The cat hissed back.
“Charming.”
She found a note taped to the feed room door in spidery handwriting that made her guess its author was Arlo.
It was a list of the animals, their names, medications, and feeding schedules. She scanned it in growing dismay. The barn cat was named Chairman Meow. The donkey was Loretta. The three-legged dog was Captain. The blind goat was Maple. The horses were Biscuit and June. The llama was Dolly. The geese were Bonnie and Clyde.
Last but not least was the potbellied pig named Hamlet who, the note informed her, lived inside the house and slept on the couch. Non-negotiable.
Tessa frowned. She didn’t recall Fern ever having a pig in her house when she and Makayla visited. Had the pig—she glanced down at the list again. Hamlet. Had Hamlet been removed to the barn when they’d visited for Sunday dinners? He must’ve been. There was no way she’d missed a live pig in her mother-in-law’s living room.
Tessa folded the note and put it in her pocket.
The weight of being responsible for all these foreign and strange creatures crashed down on her all at once. She’d never even had a goldfish, let alone a pet that required regular attention, affection, or real care. She didn’t do animals. At all.
She was not going to cry. She was not going to let Fern get the best of her. And she was not going to let down her daughter.
First things first. She was going to make a plan. Plans were what she was good at. Plans were how a person survived hard things, especially impossibly hard things.
Makayla had spotted a cluster of chickens pecking outside the barn’s back door and crouched among them, delighted, while they ignored her entirely. When she stood back up, her plaid skirt was dusty around the hem and her leather ballet-slipper shoes were caked with something Tessa chose not to examine closely.
“I’m going back to the house,” she told Makayla. “I need to unpack the car and figure out where to put our things before Mr. Sutter gets here tomorrow to make sure we’ve moved in.”
“Can I stay out here?” Makayla asked.
Tessa looked around, seeing nothing but threats to her child’s safety. “Don’t climb up in the hayloft or go into any of the stalls. And stay away from those geese. They’re a menace.”
“Aww, Bonnie and Clyde aren’t mean. Not if you have a snack for them.”
“You heard me. Stay away from them.”
“Fine,” Makayla huffed.
Inside the farmhouse, Tessa saw Mick everywhere. It was one of the reasons she’d hated coming here after the fire. But she’d never had the heart to tell Fern how much it hurt her heart to see all the pictures of Mick, the knickknacks he’d made his mother, the projects he’d done around the house over the years.
Fern had taken great comfort from the reminders of her only son. Tessa had only taken pain from them. And now she had to live with all of it. Every single bit of it forcing her to think of the man she’d lost and the tragic end to their fairytale love story. Day-to-day, she locked away her pain and grief. She’d learned long ago that the loneliness and sorrow overwhelmed her and paralyzed her if she let them out of their tightly locked cage for more than a few seconds at a time. Better to keep them out of sight and out of mind as much as possible.
But here, in this place, the home where he’d grown up, filled bottom to top with Fern’s memories of Mick, how was she supposed to avoid all those awful, overpowering feelings?
The front door opened into a living room with wide plank floors that Mick had hand scraped and laid here with care. To the left was the stone fireplace with the wood mantle Mick had made.
A staircase rose along the far wall, its dark wood banisters a work or art. Each spindle had been painstakingly hand-carved with a raised vine pattern that twined around the smoothly sanded spindle. Mick had made that, too. She traced one of the vines with her fingertip and felt the ghost of his hands in the wood.
The kitchen table was his work, too—a long farm table he’d built from reclaimed barn wood. She remembered him working on it in the months before Makayla was born, sanding it smooth, rubbing it with oil until the old oak grain glowed. She’d sat at this table as a young bride eating Fern’s chili and laughing at Mick’s terrible jokes.
She ran her hand along the surface. The wood was warm under her fingers.
Through the kitchen window, she could see the door to Mick’s woodworking shop. An ugly silver padlock secured the door. It occurred to her she had no idea where the key to that lock might be. Which was just as well. She wasn’t going in there. Not today. Maybe not ever.
Hamlet the potbellied pig was, as advertised, asleep on the living room couch. He was white all over, or rather pink beneath a covering of coarse white hair. She guessed he was three feet long and would stand maybe half that tall when he wasn’t sprawled from one end of the couch practically to the other. He looked solid, too. He had to weigh at least a hundred pounds.
He opened one eye when Tessa came in, assessed her briefly, and closed it again with a grunt that clearly communicated she was not interesting enough to warrant full consciousness.
The braying from the barn started up again. According to Arlo’s list, the cat was overdue for insulin by several hours, now. The horses needed—she consulted Arlo’s note—joint supplements and medication. The llama needed some kind of medicated skin treatment. The chickens needed feeding soon.
But before any of that could happen, the geese needed to stop terrorizing her driveway.
She had a store to run and a child to get to school and a growing designer wedding gown business with Charlotte that was in the middle of negotiations with a major New York bridal boutique.