Page 28 of On One Condition

If only that kind of love existed for everyone.

The stacks, Asher. Focus on that. On your goal to at least tackle one stack a day until you clean this mess up.

Then what? When you can see the top of this desk, will it be real to you that he’s gone?

I pinch the bridge of my nose and sigh loudly as I fight the tears that threaten. I refuse to cry. Refuse to break down—again. His presence looms so largely over everything and yet this house, this farm, everywhere he touched, feels so empty without him.

Especially as I sit here, surrounded by everything that represented him, and feel woefully underprepared.

Sure, I’ve been running The Fields since Pop passed, but if I’m honest with myself, I’ve been doing the bare minimum. This office, his haven, was too hard for me to face.

But the world moves on even though those of us left behind feel frozen in place.

I look around me. Little trinkets he’d kept over time clutter the shelf across from me. Some of my old landscape sketches are mounted on the wall to the side of me. A picture of Gran is framed on the desk next to the monitor.

This office was his haven. His place to hide when he said he needed a break from the estrogen in the house so he’d have an excuse to research whatever was his latest interest on the Internet. Or tiptoe out back and sneak a sip of whiskey that he thought Gran didn’t know about. She did.

The space is a room toward the back of the main house, a large porch Pop closed in years ago, that has an exterior door facing the fields beyond. It served as the business center for The Fields as well as his solace.

“Next up, emails,” I say to myself in mock enthusiasm and punch a fist in the air. I’ve been going alphabetically through the folders in his inbox. One by one, I’ve been opening each folder, reading through its contents and, if it’s still relevant, I keep it. If not, I delete it.

Pop clearly was a pack rat when it came to emails too.

“Fuckers.” I laugh when I see the inbox name and love how even now, he can make me laugh. I’m not sure what I expect to see in a folder labeled as such, but it’s definitely not marketing emails from S.I.N. about buying the old hotel in town or updates on its status from the Cedar Falls City Council.

Pop knew who S.I.N. was, didn’t he? Who owned it?

He was keeping track of their progress, of the company, but why?

Because once a father, always a father.

Wasn’t that what he always said to me? That no matter how old I was, he’d always be my father, he’d always tell me the truth even when I didn’t want to hear it, and he’d always try to protect me from it.

Is that what he was doing?

Making sure the man who damaged me couldn’t hurt me again?

I scroll through the emails. They’re all blanket newsletters, nothing personally addressed to him, and yet he kept them.

Sure, he’d grumbled about the resort coming to town, but when I pressed him on why, it was the same reasoning everyone else in town had, so I thought nothing of his displeasure. I simply figured he was old school and feared what the soon-to-be-completed resort would do to the other mom-and-pop businesses like ours.

It was a logical conclusion to make, but now that I’m staring at this cache of emails, I can’t help but think there were other reasons for his dislike of it.

Reasons that date back to that night fifteen years ago.

It’s all conjecture, really. Silly, imaginative conjecture, and yet once again, I’m led right back to Ledger.

It seems Fate keeps pushing me to interact with him.

The knock on the exterior door of the office makes me jump.

“Miss Wells?”

“George.” I hold a hand to my chest. “You scared the crap out of me.”

“My apologies, ma’am.”

“It’s fixed?” I ask about the irrigation line that sprung a leak overnight. We woke up to the south field being flooded, which is never a good thing with a crop like lavender that likes well-drained soil and a dry root base.