Chapter 3 #2
Mkayla and Arlo gasped.
Tessa just blinked. She’d heard numbers much bigger than that before.
After all, her father was a successful real estate developer in one of the most expensive real estate markets on earth.
But she’d walked away from that world over a decade ago, and her mother had gone to great pains to make it clear that Tessa was financially cut off.
Completely. She never dreamed she’d hear a number like that again.
Makayla, who had been sitting perfectly still with her hands folded in her lap the way Tessa had taught her, whispered, “Grandma Fern was rich?”
“Yes,” Lincoln said gently. “She was.”
Tessa stared at the lawyer. Three hundred and sixty-five days.
A full year. Living on a farm she knew nothing about, taking care of animals she couldn’t identify, in a house full of memories of a woman who’d spent a decade criticizing everything about her.
And at the end of it, Makayla’s future would be secured.
Her daughter could go anywhere she wanted to, do anything she wanted to, with her life.
You conniving, impossible, brilliant old woman.
Tessa saw exactly what Fern had done. This wasn’t spite.
This was chess. Fern had known Tessa would never willingly move to the farm.
She’d also known Tessa would never let Makayla’s inheritance—her chance at a limitless future—go to a wildlife fund.
Fern had boxed her in with love and legal paperwork, the two most inescapable forces in the known universe.
“Tessa?” Lincoln said. “Do you have any questions?”
She had a whole lot of questions, starting with how dare she? and ending with how am I supposed to do this? But her mother had raised her at all costs to maintain composure under fire. If there was one thing Tessa could do, it was sit in a chair and look calm while her insides detonated.
“Seventy-two hours,” she said evenly. “Is that negotiable?”
“I’m afraid not. Fern instructed me to write the will in such a way that you have, as she put it, ‘not a single inch of wiggle room.’ I’m sorry, ma’am, but I was legally bound to do my best for my client.”
“And I suppose you’re a very good lawyer, aren’t you?” she responded.
“I am.”
“What about my store? My apartment? I have a business to run and a daughter in school.”
“The will doesn’t prevent you from working in town.
It simply requires residence on the property and care for the animals.
You and Makayla must commence living there in three days.
Unfortunately, I’m tasked with inspecting the house four days from now and randomly throughout the next year to insure that you have actually taken up full-time residence. ”
Makayla tugged on Tessa’s sleeve. Her eyes were enormous and her voice filled with wonder. “Mom. We get to live on the farm.”
Tessa looked at her daughter’s face and her heart sank.
Game, set, and match, Fern.
The old biddy had cleverly outmaneuvered her and cornered her. Fern knew full well Makayla would be over the moon at the idea of moving to the farm and that would be the final nail in Tessa’s coffin.
I’m going to have to do this.
Not because of the college trust. Not because of the legal trap. But because Makayla was vibrating with more excitement than Tessa had seen from her in, well, longer than she could remember.
Chagrin roiled in her belly. Not at being defeated by her dead mother-in-law, but at the fact that Fern had known better than her what would make Makayla happy . . . and had arranged to give it to her.
“It appears you and I are moving to Granny Fern’s farm,” she told her daughter.
Makayla sucked in a sharp breath of delight.
She looked up at Lincoln. “Today’s Thursday. Will Saturday be satisfactory to you for my daughter and me to move in to Fern’s house?”
He answered apologetically, “That does fulfill the condition of the will, yes.”
“Would you mind stopping by the farm on Sunday, then? Monday’s a work day for me and a school day for Makayla, and we won’t be home during the day.”
“I’ll see you then, Mrs. Lawrence,” he said formally.
Arlo, who hadn’t spoken since the reading began, stood up creakily. He put on his hat, smiled briefly at Makayla, then looked at Tessa and said, “Fern always said you were smarter than you let on.”
He left before she could decide if that was a compliment.
The farm was fifteen minutes from town by the lake road, and with every mile, Tessa’s composure thinned a little more.
She’d been here before, of course. Many times when Mick was alive, less often after he died. Fern hadn’t exactly rolled out the welcome mat for her. Makayla, of course, was welcomed with open arms, warm cookies, and long visits by the two of them to the barn.
But Tessa’s relationship with Fern had settled into a pattern of stiff Sunday lunches where Fern criticized Tessa’s parenting, Tessa smiled through her teeth, and Makayla snuck away to pet the animals.
But she’d never arrived at the farm before with the understanding that this was home now.
Lake Stillwater shimmered through the trees, impossibly blue against the still-brown spring landscape.
The farm appeared—a long gravel drive leading to a white clapboard farmhouse with a 360-degree wraparound porch.
Behind it were a red barn, a smaller outbuilding, and fenced pastures rolling down toward the water.
To the east stretched eighty acres of forest Fern also owned and had left wild.
It was mature woodland with old growth oaks and huge firs.
Across the lake stood the town of Apple Pie Creek, nestled at the base of a mountain range dominated by the mighty Sik-sika Mountain.
Sik-sika meant ‘black foot’ and was the name by which the Native Americans indigenous to these mountains called themselves.
The slope of Sik-sika facing the lake was currently striped with white ski runs at Valhalla, the world-class ski resort that had opened a few years ago.
Tessa parked the car and turned off the ignition. She paused for a moment to take in the beauty of the shimmering lake and towering, snowy mountains while Makayla jumped out of the car and sprinted for the barn.
This place was, objectively, one of the most beautiful properties in Montana.
It was also in a state of aggressive chaos.
She stepped out of her car and immediately heard something screaming in the barn—a high-pitched, insistent braying that sounded like a malfunctioning car alarm crossed with a foghorn.
Two geese stood in the middle of the driveway like feathered bouncers, blocking the car from the garage and glaring at Tessa with what even she could tell was hostile intent to do grave bodily harm.
She got back in the car quickly. She had no interest in being pecked half to death or whatever it was guard geese did to intruders.
Makayla appeared in the barn door. She took in the sight of Tessa cowering in her car and the glaring geese and burst out laughing. She strode forward confidently toward the gigantic birds.
Tessa lowered the passenger side window and called out, “Stay back, Makayla. They’re making hissing noises.”
“They’re just Granny’s geese,” Makayla said with breathless delight.
“And they’re aggressively guarding the driveway. I don’t want them to hurt you. Go back by the barn while I chase them away.”
She started the car again and inched the car forward. The geese didn’t budge. She honked her horn. The geese honked back, louder, and still didn’t give an inch.
“I am not losing a game of chicken with a stupid bird,” she declared to herself. She edged the car so close to the geese that they disappeared from view beneath the front edge of her car’s hood. She rolled another few inches forward and felt a very gentle thud as her bumper lightly nudged a goose—
All of a sudden there was a flurry of wings and necks and beaks flying toward her.
She stomped on the brake pedal and threw up both arms defensively.
As two very large, very angry geese landed on the hood of her car, it belatedly dawned on her that they couldn’t attack her through the windshield.
Her hands fell back to the steering wheel, and she stared, flummoxed at the geese, who now stood on the hood of her car, necks snaking downward to stare inside the car at her.
“Well played, you awful pillows with beaks,” she muttered.
She eased the car forward until she was beside the house and parked the car.
Apparently satisfied that they’d asserted their dominance over the strange lady in the car, the geese took off with loud flaps of their alarmingly large wings. They landed inside the fenced barnyard and strutted triumphantly out of sight.
Jerks.
Tessa stepped out of the car into a sensory experience that was nothing like her apartment above the Bow-tique. The air smelled of hay, lake water, mud, and something distinctly . . . barnyard. Judith would, with a refined wrinkle of her nose declare it the ‘rich effluvia of animals and manure.’
Tessa mentally declared it straight up stinky.
The braying from the barn continued unabated. Somewhere out of sight, a chicken clucked with the urgency of a hen making an important public service announcement.
The front porch had one small rocking chair on it.
Fern had been a petite woman, and Mick had built the chair to fit her.
He’d been a talented woodworker back in the day.
The rocking chair’s blue paint was faded and worn completely away on the gently contoured oak armrests.
The spot on the porch next to it, where a second, larger chair had sat ever since the first time Tessa came here, was empty today.
The porch boards bore two lighter stripes where it had been, a ghost outline of the rocking chair Fern had left to Arlo.
Tessa looked at that empty space and felt something she hadn’t expected. Sadness. Not for Fern, exactly. For the fact that two people had sat there together every evening for thirty years and one of them would never sit there again.