Tessa reached for the bird. The hen puffed to twice her size, flattened her feathers, and let out a warning squawk that sounded like an angry velociraptor. Tessa pulled her hand back fast.
She could remove the hen by force. She was larger, stronger, and had opposable thumbs. But the hen had an egg, and something about removing a brooding mother from her nest felt wrong in a way she couldn’t quite articulate but felt in her gut.
She texted Dillon.
A chicken is nesting in my hat. Can I move her?
His reply came in under a minute. What kind of hat?
That’s not relevant.
Humor me.
A felt fedora. From a trip with Mick and Makayla.
A longer pause this time. Then: How attached are you to it?
Her fingers hovered over the screen. She typed and deleted three responses before settling on the honest one.
Very. My husband bought it for me.
The pause that followed was long enough that she wondered if she’d said too much. When his reply came, it was gentler than anything she’d heard from him.
If she’s broody, she’ll fight you for that nest. Best chance is to move her after dark when she’s sleepy. Relocate her and the egg to a nest box in the barn lined with clean straw. Use gloves. Broody hens bite.
She wrote back: Thank you.
Any time, New York.
That night, she crept downstairs with Fern’s gardening gloves and a flashlight. The hen was drowsing in the hat, making soft humming sounds akin to a cat purring. Tessa scooped her up—the hen grumbled but didn’t bite—and carried her to the barn, setting her gently in the prepared nest box with the egg tucked beneath her. The hen clucked once, settled, and closed her eyes.
Tessa picked up her hat.
It was ruined. The felt was permanently misshapen, stained, and punctured by the hen’s claws. The brim was warped beyond recovery. It smelled like chicken and straw and, well, poop.
She stared it and let herself feel what it meant. Not the hat. What the hat represented. The last physical remnant of a day when they’d been happy and whole and had no idea how little time they had left.
She opened the shop and set the ruined fedora on the workbench beside Mick’s half-finished box and stood there in the dark, taking slow, deep breaths, pressing the grief back into its cage with careful, practiced hands, letting no tendril of it escape capture.
She didn’t cry. She’d used her quota for a long time to come right here, earlier this week. But she stood there for a long time before she went back inside.
The next morning, she channeled all of it—the grief, the frustration, the slow erosion of everything she was—into work. The New York boutique had moved up their timeline. They wanted the full portfolio of Charlotte’s gown designs in two weeks, not four, and Tessa had responded the way she always responded to an impossible deadline: by making a plan and executing it with the same ruthless efficiency she’d organized charity galas since her debutante years.
She spent the morning on the phone with Charlotte, pacing the farmhouse kitchen in her barn boots while Hamlet snored on the couch.
“The exclusivity clause is too broad,” she told Charlotte, the contract pulled up on her laptop beside a bowl of Chairman Meow’s insulin syringes. “If we sign this as written, we can’t sell to any other boutique within two hundred miles of their Manhattan location.”
“Is that bad?”
“It’s catastrophic. Two hundred miles includes Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Boston, and eliminates all of Delaware, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Massachusetts, half of Pennsylvania, and a third of both New York and Vermont. We’d be giving away our best and densest markets before we’ve even entered them.”
“So we push back?”
“We push back hard. I’ll draft a counter with a fifty-mile radius and see if they flinch. If they won’t budge below a hundred, we negotiate a sunset clause—exclusive for the first year, then open territory after that.”
Charlotte was quiet for a moment. “How do you know all this, Tess? You run a clothing store in a town with two stoplights.”
“I grew up watching my father negotiate tough real estate deals over dinner. I absorbed contract language the way other children absorb nursery rhymes.”