Chapter 16
Hope was nearly three weeks old now, all knobby legs and curiosity, and Dillon would have bet a paycheck that the calf recognized his truck.
She came trotting up to the fence as soon as he killed the engine, ears forward, her dark eyes following him as he climbed out and reached for his bag. Her mother lifted her head from the grass and gave him a mildly resigned look as if she knew he there to bother her.
“Morning, ladies.”
Pete Maddox came out of the barn wiping his hands on a rag. “Hope’s the friendliest critter on this place. Marla says she’s half cow and half puppy.”
“How’s your wife doing?” Dillon asked warmly. Marla Maddox was a good woman—steady, kind, and big-hearted. She would like Tessa, and he was fairly sure Tessa would like her.
“She’s still mad she wasn’t here to see Hope born. But she was real touched when I told her about Tessa sitting in the mud holding her mama’s head and talking her through it.”
Dillon grinned. “I might have had a little to do with getting Hope born. You, too.”
The men traded knowing grins. Best to let the ladies take all the credit when it came to birthing kids or critters.
Dillon ran a hand down the calf’s back. Glossy, thick coat, good muscle tone. He checked her gums and listened to her breathing and heart. Calves born early were prone to underdeveloped lungs and respiratory infections, but hers sounded strong and clear.
“Clean bill?” Pete asked.
“Clean as it gets. Keep her on the supplement another month. But she’s a healthy, happy calf.”
Pete grinned. “How’s Makayla getting along with Murphy?”
“She’d sleep in his stall every night if Tessa let her. He’s being so patient while she learns to ride. Great horse.”
“I’m just glad he found another little girl to raise. He’ll teach her all the things she needs to know. He did real good with my girl. Couldn’t have done it without him. Teen years can be tough.”
Desire to be there for Makayla’s tough teen years spiked through him so hard it hurt.
Pete shook his head. “I bred and raised Hope’s mama, And she wouldn’t cooperate one bit for me that day. But she calmed right down for Tessa. In all my years of ranching, I’ve never seen a cow put her head in anyone’s lap.”
“That was something, wasn’t it?”
“Special lady, that Tessa. Classy of her to plop right down in the mud for a suffering animal.”
As classy as they came.
Dillon glanced at his watch. Twenty minutes to school pickup. “Afraid I’ve got somewhere to be,” he announced. Pete walked him back to the truck.
He pulled into the elementary school parking lot and joined the line of parents picking up kids. Makayla came out with her violin case in one hand and a bandage on her elbow.
She climbed in and tossed her backpack in the back. “Hi.”
“Hi, you. What happened to the elbow?”
“I tripped.”
“On what?”
“On the floor.”
“Solid choice. It’s always there when you need it.”
She was lying, but he wasn’t going to press the point. She’d talk about it when she was ready.
About halfway home Makayla said, “I signed up to play my violin in the school talent show. It’s in a couple of weeks.”
“Good for you. I was never brave enough to do anything like that in front of the other kids.”
“Professor Cohen and I are working on a special piece for it. Will you come see it? Watch me play?”
Joy leapt in his chest that she thought enough of him to invite him. “I’d be delighted to come, Makayla.”
“Promise?”
“As long as there’s no big medical emergency I have to handle, I promise.” He added sincerely, “I’m sorry I can’t guarantee 100% that I’ll be there. But if I do get called away, I’ll ask your mom to video it for me and I’ll watch it later with you.”
She nodded, looking pleased.
“Ashley Deckard made fun of me for signing up to perform. She said playing violin is dumb and boring—”
She broke off abruptly and he waited her out. She continued all at once. “Then I said she was dumb and boring, and she pushed me. I yanked my violin case out of the way so I wouldn’t fall on it and hurt it, and that’s how I skinned my elbow.”
He drove on in silence.
“Comments? Criticism?” Makayla asked anxiously.
“Is this Deckard girl, in fact, dumb and boring?” he asked gravely.
“So dumb and boring.”
“Did you get in trouble?”
“The lunchroom monitor saw her shove me and sent her to the office. I got to go back to class. And before you ask, I apologized to her before fifth period.”
“Let me know if you need me to change the dressing on your elbow for you,” he said mildly.
“Okay.” A long, loaded pause. Then, “Have you ever been to Connecticut?”
He kept his eyes on the road. “I did an internship during vet school in New Hampshire. It’s next door to Connecticut.”
“Was it nice?”
“It’s leafier than here. Smaller mountains. More white houses. Why?”
“My grandmother called my mom this morning. There’s a music school in Connecticut that wants me. It’s a really good one.”
“I’m not surprised. You’re really talented.”
“It’s a boarding school. I wouldn’t come home except for Christmases and summers.”
“Mm.”
“It’s really expensive. But my grandmother said she’d pay for it.”
“Sounds like a big opportunity.”
“I don’t know if I want to go,” she said heavily.
“What does your mom think?” he asked.
“She was crying when she hung up. My grandmother’s not going to send her any more money unless she moves back east, too. She told my grandmother she would think about it.” Another pause. “We have to decide by Friday.”
The cottonwoods along the road bent and swayed in unison as blustery weather rolled in off the mountains.
“That’s pretty soon to have to make such a big decision.”
“That’s what I thought.”
He pulled into Fern’s place—Tessa’s place—and the geese announced him with their usual raucous clamor. Brown Dog ambled around the corner and sat down to wait for Makayla.
He parked beside the house and killed the engine.
Makayla didn’t get out either. “Are you going to come inside?”
He wasn’t ready to face the conversation Tessa was no doubt going to want to have with him. She needed to know what his intentions toward her were. Before Friday. But he didn’t know, himself. He knew he had big feelings for her. But was he prepared to act on them in the next three days?
“I can’t come in today,” he answered. “I’ve got a call to make.”
“Okay.” She climbed out and Brown Dog wagged his gray-flecked tail.
“Tell your mom I said hello.”
“Okay.”
He barely made it past the bend in the road before he had to pull over.
A music school in Connecticut. Boarding.
Tuition that would make his eyes water. Tessa could have access to her trust fund again if she moved back east. It was a stark reminder that Tessa came from the kind of money, power, and access that effortlessly opened doors because her family’s name was on the building.
He’d married a woman from that world, and she’d tried to draw him into it. He knew how that story ended because he’d already lived it. He hadn’t given up veterinary medicine and being who he was for Lexi, and he couldn’t do it for Tessa, either.
He dragged a hand down his face.
Tessa’s family could give her and Makayla anything they wanted. Her daughter had a musical gift that truly deserved to be developed. Tessa had every reason on God’s green earth to take her daughter and go back east.
He could only offer mud and blood, hard work, an unpredictable schedule, and long nights with him gone on calls.
Farmers might own millions of dollars’ worth of land and equipment, but they were often cash poor and existed from harvest to harvest. He would never deny an animal care because the price of beef was down or a farmer had a bad crop that year and couldn’t afford to pay him.
Which meant he, too, was often scraping by financially.
He would never be able to offer her the life of luxury she’d grown up in and deserved to have.
And now there was a music school in Connecticut.
A few fat raindrops splatted against the windshield.
Don’t be the man she has to feel guilty about leaving.
He wanted desperately to ask her to stay.
But where would that put her five years from now, when the bridal store deal had dried up or the farm had eaten through everything she had or Makayla, grown, brilliant, and without an avenue into the music field, wanted to know why Tessa hadn’t let her go to the good music school.
Resentment would build in Tessa the same way it had in Lexi, and one day, she would pack a bag. He would watch her walk out and know—not guess, know—that he’d been the anchor holding her back from the life she deserved.
He turned the wipers on and pulled back onto the road. Lexi might have been wrong about him not being a man who showed up, but she was not wrong when she accused him of not giving him the life she deserved.
He was not going to be that man again. He cared too much for Tessa and Makayla to do that to either one of them.
Hank found him at the clinic the next morning.
Dillon had been there since five. He’d already scrubbed down the exam room, inventoried his medications, and reorganized the shelf where the dewormers lived.
He’d answered Bonnie Watson’s text about her puppy’s ear, confirmed two ranch calls for the afternoon, and ignored a voicemail from Reno that started with, so just a quick question.
He hadn’t opened the text from Tessa.
It had come in at six-twelve. He’d read the preview line—Want to talk to you. Free tonight?—and put the phone down.
He’d spent all night building his emotional wall of solitude and he wasn’t going to start knocking bricks out of it before breakfast.
Hank strolled in carrying two coffee cups from Rose’s diner and set one on the desk in front of him. “You look like a med student who slept in a chair at his desk.”
“I slept in a bed.”
“In a chair-shaped way?”
He rolled his eyes and picked up the coffee.
Hank sipped his own coffee in silence. His brother had a doctor’s patience and could outlast almost anyone in a waiting game. It was an extremely irritating quality in a brother.
“Spit it out,” Dillon said finally.
“Spit what out?”
“Whatever you came here to say.”
Hank set his cup down. “Reno called me last night.”
He gifted his brother with a little professional silence of his own. After all, none of his patients could speak.
“Reno said you sounded weird on the phone yesterday. Apparently, you cut him off in the middle of telling you about a discovery motion and didn’t pick up when he called back to ask why.”
“I was driving.”
“For four hours?”
He didn’t answer that.
Hank leaned forward, his expression serious. “Dude.”
“Don’t.”
“You’re doing it again.”
“Doing what?”
“Running away before you can be told to leave.”
“I have no idea what you’re—”
Hank held up a hand, stopping him. “You can yell at me later. Right now I’m going to say what I came here to say, and then I’m going to leave so you can do whatever fool thing you’re going to do anyway.”
“Lovely.”
“Tessa didn’t ask you to fix her life.”
He looked up sharply at his brother.
“She didn’t ask you to compete with her mother’s checkbook. She didn’t ask you to outbid a music school. She didn’t ask you to be anything other than what you’ve already been to her, which, as far as I can tell, is the first man in a long time who to show up for her and stay.”
“Hank—”
“I’m not done. Lexi’s been gone for years and you’re still letting her run your life. You need to decide who writes the rules for you. I’m just suggesting that your ex-wife shouldn’t still be calling the shots.”
Lexi wasn’t calling the shots anymore. He was the one deciding not to wreck Tessa and Makayla’s lives. Sure, he might’ve made that decision based on his experience with Lexi, but this was all him.
He opened his mouth to say so, but Hank stood up and cut him off with, “Don’t answer me. I’m going to go because you’ve got that look in your eye that tells me you’re about to be very stubborn.”
“It’s my best look.”
“It’s your worst look, bro.”
Hank paused at the door. “Tessa’s going to need you, whatever she decides. Don’t make her decide alone because you’re scared.” And with that, his brother walked out.
The workshop was cold when he opened the door.
He’d been coming out here a few nights a week ever since Arlo gave him a key to the shop. He came out after work, after dinner, sometimes staying till past midnight.
The rocking chair was on a pair of sawhorses in the middle of the room.
He’d built the seat first—wide oak slats, scooped and sanded smooth, joined the way Arlo had taught him.
The arms, also scooped and sanded to fit the forearm just right were finished, as was the gently curved back.
He’d made every part of it with an eye to maximum comfort, sized up from Fern’s rocker to fit a slender woman Tessa’s height.
He’d shaped the rockers from a single length of maple Arlo had pulled out of a stack in the back of the shop and said, this piece has been waiting to be part of a good chair.
He finished joining the rockers, set it on the floor, and gave it a push. It rocked perfectly. No wobble. No hitch in its motion. All he had left to do was sand the whole thing to silken smoothness and rub in several coats of oil by hand.
It was a chair a woman could sit in for decades.
And he knew as sure as he knew it was a good chair that he couldn’t finish it.
He couldn’t gift it to Tessa and then watch her leave it behind. Leave him behind. Nor could he give it to her if she stayed. When he ultimately failed to provide for her and she lost the porch this chair was made for, she would grow to resent the chair as a symbol of all he’d cost her.
Outside, the rain had stopped. The skylights let in the silvery, washed-clean light of the valley after a spring storm. A patch of it fell across the rocker like the heavens were telling him to keep going. He ignored the message.
He cleaned and put away Mick’s tools, turned off the work lights, and locked the door. Arlo was on his porch in his rocking chair, watching him without comment.
Dillon raised a hand. Arlo raised one back.
He intentionally didn’t look at Tessa’s porch where a small, empty rocker sat alone, and where there was going to be—for the foreseeable future—exactly the same number of chairs as there had been when this whole thing started.
He drove home in the golden evening light and did not pick up the phone when she called. Again.