Arlo’s hand stilled on Brown Dog’s head. “Tessa. That woman talked about you every blessed day for eleven years. She drove me absolutely crazy going on about you.”
He met her gaze frankly. “Fern didn’t have a gentle way of saying things. Neither do I, so here it is straight up. She admired you. Thought you were too good for her son—which is saying a lot. She loved you. She was terrible at showing it and she knew it, and that ate at her. She left you this farm because she believed you were strong enough to fight for it and principled enough not to just take the money and run. Don’t prove her wrong.”
Tessa couldn’t speak. The tightness in her throat didn’t come from sadness. Rather, it came from being seen. Accurately and completely, by a woman who was gone and an old man who was sitting in front of her with his hand on a dog’s head speaking hard truths.
From upstairs, faintly, came the sound of a violin. Bach—the Partita in E major, Makayla’s current assignment for Mr. Cohen. The notes were clean and precise, each one placed with the technical perfection.
And then the melody changed. A note held longer than it was written, a slide between intervals that wasn’t Bach at all, a rhythmic push that turned the phrase from something performed into something felt.
The playing stopped for half a breath and resumed marching along to the written score.
“I’ll call Reno,” Dillon said evenly.
Arlo stood, slow and deliberate, and walked to the edge of the porch. He stood there for a long time, looking out at the property—the barn, the pasture, the lake, the mountains.
“You tell that slick lawyer,” Arlo said without turning around, “that Fern Lawrence was the finest woman who ever drew breath in this valley. And if they think they’re going to steal her land with a piece of paper she didn’t write, they’re going to find out what folks in these parts are made of. We stick together in Cobbler Cove. Take care of our own.”
He looked back at her. “You’re one of us, Tessa. Don’t you ever forget it.”
And that was what finally made a tear escape her eye and run down her cheek.
Arlo clumped down the steps and headed back toward his place. Brown Dog stayed for a moment, looking up at Tessa kindly with his gray muzzle and his knowing eyes, and then followed his person home.
Dillon asked quietly, “You okay?”
She thought about the oil company and the forged letter and a legal fight she couldn’t afford. About her grandfather in a facility in Connecticut, calling for a granddaughter whose name he’d forgotten. About her mother’s voice, which would find her eventually, with its measured disappointment and transactional love. About the gown business and the store and the animals and the 365-day clock ticking toward a finish line she no longer wanted to cross.
About a man standing on her porch with iodine on his arm who had just told her the truest thing anyone had ever told her, and a dead woman who had loved her badly . . . and fiercely and better than Tessa had known.
She took a long, shaky breath. Let it out. Reached up and adjusted the brim of her hat and looked at the man beside her who’d dropped everything and come when she needed him.
“No. I’m not okay,” she said honestly. “But I think I will be.”
Dillon nodded. He didn’t offer reassurance or solutions or platitudes. He just stood beside her on the porch, quietly and solidly present, while the violin upstairs bent another note toward something that sounded like freedom.
12
Dillon had been awake since four, but it wasn’t an emergency that had him staring at the dark ceiling. It was a woman’s fingertips on his arm and the way she’d shed a tear when an old man said, you’re one of us, and meant it.
He drank coffee at the sink until the sun came up. By six-thirty he was in his truck headed for Fern’s farm, because Thursday was Chairman Meow’s glucose draw, and he was not, absolutely not, going there for any other reason.
Arlo was waiting for him when he pulled up the gravel drive. Not at the fence line, where Arlo usually positioned himself to deliver cryptic bulletins for Tessa to decode, but on her porch. Brown Dog stretched out at his feet and Arlo held a thermos in both hands.
Tessa stepped out onto the porch in jeans and a flannel shirt. Her hair was pulled back in a loose braid, and she had a mug in each hand. She walked down the steps and held one out to him without a word.
“Morning,” he said, accepting the steaming coffee.
“Morning.” She had dark circles under her eyes that hadn’t been there Monday. Yesterday had taken a pound of flesh out of her. “Chairman’s in the rafters, refusing to let me catch him.”
“I’ll bring him down.”
“Brave man.” She added under her breath, “Or foolish.”
His lips twitched, but in case she hadn’t meant for him to hear that last part, he didn’t smile.
“Arlo wants to see you when you’re done.” She gave him a look he couldn’t read. “He wouldn’t say about what. He just walked over at six, sat down in Fern’s chair, and started pouring himself coffee.”
Dillon glanced toward the porch. Arlo lifted the thermos lid/cup in greeting.
