Mick had been taken in a single, terrible afternoon. Her grandfather was being taken one memory at a time, and there was nothing she could do to stop it.
She pressed her hands over her face and breathed shakily.
She would not cry. She could not afford to cry right now because Makayla was upstairs and the animals needed their evening feeding. She had three hundred and forty-some days left on this farm, a trust fund allowance that had just evaporated, and her mother was using Makayla’s future as leverage against Tessa as if love was a line item on a balance sheet.
She concentrated on breathing until the pressure behind her eyes eased from unbearable to merely awful and she could lower her hands without her face betraying her.
Hamlet looked at her, and did something he’d never done before. He heaved himself up on his short legs, walked to her, and leaned his full, considerable weight against her shins. His bristly warmth pressed against her through the denim of her jeans. He grunted softly—uh-uh-uh—the rhythmic, contented sound he made when she scratched behind his ears.
He wasn’t asking for affection. He was giving it to her. In his own porcine way, he was telling her he was there.
She reached down and rested her hand on his broad, warm back and let herself feel the steady rhythm of his breathing. A pig. She was being comforted by a pig. Judith would require smelling salts if she ever found out.
A quiet laugh escaped her, surprising her with its arrival.
She’d been coerced into sitting on a dead woman’s porch and was being consoled by a house pig while her grandfather forgot her name, her mother dismantled her finances, and her daughter was starting to play music that did things it wasn’t supposed to.
In the midst of all that wreckage, something small and stubborn and new was growing inside her. She didn’t have a name for it yet, and she wasn’t even sure it was strong enough to survive everything bearing down on it.
But she was, for the first time in her careful, curated, performance-driven life, curious about what it might become.
Later that evening, after the animals were fed, medicated, and settled—a routine that now took her forty-five minutes instead two hours like it had the first week—Tessa stood at the kitchen sink washing the Dutch oven and heard Makayla’s violin start up again.
But it wasn’t Bach this time. And it wasn’t any piece Tessa recognized from the repertoire Professor Cohen assigned.
It was something else entirely. Something that started with a long, sustained note that wobbled and then found its footing and slid downward in a mournful swoop that made the hair on Tessa’s arms stand up. The melody was simple—almost folk-like, plaintive and raw—but underneath it, Makayla was doing something with the rhythm that made it pulse and breathe in a way classical music never did. The notes swung instead of marched. The bow bounced and skipped across the strings in a technique Tessa had never heard in any of Makayla’s lessons or recitals.
She turned off the water and listened.
The melody built, gathering speed and confidence, and suddenly Makayla’s foot was stomping overhead—a steady beat that drove the music forward like a heartbeat—and the violin was singing, not performing, not executing, but singing with an abandon and a joy that was nothing like the precise, crystalline perfection Tessa was used to hearing.
It stopped abruptly. Mid-phrase. As if Makayla had caught herself doing something she wasn’t supposed to do.
Silence settled over the house.
She should go upstairs and ask what that was. Encourage it or at least acknowledge it. That’s what a good mother would do.
But a good mother would also have noticed years ago that her daughter was holding back. That the perfect posture and perfect grades and perfect violin playing were symptoms, not achievements. That a child who monitored herself every waking moment was not a well-behaved child but a frightened one.
Tessa knew because she’d been the exact same way as a child. But it had taken her all these years to understand that she hadn’t been eager to please at all. She’d been scared.
Tessa set the Dutch oven in the drying rack and dried her hands slowly on a dishtowel printed with sunflowers. She didn’t go upstairs. Not because she didn’t want to, but because she understood, with a clarity that hurt, that whatever Makayla was doing up there in her room with her violin and her stomping foot and her new, different music—she needed to do it alone first. She needed a space where nobody was evaluating her. Where nobody was watching.
Tessa was beginning to understand that need, as well, for the very first time in her considerably longer life than her daughter’s.
She hung the dishtowel on its hook, turned off the kitchen light, and went to the living room window. Outside, the last light was fading over Lake Stillwater. Across the property line, Arlo’s porch light was on. She couldn’t see him, but she could see the silhouette of Fern’s rocking chair—his rocking chair, now—moving gently back and forth.
He was sitting out there alone, the way he sat every evening, watching the same sunset Fern had watched beside him for thirty years.
Tessa pressed her forehead against the cool glass of the window and closed her eyes.
You be brave out there in that big world, Tassie girl.
I’m trying Gramps. I’m really trying.
10
Dillon had both hands in a cow’s mouth when Makayla told him about the hat.