19. Bree
— ? —
Bree
The chicken coop ramp was a work of engineering genius.
I stood at the edge of the yard and stared at it, trying to find a flaw, trying to find some reason to criticize the three-tiered, gently sloped, predator-resistant masterpiece that my ex-husband had apparently built overnight.
I couldn’t find one.
The wood was sanded smooth. The joints were perfect. There were tiny rails on either side, just high enough to keep a chicken from falling off, and the whole thing was painted the same red as the barn.
“He reinforced the joints with steel brackets,” Molly observed from beside me. “I watched him do it. He measured everything three times.”
“It’s a chicken ramp. The chickens don’t need steel brackets.”
“The chickens look happy.”
They did. Henrietta the Second, named after the chick from the expo, was currently strutting up and down the ramp with the satisfaction of a queen surveying her domain. She clucked approvingly. Two other hens followed her, testing the structure, finding it to their liking.
“Rosie asked for it,” I said. “She said the old ramp was too steep and the chickens were scared.”
“And he built this in response?”
“Apparently.”
Molly let a beat pass. “He’s good with her.”
“I know.”
“Really good. Patient with her, and he actually listens.”
She was watching him through the kitchen window, where he sat letting Rosie braid clover into his hair with the same grave focus he’d once given quarterly earnings.
“I know, Molly.”
“I’m just saying-”
“I know what you’re saying. You’re saying I should reconsider my position. You’re saying he’s changed. You’re saying maybe I was wrong about him.”
I heard how it sounded the second it left my mouth. Defensive. Rehearsed. I’d already had this fight with myself, and lost.
“Was I going to say any of that?”
“Weren’t you?”
She smiled. “Maybe the last part.”
Instead of answering, I watched too. The clover was only the opening act; Rosie had announced a “very important tea party” for the afternoon. He’d been informed via formal invitation, hand-delivered by Rosie that morning, that his attendance was mandatory.
He’d shown up in a button-down shirt. He’d tried to tuck it in.
“I need to check on the greenhouse,” I said.
“Sure you do.”
I walked away from Molly’s knowing gaze and circled around to the back of the house, where I could see through the window without being noticed.
The tea party was in full swing.
Rosie had arranged her stuffed animals in a circle around her small table. Mr. Bunny was in the place of honor. Teddy was on his left. Penguin, inexplicably, was wearing a doll’s hat.
Rafael was seated on a chair much too small for him, his knees practically at his chin, studying a piece of paper with intense concentration.
“This seating chart,” he said, his voice drifting through the open window, “shows Mr. Bunny in the primary position, but his chair appears to be lower than the others. Is that intentional?”
Rosie considered this with grave seriousness. “His chair is special.”
“Special how?”
“It’s the thinking chair. When you sit in it, you have to think really hard about important things.”
“And what important things does Mr. Bunny think about?”
He asked it with complete gravity, a grown man conducting a serious interview with a stuffed rabbit. Rosie had waited her whole life for someone to take Mr. Bunny this seriously.
“Carrots, mostly. Sometimes he thinks about his feelings.”
“That’s a lot of responsibility for one rabbit.”
“He’s a very responsible rabbit.”
Rafael nodded solemnly. “I can see that. But I’m concerned about the structural integrity of his chair. The legs seem uneven. If he leans too far forward while thinking about carrots, he might tip over.”
Rosie’s eyes went wide. “He might fall?”
“It’s possible. Would you like me to reinforce the chair? I have some spare brackets from the chicken ramp project.”
“Yes, please. Mr. Bunny can’t fall. He’s the guest of honor.”
“Understood. I’ll handle it after tea.”
I pressed my hand to my mouth.
This was Rafael Grant. The man who’d commanded boardrooms and negotiated billion-dollar deals and made grown executives tremble with a single raised eyebrow. He was sitting in a tiny chair, drinking invisible tea from a plastic cup, discussing the structural integrity of a stuffed rabbit’s seat.
And he was taking it completely seriously.
“Rafe?” Rosie’s voice was smaller now.
“Yes?”
“Do you like it here? At our farm?”
“I love it here.”
“More than your other job? The one far away?” She was frowning at her teacup.
Rosie asked it dead serious, the way she asked everything, and outside the window I gave up pretending I wasn’t listening.
“Much more.”
“Why?”
Rafael set down his plastic cup. His expression shifted, softer and more honest.
“Because here, I get to build things that matter. Like chicken ramps. And rabbit chairs.” He reached out and gently adjusted Penguin’s hat. “And I get to spend time with you. That’s the best part.”
Rosie beamed. “You’re my favorite farmhand.”
“I’m your only farmhand.”
“You’d still be my favorite even if there were a hundred.”
I stepped away from the window before I could hear more.
My chest hurt. An actual physical ache, located somewhere behind my ribs, spreading outward with each breath. I walked to the greenhouse without seeing where I was going and stood among the tomato plants and tried to figure out what I was feeling.
The afternoon continued in the same vein.
After the tea party, Rafael and Rosie moved to the living room for what she called “tower time.” I watched from the kitchen, pretending to prepare dinner, while they sat on the floor surrounded by building blocks.
“The base needs to be wider,” Rafael explained, demonstrating. “If the base is narrow, the tower will be unstable. See?” He built a narrow tower and pushed it gently. It collapsed.
“It fell!” Rosie was delighted by the destruction.
“Exactly. Now watch what happens when we make the base wider.”
He rebuilt, this time spreading the blocks out at the bottom. The tower stood firm.
“That’s so cool! Do it again!”
They spent an hour building towers, knocking them down, building them again. Rafael explained load distribution and center of gravity and architectural principles, using words Rosie couldn’t possibly understand, and she absorbed every one of them with the intense focus she’d inherited from him.
Dark head bent over dark head, the two of them frowning at the blocks in exactly the same way.
Father and daughter.
The words kept echoing in my mind, even as I chopped vegetables and stirred pots and did all the normal things that didn’t feel normal anymore.
I’d kept them apart. For four years, I’d kept them from each other, and now they were in my living room building towers and discussing structural engineering, and I couldn’t stop watching them.
Dinner was chaos in the best way. Rosie insisted that Rafe sit next to her, that he use the blue plate (her second favorite, an honor she didn’t bestow lightly), that he tell her about the chickens while they ate.
Rafael complied with every request. He sat where she pointed and used the blue plate without question, and he told her about Henrietta the Second’s apparent displeasure with the new ramp design (“She walked up it three times and then gave me a look that suggested my engineering skills were inadequate”).
Rosie laughed so hard she almost spit out her peas.
“Mommy, Rafe is so funny!”
“He thinks he is,” I said.
“I prefer ‘accidentally amusing,’” Rafael offered. “The humor is unintentional but welcome.”
“Your face is unintentional.”
“That’s not even a comeback,” he said, grinning.
“It’s the best I could do on short notice.”
“Your short notice needs work.”
Rosie watched us bicker with obvious delight. “You talk to each other funny.”
“Funny how?” Rafael asked.
“I don’t know. Different than how you talk to me. Like you’re playing a game.”
“We’re playing a game,” I said. “It’s called ‘who can annoy the other person more.’”
“Who’s winning?”
“I am,” Rafael said.
“You’re not.”
“You laughed at the chicken story. That’s a point for me.”
“That was a pity laugh,” I said, mostly to my plate.
“There’s no such thing. A laugh is a laugh.”
He was grinning at me across the table, loose and unguarded in a way the man I married never once had been. Texas was working on him.
“Says who?”
“Says me. I’m keeping score.”
“Since when?” I demanded.
“Since always. I’m up by seven.”
He said it with such conviction I half believed there was a real ledger somewhere, a spreadsheet titled Making Bree Laugh, columns and running totals and all.
“That’s completely made up.”
“All scores are made up. That’s what makes them scores.”
Rosie giggled. Rafael caught my eye and winked, and my chest did a complicated flip that I refused to examine.
Bedtime was harder.
I tucked Rosie in, pulling the covers up to her chin, smoothing her hair back from her forehead. She’d had her bath and her story and her glass of water. All the normal rituals.
“Mommy?”
“Yes, baby?”
“Rafe can stay forever, right?”
The question hit me in the center of my chest.
“We’ll see.”
Rosie’s face shifted. She knew that phrase. She’d heard it enough times to understand what it really meant.
“We’ll see means probably not.”
“It means we’ll see.”
She fixed me with the flat, unimpressed stare she’d inherited straight from me, and I felt the whole conversation getting away from me.
“But I want him to stay. He builds good ramps and he plays tea party right and he makes you laugh even when you don’t want to.”
“Rosie-”
“Please, Mommy? Please can he stay forever?”
With no answer to give her, I kissed her forehead and turned off the light and walked out of the room before she could see my face.
The house was quiet after that. Rafael had left after dinner, back to the inn, and I was alone with the silence and my thoughts and the questions I couldn’t answer.
My phone rang.
The number was blocked. I almost let it go, but I answered anyway.
“So.” The voice was smooth and unhurried, and I placed it before she said another word. “Is he with you?”
Camille.
“How did you get this number?”
“That’s not really an answer. Though I suppose it is one.” A soft, satisfied sound came down the line. “I told you what would happen if you stayed in his life, Brianna. I handed you a clean way out, and you didn’t take it. So don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
“Warn me about wh-”
The line went dead.
I stood in the dark kitchen with the phone still at my ear and exactly one thought, uncharitable and immediate: this absolute bitch. She had my personal number and she knew Rafael was here, and she’d called my house just to remind me she wasn’t finished.
It was noise, I told myself. A jealous woman rattling a cage from a thousand miles away. I almost believed it.
I went to bed early. Fell asleep fast. Dreamed about things I didn’t want to remember.
The nightmare was an old one, the penthouse and the interview playing on a loop, the crowd laughing, Rafael’s voice saying take the girl off the farm while I smiled and smiled and felt my heart breaking behind my teeth.
I woke up sweating.
The clock said 2:47 a.m. The sheets were tangled around my legs. My heart was pounding.
I got up. Stripped off my damp shirt. Walked to the laundry basket in the corner of my room to drop it in.
His shirt was there.
Rafael had left it yesterday, after he’d gotten covered in mud helping fix the irrigation line. I’d washed it without thinking, folded it without thinking, left it in the basket to return to him.
I picked it up.
It still carried his scent. Faint, mostly overtaken by laundry detergent, but there underneath. The smell I remembered from our marriage. The smell I’d fallen asleep to a thousand times.
I shouldn’t do this.
I did it anyway.
The shirt went on over my head. It was too big, the sleeves hanging past my hands, the hem reaching my thighs. It smelled clean and warm and like him.
It smelled safe.