“I know they don’t. That’s why I wouldn’t talk to her.”
“Are you talking to her now?”
“Yeah. She apologized. She wore one yesterday, actually.”
To Tessa’s chagrin, Makayla circled back around to the topic of Dillon as she ate. “If Dillon’s working through something, are you also?”
“I’m always working through something. It’s my job as a grown-up.”
“Is that why you’re still in your bathrobe?”
“Yes,” she answered honestly.
Makayla took another bite of cereal. “You don’t have to tell me what it is. I just wanted to know.”
Tessa at eleven had never been allowed to ask her own mother anything of the sort. Good for me. I am parenting differently. No idea if I’m doing it well, but at least I’m not my mother.
She crossed the kitchen and kissed the top of Makayla’s head. Her hair smelled like the strawberry shampoo that reminded Makayla of summer.
“I’m okay,” Tessa said into her daughter’s hair. “I promise. Eat your cereal.”
“It’s cold.”
“Cereal is supposed to be cold.”
“The milk is warm.”
“Of all the tragedies to befall this household, Makayla Lawrence.”
Makayla grinned up at her, milk mustache and all, and for one small, unguarded moment the world felt like it might hold.
The bus came and Makayla waved to her from inside it. Brown Dog ambled onto the porch to take up his morning vigil, and Tessa gave him a biscuit because Arlo said Fern had declared a treat the correct and honorable outcome of Brown Dog appearing on a porch.
The house was too quiet when she went back inside.
She stood in the kitchen with her hand on the table Mick had built and her heart twisted at the idea of leaving it behind. Thing was, it belonged in this room. In this house he’d grown up in and called home till the day he died.
She had until Friday to decide—stay or go. Hold firm or cave in. Her mouth twisted. Or more accurately, Montana, happy, and poor or New York unhappy and rich.
And as much as she’d wanted to talk it through with Dillon to make sure she wasn’t missing anything important that she ought to be considering, maybe it was better that he was avoiding her. She had to make this decision for herself and Makayla. It couldn’t hinge on a possible but as yet unexplored future with a man. Even if that man was already in her life and she was already more than half in love with him.
The question could not be, would I stay if Dillon and I were a couple? The question had to be, would I live in Montana, stay on this farm, choose this exact life for me and Makayla if Dillon never spoke to her again?
I’m going to pick this place, this life, or I’m going to leave it. But either way, I’m doing it for myself.
It might be, she realized as she climbed the stairs to dress for work, the first important thing she’d ever told herself that started with the word I and included no one else in its grammar.
Tessa pulled on the gray wool trousers that had survived, so far, every calamity the farm had thrown at them, and the last silk blouse in her closet that had not yet been eaten, trampled, mauled, stained, or otherwise ruined. It was, at this point, something of a museum piece.
She went downstairs and out through the kitchen door carrying her camera bag and a garment bag over her shoulder with Charlotte’s newest gown in it. The light in the workshop would be perfect in about ten minutes, and she had just enough time to shoot pictures of the dress before she had to leave for the store.
She draped the garment back over the porch rail, turned around to lock the kitchen door, and when she turned back, Loretta was standing not ten feet from the porch.
She hadn’t heard the donkey coming. That was the thing about Loretta. She had the stealth instincts of a hunting tiger and the instincts of a criminal mastermind.
Loretta looked at Tessa.
Tessa looked at Loretta.
