Arlo didn’t move.
He didn’t fix it. He didn’t shush her. He didn’t pat her shoulder or hand her a handkerchief or say any of the terrible, useless things people said when they couldn’t stand to watch another person cry. He just stayed beside her. Brown Dog on her foot. The afternoon light sliding down the flanks of the mountains, one inch at a time.
And somewhere between one breath and the next, in the middle of a ruined Thursday on a porch in Montana, Tessa finally understood what real family was.
Not blood. Not a shared name. Not dinners in a penthouse with the right forks and the wrong conversation. Family was the person who came over with a thin excuse about a pressure canner and stayed until the worst of the grief had passed and didn’t ask you a single question you weren’t ready to answer.
Her Gramps had been that person for her, once.
Fern had been that for Arlo. She’d been that for her father, too, it sounded like.
And Arlo, for reasons that eluded her, had chosen to be that person for her.
She wiped her face with the sleeve of Mick’s flannel shirt, which Judith would have declared a crime against good manners, and she said ruefully, “I’m the worst mess ever.”
“I’ve seen worse messes,” Arlo said. “Fern dropped a jar of pickled beets on her living room rug in 1987. Now, that was a mess.”
Tessa laughed shakily, but it was real and it felt good.
He squinted out at the lake. “I believe. I’ll collect that pressure canner another day, if it suits you. Don’t feel much like rootin’ around in Fern’s basement this late in the day.”
“Whenever you’re ready.”
“Mm.”
He settled deeper in the rocking chair and didn’t show any sign of leaving. Brown Dog rolled onto his back against her leg and showed her his gray belly without the slightest interest in moving.
Across the property line, his rocking chair sat empty on his porch as the afternoon light lengthened, the seat worn smooth from years of bearing his weight. The space beside Fern’s rocker on this porch was empty, now.
Tessa looked at the two rocking chairs, alone on their respective porches, and thought for the first time since she’d signed the inheritance papers in Mr. Sutter’s office, that someday—not soon, not this month—she might sit in Fern’s chair and let herself feel what it was like to sit where Fern had sat.
Not yet. But someday.
Arlo, watching her watch, didn’t comment, for which she was grateful.
He just stayed.
14
Dillon was too wired to sleep that night. It had so amazing seeing Makayla’s face light up with wonder and then crumple into tears of joy that he couldn’t stop grinning up at the ceiling of his bedroom and close his eyes. He was pretty sure he’d glimpsed Tessa secretly wiping away a few tears, too.
As for Murphy, he’d taken one look at Makayla and trotted right over to her, snuffling her pockets for treats. Dillon had slipped a plastic bag of apples into Makayla’s backpack when she wasn’t looking, and they all had a laugh when Murphy unzipped the backpack and pulled out the apple slices.
There was something magical about girls and horses. They were simply made for each other.
He made a mental note to thank Pete for thinking of Makayla and tell the farmer that Murphy and Tessa’s daughter were already wildly in love with each other.
Tired but happy, he got up at five, showered, and made breakfast. As he did so, he kept seeing Tessa in his mind’s eye. Not the polished version. Not even the dressed-down barn version. He saw her with a frightened heifer’s head pillowed in her lap, murmuring oh you brave girl, look at you, you’re doing such a good job, you’re gonna love being a mama. As if it were the most natural thing in the world for a woman raised on Park Avenue to sit in the dirt comforting a laboring cow. He saw her smiling with tears in her eyes as her daughter met her first horse that was all hers. And he saw her staring at him wide-eyed, aware of him as a man and liking what she was seeing.
He tried to convince himself he could handle whatever was happening between them by doing his job professionally and leaving his feelings at home. But every time Tessa walked into the barn, his pulse galloped away from him as sure as he was standing there.
When her fingers brushed across his knuckles yesterday as she took the lab report from him, he’d barely stopped himself from pulling her into his arms and kissing her until neither of them could remember their own names.
It was barely dawn and he was on his second cup of coffee and his fourth mental rehearsal of the speech he was going to give himself before he went to Tessa’s farm for Chairman Meow’s weekly glucose check today. The problem was every version of his speech kept leading back to the same place.
Tessa was nothing like Lexi. And now that he’d gotten to know her—and face it, fallen head over heels for her—he wasn’t going to be right ever again.
His phone buzzed on the counter.