18. Bree
— ? —
Bree
I gave him the ditch on a Thursday, because I wanted him to quit.
That was the honest reason, though I dressed it up as necessity.
The drainage ditch along the low field had silted up over the winter and half-collapsed in the spring storms, and the almanac had rain coming by the weekend.
If the water couldn’t run off, the low field flooded, and if the low field flooded, I lost the fall squash I’d been babying since July.
It needed to be dug out and re-cut by hand, forty yards of it, in clay that grabbed a shovel and wouldn’t give it back.
I’d done it myself the first year, alone and six months along, and it had nearly finished me.
I handed him the shovel after breakfast and told him what I needed, flat and businesslike, already composing the speech I’d give the women about how the city boy had lasted right up until the work got ugly.
“By when?” was all he asked.
“Before the rain.”
He looked at the sky, then down at the shovel in his hands. “Okay,” he said, and he walked into the low field and started digging.
I didn’t check on him. Too busy, I told myself.
I ran the stall and put Rosie to bed, and made myself not look every time I passed a window that faced the low field.
When the light went and he still hadn’t come up to the house, I decided he’d give it up in the dark and slink off to the inn, and I’d find the job half-done and abandoned in the morning.
That would be the answer to every question I’d been too scared to ask out loud.
That night, I went to bed sure of it.
I found him at dawn.
He was at the bottom of the ditch, and the ditch was finished, the whole length of it cut down to the clay and sloped right, the water already finding the channel exactly where it was supposed to go.
His shovel was still in his hand. His clothes had stopped being clothes somewhere around midnight and turned into a second skin of red mud, and his palms, when I climbed down and turned them over, were torn open and crusted black.
He was fast asleep, sitting up against the wall of the ditch he’d killed himself to dig, a smear of mud drying on his cheek where he’d wiped sweat with the back of a ruined hand.
I stood over him in the gray light and felt the last wall I’d been holding come down without my permission.
Because the old Rafael would’ve hired a crew.
He’d have made a call and watched the work happen from behind glass.
This one had gone down into the clay with a shovel and stayed there through the night, alone, in the dark, for a squash crop that wasn’t even his, because I’d asked him to and because he wanted me to see that he would.
“Rafael.” My voice came out strange.
He woke slowly. Blinked up at me, registered the finished ditch, and a flash of panic crossed his face, because he thought he’d failed some part of it.
“The rain,” he croaked. “Is it done right? I wasn’t sure about the slope near the-”
“It’s done right.”
“Oh.” He sagged back against the mud. “Good.”
I should’ve said thank you. I should’ve said a hundred things.
Instead I crouched down in the mud beside my ex-husband and took one of his ruined hands in both of mine, careful of the raw skin, and I held it.
Neither of us said anything at all. Somewhere in that silence, I lost the ability to lie to myself about what was happening to me.
It took me the better part of a week to look at him normally again.
The fence line needed mending. That was why I was out here at seven in the morning with a cup of coffee and a pair of pliers, not because I wanted to check on the new farmhand, not because I’d been thinking about him all night, and definitely not because Molly had teased me at dinner about “keeping tabs on the pretty city boy.”
The fence needed mending. That was the story, and I was sticking to it.
I found the loose section near the north pasture and got to work, twisting wire, checking posts, doing mindless physical labor that usually cleared my head. The sun was already warm, promising a hot day, and I’d tied my hair back and rolled up my sleeves and settled into the rhythm of it.
The wire bit into my gloves. The posts were solid, mostly. One needed replacing, but that was a job for another day, a job that required a post-hole digger and more energy than I had this morning.
Then I looked up.
Rafael was in the east paddock, moving hay bales.
I’d told him to do that. I’d specifically assigned him to hay duty because it was grunt work, a task you gave someone you wanted to break. Heavy lifting, repetitive motion, guaranteed to leave him sore for days.
He’d been at it for over an hour, apparently, because his shirt was soaked through.
The fabric clung to his back, outlining the muscles that moved beneath it. He’d cut the sleeves off at some point, probably when the heat got unbearable, and his arms were bare, tanned from two weeks of outdoor work, flexing as he lifted each bale onto his shoulder.
One shoulder. He was carrying hay bales on one shoulder, the way the women had taught him, the way I’d seen my father do it a thousand times. He’d learned.
He had gloves in his teeth. I didn’t know why.
Maybe he’d taken them off to adjust a strap and hadn’t put them back on, or maybe he just liked the look of it, but they were there, clenched between his teeth, and his jaw was tight with effort, and I watched him cross the paddock with that bale balanced on one shoulder, and desire pulled tight and low in me, sudden and unwelcome.
This was a problem.
This was a significant problem.
He reached the stack, deposited the bale, turned to go back for another. As he turned, he caught sight of me at the fence line. His face broke into a grin, easy and unselfconscious, and he raised a hand in greeting.
I raised mine back. Casual. Normal. Not at all affected by the sight of him.
He went back to work. I went back to pretending to work while actually watching him from the corner of my eye.
The horse situation made it worse.
Penny, the gray mare, was following him around the paddock, for no reason anyone could name except that she’d apparently decided he was her favorite person. Every time he picked up a bale, she nudged his shoulder. Every time he set one down, she was there, nosing at his pocket for treats.
He’d started carrying apple slices. I’d noticed them in his jacket that morning.
“You spoil her,” I’d told him at breakfast.
“She deserves it.”
“She’s a horse. She doesn’t know the difference.”
“She knows exactly the difference. She’s very discerning.”
And then there was Butterbean.
The pig had undergone a complete transformation.
Two weeks ago, he’d wanted Rafael dead. Now he was in love.
Desperately, embarrassingly in love, following Rafael everywhere he went, squealing with joy every time Rafael appeared, sleeping outside the inn at night because he couldn’t bear to be separated.
Patsy had called me twice to complain about the noise.
The town found this hilarious.
I’d caught Dot with actual binoculars yesterday, watching from the diner window while Rafael tried to muck out a stall and Butterbean kept getting in the way. She’d had a whole audience. People were buying coffee just to watch the show.
“He’s better than television,” she’d told me. “That pig follows him around screaming, and he just talks to it, real serious, about respecting personal space. Like it’s a business negotiation.”
“What does he say?”
“He says things like ‘Butterbean, we’ve discussed this. Personal boundaries are important for healthy relationships.’ And the pig just screams louder.”
I’d pretended to be annoyed. I’d failed.
Now, watching Rafael cross the paddock with Butterbean trotting behind him, loud and devoted, I felt my mouth twitch. He was talking to the pig. I couldn’t hear what from this distance, but his hands were moving, gesturing, making some kind of point.
Butterbean squealed.
Rafael nodded solemnly.
I turned back to the fence before I could laugh out loud.
The afternoon brought more trouble.
I was in the barn office, updating the delivery schedule, when I heard footsteps on the worn wooden floor. Rafael appeared in the doorway, dusty and tired and carrying a clipboard.
“I finished the hay,” he said. “And the goat enclosure. Hector only kicked me once today.”
“Progress.”
“I also noticed your compost setup behind the greenhouse.”
I looked up. “What about it?”
“It’s brilliant.”
The word caught me off guard. “It’s compost.”
“It’s a three-stage thermophilic composting system with integrated vermicomposting for nutrient acceleration.” He stepped into the office, eyes bright. “I haven’t seen that particular configuration outside of agricultural research facilities. Did you design it yourself?”
“I read some books.”
“Which books?”
“Does it matter?”
“Yes.” He pulled a chair over to my desk, sat down without asking permission.
“Because that setup is optimizing nitrogen fixation in a way that most commercial operations don’t even attempt.
The carbon-to-nitrogen ratio in your finished compost has to be nearly ideal. I tested a sample this morning.”
“You tested my compost?”
“I found a pH kit in the supply shed. I hope that’s okay.”
I looked at him, really looked. This was the CEO who’d spent our whole marriage checking his phone instead of talking to me. And now he was sitting in my barn office, vibrating with excitement about my compost.
“The soil charts are even better,” he continued, reaching past me to grab the binder I kept on the shelf. “This nitrogen mapping system you’re using, it’s incredibly efficient. You’re tracking micronutrient levels at a granular level that most farms can’t achieve. The data visualization alone is-”
“Rafael.”
He stopped. Looked at me.
“You’re geeking out,” I said.