Chapter 10
Dillon had both hands in a cow’s mouth when Makayla told him about the hat.
He was out at the Hendricks place, checking a two-year-old heifer with an abscess on her gum that had swollen to the size of a golf ball. The heifer was not cooperating. She was expressing her displeasure by trying to crush his fingers between her molars every time he irrigated the wound.
“You’re not helping,” he told her.
The cow lowed mournfully and rolled her eyes at him.
Cal Hendricks leaned on the fence, arms folded, watching with the amusement of a man who was paying someone else to get bitten. “She don’t like the taste of that rinse.”
“It’s antiseptic. It’s not supposed to taste good.”
“You could add some molasses.”
“I could also add a bow and a thank-you card. She’d still rather eat my hand.
” He packed the abscess with antibiotic paste, dodged one final attempt at finger amputation, and stepped back.
“Keep her on soft feed for a week. I’ll come back in a week to check the drainage.
Call me if the swelling gets worse or she stops eating. ”
Cal nodded. “What do I owe you?”
“We’ll settle up next time.” Which was his way of saying Cal could pay him whenever the next milk check came in, and they both knew it.
He cleaned his instruments, stripped off his gloves, and climbed into his truck. His phone showed two texts. The first was from Hank: You coming to Sunday dinner or are you too busy playing house with the widow and her daughter?
He ignored that one.
The second was from Makayla: Can you pick me up after school? Mom has a call with Charlotte about the New York contract. She said it’s okay if you can.
He texted back a thumbs up and checked the time. Forty minutes until school let out. Enough time to swing by the clinic, wash cow saliva off himself, and pretend he hadn’t rearranged the rest of his afternoon the second he read her message.
She’s a good kid. That’s all this is.
His phone buzzed again. Hank: That’s what I thought. Tell them I said hi.
Brothers were a plague upon humanity.
Makayla climbed into the truck and tossed her backpack in the back seat. She set her violin back there more carefully.
“How was school?”
“Fine. I got an A on my history test and Madison Burke told me my boots were weird.”
“What did you say?”
“I told her they were custom and cost more than her entire outfit.”
He frowned. “No, they’re not.”
“Of course they’re not. But Madison doesn’t know that.”
He coughed to cover a laugh. She was her mother’s daughter through and through. They both had that lethally dry sense of humor.
They drove in comfortable silence, the valley unfolding ahead of them. The snow line on the mountains had crept up noticeably in the past two weeks, and the pastures along the highway were greening up and getting lush. A pair of hawks circled above the Beecham ranch in a lazy thermal.
“Dillon?”
“Yeah.”
“Mom’s been sad.”
He glanced over. Makayla was looking out the passenger window, her profile backlit by the afternoon sun.
She had her mother’s bone structure and her father’s coloring—lighter brown hair than Tessa’s, big blue eyes instead of warm brown.
She was also pretending a little too hard to be interested in the scenery.
“Sad how?” he asked carefully.
“Quiet sad. She says she’s fine and then stares out the window for a long time.” A pause. “I think it’s about her hat.”
“The one the chicken ruined?”
“Yeah. went out to Dad’s workshop and stayed a long time. When she came back inside, she looked like she’d been crying.”
He kept his gaze on the road and considered his response. Kids noticed everything. They might not understand all of it, but they cataloged it with a ruthless accuracy that most adults had trained themselves out of.
“Sometimes people are sad about things they can’t fix,” he said. “Doesn’t mean they’re not okay. It just means they’re carrying something heavy and they need time with it.”
Makayla considered this. “What do you do when you’re sad?”
The unexpected question crashed into him like a rock thrown through a window. He didn’t have a smooth answer ready, which was how he knew it was a good question.
“Pretend I’m not sad. Your mom’s approach is probably healthier.”
“You should come have dinner with us. Mom made chicken and dumplings last weekend and it was the best thing I’ve ever eaten. She used Granny Fern’s recipe. She’s been cooking more. Real food, not just pasta. I think the farm is changing her.”
“I think the farm is changing both of you.”
He said it before he could think better of it, but Makayla beamed at him with such happiness he couldn’t regret it.
He dropped her at the farm and spied Tessa through the kitchen window.
She was on the phone, pacing, gesturing with one hand the way she did when she was arguing a point, but she stopped long enough to wave at him.
He waved back and headed for Carver’s Western Wear Store on Main Street in Cobbler Cove.
Dillon had been there exactly twice—once for a new belt and once for a pair of work gloves—and both times he’d gotten in and out in under five minutes, which was exactly how long he could usually stand shopping.
Today he stood in front of the hat display for eleven minutes. He knew because he checked his watch twice and was disgusted with himself both times.
The hats were arranged on a wooden rack by style and color. Cattleman’s crowns, pinch fronts, ranch hats, and a few dressier options for church and the county fair. Most were tan, brown, or black.
He found what he was looking for tucked in the back on the top shelf. Wide-brimmed, Western-cut, with a cattleman’s crown instead of a fedora’s teardrop—but the felt was dove gray, with a satin lining and a simple leather band.
It was close enough to the hat she’d described that she would know he’d been paying attention, and different enough that it wasn’t pretending to be an exact replica. A new hat for a new life.
He put the bag on the passenger seat of his truck and sat there for a moment, keys in the ignition, engine off.
He could take it back. Tell Gail he’d changed his mind. Leave the hat on the shelf and not think about the way Tessa had typed, My husband bought it for me but really meant I lost something precious I can’t get back.
He started the truck and drove to the farm.
The plan was simple. Leave the hat on the porch. Drive away. No conversation. No moment. Just a hat in a bag with maybe a note that said something like Figured you needed one. Clean, quick, uninvolved.
It was a good plan.
At least it was until he pulled up to the farmhouse and Tessa was on the porch.
She was sitting in the old wicker chair she’d been hauling around the house like a portable office—phone in one hand, a mug in the other, Hamlet at her feet.
She’d changed out of her nice work clothes that Loretta hadn’t eaten.
She wore jeans and what he assumed was one of Mick’s old flannels with the sleeves rolled up.
Her hair was down, which was unusual, and the sunlight painted her brunette locks in random streaks of red and gold.
She looked up when his truck pulled in and her expression cycled through surprise, pleasure which she covered quickly, and then the composed, faintly amused face she wore like armor.
“Did you forget something?” she called to him as he got out of the truck
He grabbed the bag and walked up the porch steps and tried to remember a single one of the casual, offhand things he’d rehearsed saying during the drive from town. None of them surfaced. His brain, usually reliable in emergencies, chose this moment to present him with absolutely nothing.
He held out the bag. “I got you something.”
Smooth, Dillon. Devastatingly smooth.
She set down her mug and took the bag with cautious curiosity. She opened it, reached inside, and went very still.
She pulled out the hat and turned it slowly, her fingers running along the brim, the leather band, the satin lining. She didn’t say anything for a long moment, and he watched her throat move as she swallowed.
“It’s not the same,” he said. Which was obvious, and also the entire point, but he felt the need to say it anyway. “It’s not a fedora. It’s just a ranch hat. But the color was close, and I figured—”
He figured what? That he could fix grief with a hat? That a farm hat from Carver’s Western Wear could replace the memory of a happy family trip where her husband bought her a treasured gift?
“I figured you needed one for this new season,” he finished lamely.
He wished he could recall the words the second they left his mouth, because they meant more than he’d intended and she was going to hear every extra nuance of meaning.
She looked up at him.
This was the part of the plan where he was supposed to tip his hat and leave. Make a joke. Say something about protecting this one from the chickens or literally anything inane that would put distance between this moment and whatever was happening in the charged space between her gaze and his.
He didn’t do any of those things. He stood there like he’d forgotten why he’d come. Except he knew exactly why he’d come, and that was the problem.
Tessa tried the hat on.
It fit perfectly. The dove gray suited her face the way he’d known it would, though he would deny under oath that he’d spent any time imagining it.
The brim cast a soft shadow across her cheekbones.
She looked like she belonged on this porch, on this farm, in this valley—like the landscape had been waiting for her to arrive and put on the right hat.
She stood up. He realized, with the distinct sensation of stepping off a cliff, that her eyes were overly bright and her chin was trembling. Tessa Lawrence, a woman who never cried in front of anyone, was about to cry in front of him.
“You remembered the color,” she choked out.
“It’s just a hat,” he said, which was the biggest lie he’d told since he tried to convince himself she was just another client.
“It’s not just a hat.” Her voice was wobbly. “You know it’s not.”
Hamlet grunted at his feet. In the barn, Loretta let out one of her theatrical brays. From upstairs, faintly, came the sound of Makayla’s violin—Bach that sounded less like a concerto and more like music that wanted to dance.
The world carried on around them as if nothing had changed. The animals needed feeding. The sun was going down. There were chores and phone calls and a contract negotiation to get to.
But everything had changed.
Tessa was looking at him with her new hat and her tear-bright eyes, and he understood with perfect, terrible clarity that this was the moment he’d been running from since the day he’d met her. Not the moment she fell for him. The moment he admitted he’d already fallen for her.
“Thank you, Dillon,” she said softly.
And then she did something he didn’t expect.
She put her hand on his arm—just her fingertips, light enough that he could have stepped back, brief enough that it could have been nothing—and the warmth of her touch went through his shirt and into his skin and settled somewhere behind his ribs like a coal that would take a long time to go cold.
She dropped her hand and smiled at him, unguarded and a little shaky and so beautiful it made his whole chest hurt.
“I should go,” he said. His voice came out rougher than he meant it to.
“Okay.”
He walked to his truck and didn’t look back because he knew, with the same instinct that told him when a horse was about to bolt and when a calf wasn’t going to make it through the night, that if he looked back, he would stay.
And if he stayed, he would have to be the man he’d spent three years telling himself he couldn’t be.
The one who showed up. The one who had something left inside him for taking care of a woman.
Lexi’s accusations reached for him, and for the first time, they sounded thin and rehearsed, like lines from a play he’d seen too many times, and they couldn’t quite drown out the way Tessa had said, You remembered the color, as if remembering a color was the kindest thing anyone had ever done for her.
He drove home in silence. No radio, no calls, no distractions. The valley darkened around him as the sun dropped behind the western ridge, and the sky went through its nightly performance—pink to copper to violet to the deep, bruised blue that settled over the mountains like a held breath.
As he drove, he thought about a dove-gray hat and a woman’s fingertips on his arm and an eleven-year-old girl who drew pictures of a family that included him. And he was terrified.
This wasn’t the kind of fear he felt when a foal was crashing and he had thirty seconds to find a vein. That was clean and sharp with a clear outcome. This was the slow kind of terror that sat in his gut and whispered that the thing he wanted most was the thing most likely to destroy him.
He’d been here before. Given his heart to a woman who found his life—found him—insufficient. He’d sat in this same silence afterward and ultimately decided the safest version of his life was the empty one.
It was still the safest choice. He just didn’t know if he had it in him to try the unsafe path again.