn’t look back because he knew, with the same instinct that told him when a horse was about to bolt and when a calf wasn’t going to make it through the night, that if he looked back, he would stay. And if he stayed, he would have to be the man he’d spent three years telling himself he couldn’t be. The one who showed up. The one who had something left inside him for taking care of a woman.
Lexi’s accusations reached for him, and for the first time, they sounded thin and rehearsed, like lines from a play he’d seen too many times, and they couldn’t quite drown out the way Tessa had said, You remembered the color, as if remembering a color was the kindest thing anyone had ever done for her.
He drove home in silence. No radio, no calls, no distractions. The valley darkened around him as the sun dropped behind the western ridge, and the sky went through its nightly performance—pink to copper to violet to the deep, bruised blue that settled over the mountains like a held breath.
As he drove, he thought about a dove-gray hat and a woman’s fingertips on his arm and an eleven-year-old girl who drew pictures of a family that included him. And he was terrified.
This wasn’t the kind of fear he felt when a foal was crashing and he had thirty seconds to find a vein. That was clean and sharp with a clear outcome. This was the slow kind of terror that sat in his gut and whispered that the thing he wanted most was the thing most likely to destroy him.
He’d been here before. Given his heart to a woman who found his life—found him—insufficient. He’d sat in this same silence afterward and ultimately decided the safest version of his life was the empty one.
It was still the safest choice. He just didn’t know if he had it in him to try the unsafe path again.
11
