Chapter 11 #2
“Fern wrote my name on every check she ever gave me for vet services. She wrote notes in the margins of every medication instruction I left her. I’ve seen her handwriting a hundred times.
” He tapped the signature. “The F is wrong. Fern crossed her capital F low, almost at the baseline. This one’s crossed in the middle.
And she never wrote her middle initial. She told me once that middle initials were pretentious. ”
The relief that washed through Tessa was so intense she had to lean against the porch rail to steady herself.
“That won’t stop them, of course,” she said.
“They’ve already filed a challenge to the will.
I need a lawyer, and I can’t—” She stopped.
The sentence she’d been about to finish was one she’d never said aloud to anyone in Cobbler Cove.
Not to Charlotte. Not to the WoWS. Not even to herself, except at two in the morning when the math wouldn’t lie to her.
I can’t afford one.
Dillon came up the steps. Stepped over Hamlet. Leaned against the rail beside her, close enough that she could smell iodine and soap and the faint scent of cedar. His proximity was a statement. I’m right here.
“My brother Reno is a lawyer,” he said.
“The rodeo clown?” she blurted, startled.
“They like to be called bullfighters these days,” he observed.
“I stand corrected,” she murmured.
He smiled briefly then continued, “He used to be an attorney at one of Texas’s biggest law firms. Youngest partner in the firm’s history. Hot shot litigator. Barracuda in the courtroom. Never lost a case. Stupidly high-profile client list.”
“And now he chases bulls in rodeos?” she asked blankly.
“Technically, the bulls chase him.”
They exchanged short-lived smiles.
Dillon added, “At any rate, he walked away from all of it a few years ago. Won’t talk about why.
But he’s the smartest person I know and the best lawyer I’ve ever seen.
If somebody forged a dead woman’s signature to steal her land, Reno’s the kind of man who will take deep offense at something so despicable. ”
She wanted to laugh and cry simultaneously at the idea of her future depending on a lawyer turned bullfighter.
Instead, she gazed out at June and Biscuit standing nose to tail in the shade of a big oak in the pasture, swishing flies off each other’s faces with the lazy synchrony of old partners.
Captain was lying in the grass near the horses with Maple tucked against his side.
The sky was so blue it didn’t look real.
A few short weeks ago, this view had been pretty but foreign. Something to appreciate from a distance, the way she appreciated art in a gallery—admiring the composition without imagining herself inside the frame.
Now it was home. The realization came to her without drama or the fanfare of a revelatory moment.
It had been accumulating in small deposits—Makayla’s boots by the door, Fern’s recipe cards in the kitchen drawer, the sound of Loretta’s dawn bray becoming just her morning alarm clock, Chairman Meow’s grudging tolerance, the hat sitting comfortably on her head.
Another realization washed over her gently, but still shocking in its content.
I don’t want to sell this farm.
The thought should frighten her. A month ago, it would have. She’d inherited this place as a burden, a final complication from a difficult woman, a 365-day sentence to endure before collecting a giant check for Makayla.
And now a stranger was offering to release her from the will’s terms, take all of it off her hands, and every cell in her body had said no.
You can’t so this because of Dillon, she told herself fiercely, vividly aware of the pull she felt toward him. She had to want this farm, this life, for herself. Otherwise she was just borrowing someone else’s life again.
Thing was, she did want this life. The business with Charlotte was growing. The Fashion Bow-tique was hers. This land, these animals, were becoming part of her. Makayla was becoming herself. And for the first time in her life—she was starting to figure out who she wanted to be.
She summed it all up by saying simply, “I don’t want to lose this place.”
Dillon went very still beside her. “That’s the first time you’ve said that.”
“It’s the first time I’ve known it.”
He didn’t respond right away. She felt him choosing his words with the same deliberation he approached a frightened animal—careful, unhurried, aware that the wrong move would close a door that had just opened.
“When Lexi left—” he started.
Tessa’s breath caught because he’d never talked about his first wife before.
“—She told me I was a workaholic who was so obsessed with taking care of animals that I had nothing left inside me for taking care of a woman.”
Tessa’s flinched at the cruelty of those words. Behind the barn, Loretta brayed at something. A hawk’s shadow crossed the porch.
“I believed her,” he said heavily. “I stopped trying to be anything more than a veterinarian. I quit thinking about having a family, bought a house, and figured one person was all it was ever going to hold. I eat supper standing up because sitting down at an empty table feels worse.”
“Dillon—” she said softly.
“Let me finish. I need to say this while I still can.” The muscle in his jaw flexed and unflexed.
“When I met you, I told myself you were Lexi all over again. Same polish, same money, same world I don’t fit in.
I told myself that for weeks. Every time you said something sharp, I filed it under evidence.
Every time you looked expensive, I reminded myself I’d been there before. ”
He turned his head and looked at her. His blue eyes were clear and steady . . . and raw and absolutely terrified.
“But you’re nothing like her. I’m sorry it took me this long to stop pretending you are.”
Tessa’s vision blurred. She blinked hard and looked away, because if she kept looking at him, she was going to cry on this porch for the second time in two days, and once was her limit for any given week.
“You eat standing up,” she said, her voice unsteady. “That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard, and I have a donkey that ate a seven-hundred-dollar blouse.”
He laughed, sounding grateful that she’d given him a reason to. “Eating by the sink saves time,” he commented.
“It’s a cry for help.”
“Your daughter already told me that.”
“Makayla is very wise for her age.”
“She gets it from her mother.”
The banter was familiar, comfortable, a pattern they’d worn smooth over weeks of vet visits and porch conversations.
But underneath it, something had shifted.
He’d told her about Lexi. Not the fact of her—she’d known there was an ex-wife—but the wound of her.
He’d shared the hurtful words that had burrowed into his soul and made a home there.
She understood that kind of wound. She carried a few of her own.
Her mother’s icy voice telling her she was a spoiled child who’d only eloped to rebel and was being cut out of her parents’ lives.
Fern’s judgment that she couldn’t handle small town life, let alone farm life.
Her own quiet terror that she only knew how to be someone else’s version of herself.
“For the record,” she said firmly, “you have plenty left inside you for taking care of a woman. You’ve been taking care of two women for weeks, and one of us didn’t even ask.”
He looked at her. She looked at him. The four inches between their shoulders could have held the whole world or nothing at all.
Neither of them closed the distance.
Not yet.
But soon.
Arlo arrived a few minutes later.
Tessa spotted him walking across the west pasture with Brown Dog and knew immediately that he’d heard about the oil man’s visit.
The Cobbler Cove information network operated at a speed that made fiber optic cables look leisurely.
Westerfeld’s sedan had probably been tracked, reported, and discussed at Rose’s Diner before it left the city limits of Cobbler Cove.
Arlo climbed through the fence and crossed the barnyard without his usual ambling detour to check the chickens or comment on the weather or deliver a cryptic observation she wouldn’t understand until after some calamity had happened on the farm.
As the old man approached the porch, Dillon subtly slid away from her to a more impersonal distance. Tessa handed Arlo the photocopied letter without speaking.
He read it once. His jaw tightened. He read it again. Then he handed the paper back with a slow, precise movement that did nothing to mask his outrage.
“That’s not Fern’s writing, and that’s not even close to how she signed her name.” His voice was flat and very cold, nothing like the gentle, meandering Arlo who dispensed folksy wisdom from a rocking chair.
“We agree,” Dillon said.
Arlo lowered himself into the chair Westerfeld had occupied an hour ago. Brown Dog sat at his feet and rested his chin on Arlo’s knee. The old man’s hand dropped to the dog’s head, and for a long moment, nobody spoke.
“Fern turned them down twice,” Arlo said finally.
“First time in a letter, which is how I expect they got the idea for that forgery. The second time, when that Hutchins fellow came out here, she met him at his truck with a broom and told him if he set foot on her property, she’d give him something to drill for. ”
Tessa smiled. That sounded just like Fern.
Arlo continued, “She did it all for Makayla. The will, the conditions, the year. She knew those people would come back after she was gone, and she knew what the land was worth. She also knew money talks louder than a dead woman’s wishes.
So she tied up the farm in legal knots and put it in the hands of the one person she trusted to do right by it. ”
“Me?” Tessa’s voice cracked on the word.
“You.”
“She didn’t even like me.”
Arlo’s hand stilled on Brown Dog’s head. “Tessa. That woman talked about you every blessed day for eleven years. She drove me absolutely crazy going on about you.”
He met her gaze frankly. “Fern didn’t have a gentle way of saying things.
Neither do I, so here it is straight up.
She admired you. Thought you were too good for her son—which is saying a lot.
She loved you. She was terrible at showing it and she knew it, and that ate at her.
She left you this farm because she believed you were strong enough to fight for it and principled enough not to just take the money and run. Don’t prove her wrong.”
Tessa couldn’t speak. The tightness in her throat didn’t come from sadness. Rather, it came from being seen. Accurately and completely, by a woman who was gone and an old man who was sitting in front of her with his hand on a dog’s head speaking hard truths.
From upstairs, faintly, came the sound of a violin. Bach—the Partita in E major, Makayla’s current assignment for Mr. Cohen. The notes were clean and precise, each one placed with the technical perfection.
And then the melody changed. A note held longer than it was written, a slide between intervals that wasn’t Bach at all, a rhythmic push that turned the phrase from something performed into something felt.
The playing stopped for half a breath and resumed marching along to the written score.
“I’ll call Reno,” Dillon said evenly.
Arlo stood, slow and deliberate, and walked to the edge of the porch. He stood there for a long time, looking out at the property—the barn, the pasture, the lake, the mountains.
“You tell that slick lawyer,” Arlo said without turning around, “that Fern Lawrence was the finest woman who ever drew breath in this valley. And if they think they’re going to steal her land with a piece of paper she didn’t write, they’re going to find out what folks in these parts are made of.
We stick together in Cobbler Cove. Take care of our own. ”
He looked back at her. “You’re one of us, Tessa. Don’t you ever forget it.”
And that was what finally made a tear escape her eye and run down her cheek.
Arlo clumped down the steps and headed back toward his place. Brown Dog stayed for a moment, looking up at Tessa kindly with his gray muzzle and his knowing eyes, and then followed his person home.
Dillon asked quietly, “You okay?”
She thought about the oil company and the forged letter and a legal fight she couldn’t afford.
About her grandfather in a facility in Connecticut, calling for a granddaughter whose name he’d forgotten.
About her mother’s voice, which would find her eventually, with its measured disappointment and transactional love.
About the gown business and the store and the animals and the 365-day clock ticking toward a finish line she no longer wanted to cross.
About a man standing on her porch with iodine on his arm who had just told her the truest thing anyone had ever told her, and a dead woman who had loved her badly . . . and fiercely and better than Tessa had known.
She took a long, shaky breath. Let it out. Reached up and adjusted the brim of her hat and looked at the man beside her who’d dropped everything and come when she needed him.
“No. I’m not okay,” she said honestly. “But I think I will be.”
Dillon nodded. He didn’t offer reassurance or solutions or platitudes. He just stood beside her on the porch, quietly and solidly present, while the violin upstairs bent another note toward something that sounded like freedom.