He turned his head and looked at her. His blue eyes were clear and steady . . . and raw and absolutely terrified.
“But you’re nothing like her. I’m sorry it took me this long to stop pretending you are.”
Tessa’s vision blurred. She blinked hard and looked away, because if she kept looking at him, she was going to cry on this porch for the second time in two days, and once was her limit for any given week.
“You eat standing up,” she said, her voice unsteady. “That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard, and I have a donkey that ate a seven-hundred-dollar blouse.”
He laughed, sounding grateful that she’d given him a reason to. “Eating by the sink saves time,” he commented.
“It’s a cry for help.”
“Your daughter already told me that.”
“Makayla is very wise for her age.”
“She gets it from her mother.”
The banter was familiar, comfortable, a pattern they’d worn smooth over weeks of vet visits and porch conversations. But underneath it, something had shifted. He’d told her about Lexi. Not the fact of her—she’d known there was an ex-wife—but the wound of her. He’d shared the hurtful words that had burrowed into his soul and made a home there.
She understood that kind of wound. She carried a few of her own. Her mother’s icy voice telling her she was a spoiled child who’d only eloped to rebel and was being cut out of her parents’ lives. Fern’s judgment that she couldn’t handle small town life, let alone farm life. Her own quiet terror that she only knew how to be someone else’s version of herself.
“For the record,” she said firmly, “you have plenty left inside you for taking care of a woman. You’ve been taking care of two women for weeks, and one of us didn’t even ask.”
He looked at her. She looked at him. The four inches between their shoulders could have held the whole world or nothing at all.
Neither of them closed the distance.
Not yet.
But soon.
Arlo arrived a few minutes later.
Tessa spotted him walking across the west pasture with Brown Dog and knew immediately that he’d heard about the oil man’s visit. The Cobbler Cove information network operated at a speed that made fiber optic cables look leisurely. Westerfeld’s sedan had probably been tracked, reported, and discussed at Rose’s Diner before it left the city limits of Cobbler Cove.
Arlo climbed through the fence and crossed the barnyard without his usual ambling detour to check the chickens or comment on the weather or deliver a cryptic observation she wouldn’t understand until after some calamity had happened on the farm.
As the old man approached the porch, Dillon subtly slid away from her to a more impersonal distance. Tessa handed Arlo the photocopied letter without speaking.
He read it once. His jaw tightened. He read it again. Then he handed the paper back with a slow, precise movement that did nothing to mask his outrage.
“That’s not Fern’s writing, and that’s not even close to how she signed her name.” His voice was flat and very cold, nothing like the gentle, meandering Arlo who dispensed folksy wisdom from a rocking chair.
“We agree,” Dillon said.
Arlo lowered himself into the chair Westerfeld had occupied an hour ago. Brown Dog sat at his feet and rested his chin on Arlo’s knee. The old man’s hand dropped to the dog’s head, and for a long moment, nobody spoke.
“Fern turned them down twice,” Arlo said finally. “First time in a letter, which is how I expect they got the idea for that forgery. The second time, when that Hutchins fellow came out here, she met him at his truck with a broom and told him if he set foot on her property, she’d give him something to drill for.”
Tessa smiled. That sounded just like Fern.
Arlo continued, “She did it all for Makayla. The will, the conditions, the year. She knew those people would come back after she was gone, and she knew what the land was worth. She also knew money talks louder than a dead woman’s wishes. So she tied up the farm in legal knots and put it in the hands of the one person she trusted to do right by it.”
“Me?” Tessa’s voice cracked on the word.
“You.”
“She didn’t even like me.”
