Chapter 11
Teddy
I’d surprised myself by saying yes to the next D less desperate to fill the silence and crack a smile.
She let me work in silence if I wanted to, saying she could always put music and captions over it, and she only asked me questions that sounded genuine and unscripted.
I almost – almost – missed the chatter and excitement.
By the end of the week, she’d put together a test video of me inspecting the hive for mites and messaged it to all of us. I opened it on my phone while sitting on the hilltop overlooking the farm, the evening sunshine feeling decidedly summery, Willow rolling in the grass at my feet.
The video was … honestly, really good. She’d made me look so confident and knowledgeable.
She’d cut in shots of bees landing on my sleeve and even edited out my nervous laugh at the end.
If I’d been the type of person to post on social media, I might have shared it myself.
She was due to launch her new marketing strategy next week, and, as sceptical as I’d been, it looked great. Professional.
The festival date was set for three weeks before I was due to leave for the season, right at the end of August. It was a good time for it; summer would still be in full swing on the farm, but it was the penultimate weekend before schools started up again, so families would be keen to make the most of it.
It seemed like ages away to me – I’d only just arrived, and by the time it came around, I’d be about to leave again – but Chloe insisted it was barely any time at all, which freaked me out a bit.
Chloe immediately started cranking the social engine into overdrive.
She scheduled posts, set up “collaborations” with a local cheesemonger and the pork farm up the road, had thousands of little handouts printed for us to take to other events, and shadowed me almost every day.
It was relentless, but I couldn’t deny the almost immediate impact on our following, and Jen was over the moon.
She kept saying things like, “You two make such a good team,” which always made both of us retreat to opposite corners of the farm.
I still compartmentalised as best as I could, filling the days with chores, taking Willow for long walks, and throwing myself into the garden work demanded at this time of year.
But, the more I tried to lose myself in my job, the more I noticed little things changing about the way Gwenynen worked.
I realised Jen hadn’t shared the updated finances with me in months.
Maggie had built a new, better fence along the southern border so I wouldn’t need to mend it anymore.
Even Chloe started to feel less like an interloper and more like a fixture – someone who belonged.
The feeling gnawed at me: that this place I’d called home, that I’d longed for for so many years, didn’t actually need me to thrive.
I knew that wasn’t true – Jen did her best with the bees in the off season, but I knew the hives inside and out, and my horticulture degree genuinely came in handy every single day – but, as I took in the buzz of activity around me, I couldn’t help but feel redundant.
There was an unsettled feeling in my chest that I’d never experienced at Gwenynen before, and I didn’t like it one bit.
* * *
One Friday night after dinner, as Jen and I made cups of jasmine tea and settled on the sofa for a film, I asked her about the finances. We had always gone through them together each month, but I’d been home for weeks now, and she hadn’t mentioned them once, nor had she shared them over the winter.
“Oh, I already handled all that,” she said, literally waving me off. “You don’t need to deal with the boring stuff.”
“But we always do that together,” I said, pausing the intro to the film, forcing Jen to look at me. “Do you not want my help anymore?”
“I can handle the finances, Ted. You shouldn’t have to worry about all that, especially during your time here.”
I frowned, the tightness in my chest constricting – “your time here” sounded more like, “your limited time here”.
“But I like doing that with you. I like being your partner in all this.”
Jen sighed, and when she looked over at me and held my gaze, I recognised the soft sadness in her eyes.
It was the look she gave me when she was thinking about Mom.
And I understood; she’d originally wanted to do all this with her sister.
It had been their dream. But we’d both lost her, and I didn’t like feeling cut out, especially after everything I’d put into the farm over the years.
Still, I knew better than to press when Jen got like this.
She could turn from casual to upset in a nanosecond, and I didn’t want to be the reason she felt sad.
Even if I had to carry the sadness instead.
So I un-paused the film and tried to forget about the finances, and the way Jen had been cutting me out of more and more parts of the farm.
Instead, I ran my finger around the pendant dangling from my neck and thought about Mom.
There had been a time, not long ago, that I could have said anything to Jen and not worried about how she’d react.
Other than Mom, she’d been the closest person to me my entire life, emotionally if not always physically.
But, somewhere along the way, things had changed. I only wished I understood why.
* * *