Chapter 7
The donkey had developed a system.
Tessa figured it out on Monday of the second week, when she hung a coral silk shell on the clothesline behind the house—the last survivor of a once-formidable wardrobe—and made the mistake of stepping inside for sixty seconds to pour a cup of coffee.
She heard the paddock gate creak through the open kitchen window. By the time she reached the back door, Loretta had the blouse in her teeth and was backing away with the purposeful determination of a creature executing a well-rehearsed heist.
“Drop it!” Tessa lunged for the silk.
Loretta pinned her ears flat, clamped down harder, and reversed faster. The blouse stretched between them—Tessa gripping the hem, Loretta gripping the collar—in a tug of war that was beneath both of their dignities.
The silk ripped. Loretta stumbled backward with the larger piece and galloped away toward the paddock, coral fabric streaming from her mouth like a victory pennant.
Tessa stood holding a scrap of what had once been an eighty-dollar blouse and contemplated the very real possibility that the donkey was doing this on purpose.
“She waits for me to go inside,” she said in disbelief to nobody. “She watches me hang things up, and she waits for me to walk away.”
From the porch, Makayla lowered her cell phone, grinning with unholy delight.
“Tell me you did not just film that!” Tessa exclaimed
“And I sent it to Dr. Steele.”
“Makayla Grace Lawrence—”
Her phone buzzed with a text. From Dillon. Great. Just great.
Tell the donkey I said coral isn’t her color.
She put the phone in her pocket without responding. She would not give him the satisfaction.
But she might have smiled. Just barely. With her back carefully turned to Makayla.
The wardrobe destruction became an almost daily occurrence—a dark comedy she was learning to tolerate if not enjoy.
Blouses, scarves, one glove of a leather pair she’d owned for years.
Loretta was either working through a fiber deficiency or waging a deliberate campaign to strip Tessa of every piece of clothing that connected her to her old life.
She was beginning to suspect the latter.
But the hat wasn’t the donkey’s fault.
Her favorite hat was a wide-brimmed dove-gray felt fedora she’d bought at a little shop in Orlando.
She and Mick had taken Makayla to the big theme parks there for her fourth birthday.
Tessa had tried the hat in one of the souvenir shops as a lark, and Mick had tilted it just so on her head, stepped back, and grinned. “Now that’s a hat.”
She’d kept it on a high shelf in the farmhouse mudroom. Well out of donkey range, goose range, and any other range of any creature on this property.
She had not accounted for the chickens. Nor for their ability to fly short distances.
Wednesday morning, she reached for the hat and found a Rhode Island Red hen sitting in it. The hen had arranged herself in the crown with the imperial bearing of a duchess settling into a sedan chair. Beneath her, deposited in the dove-gray felt Mick had bought her, was a single brown egg.
“No,” Tessa declared. “Absolutely not. That is a hat.”
The hen clucked at her with serene indifference and tucked her wings more firmly against her sides.
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.”
She’d redlined the contract by noon. After lunch, she strapped her camera around her neck and drove to the Foster Ranch, where Jenna had generously offered her barn for photo shoots.
Two of Charlotte’s gowns were hanging in garment bags in her back seat, and she spent three hours photographing them against weathered wood and hay bales in the afternoon light.
The images were stunning. She knew it with the bone-deep certainty of someone who understood composition and light the way Dillon understood animals.
She uploaded the best shots to Charlotte’s Instagram that evening and watched the likes and comments roll in while she heated up soup in Fern’s kitchen.
This was the work that made her feel like herself. Or rather, the new self she was building from scratch in the wreckage of every identity she’d ever borrowed. She was good at this, and it was hers.
Thursday afternoon, with the business fires temporarily banked and the animals tended, Tessa found herself doing something she hadn’t expected.
She was reading Fern’s books.
It started practically. She’d gone looking for information about chickens—specifically, how long the broody hen would sit on her egg and what, if anything, Tessa was supposed to do about it.
She found a battered copy of Storey’s Guide to Raising Chickens on the shelf beside Fern’s reading chair.
It was bristling with sticky notes in Fern’s loopy handwriting.
The margins were filled with annotations: Gertrude does NOT like this feed.
Check Hattie’s comb for mites every week.
The red hens always go broody in spring—let them, they’re happier that way.
Tessa sat down in Fern’s chair—a sunken, overstuffed armchair upholstered in fabric covered with enormous sunflowers—and read the whole book, notes and all.
She reached for the next book on the shelf, The Merck Veterinary Manual.
She didn’t read the whole giant text, but she read all the sticky notes and marginalia.
Dillon says 2cc not 3—C. Meow is a small cat.
Biscuit’s hocks better today—the boy knows his stuff.
The boy. Fern had called Dillon the boy. Tessa smiled and kept reading.