Chapter 12
Chloe
I wasn’t sure what I’d done to piss Teddy off this time, but it was clear I’d managed to somehow.
She wasn’t cold, exactly – not in the way that suggested she’d bought a voodoo doll of me and started sticking pins in it.
It was more like a door had shut that I’d thought had started to crack open.
I tried to find her to let her know that I had actually weeded the lavender beds, despite the fact that my farm chores were supposed to have lessened so I could work on the event and marketing, but she completely ignored me as I waved to get her attention.
She barely glanced my way as we crossed paths, and when she did, it was the sort of look you might give a large rock, or maybe a weed like the ones I’d been pulling.
I pretended I didn’t care, even to myself, but of course I did. I replayed over and over the conversation we’d had, trying to figure out what I’d said that was so triggering, but I came up empty. She was clearly determined to be as opaque as possible.
At lunch, I grabbed my sandwich – courtesy of Phil, who’d started making me packed lunches for my days on the farm – and went out to the far corner of the farm, where the orchard met a scrim of brambles and old, tangled barbed wire.
The last of the trees – pear, I was pretty sure – had a perfect crook at the base of its trunk, and I let myself settle into it.
The ground was damp, but I didn’t care. I was already dirty from my impromptu weeding.
My boots were caked in half the county’s mud.
Morgan had taken one look at them last week and declared them officially mine, which was fine, since they’d broken in nicely.
The sandwich was impeccable, of course – brie and homemade chilli jam melted together in my mouth, the seeded bread soft and pillowy.
I’d also brought some crisps, and, once I’d had a bite I could actually review to Phil, I did what he would have considered sacrilege and pressed a pile of sweet chilli crisps into the rest of my sandwich, crunching away at it.
After I’d finished my lunch and licked some errant jam from my thumb, I pulled out my journal – a battered thing now, with all my clever and aesthetic stickers peeling off, the spiral binding uncoiling at the top, the front page curling at the corners – and just started writing.
I began with a single word – Teddy – then another.
Or, well, a series of question marks. Pretty soon, I was writing full-on letters to her that I knew I would never deliver:
Why does it bother me so much when you shut me out? I didn’t even know you until weeks ago, except for one ill-timed moment thousands of miles from here. Are you like this because you don’t care about anyone else at all, or am I uniquely detestable to you?
Do you hate me because you see me and loathe who I am, or because you don’t want to know me, unsure what you’d see if you looked close enough? And why the FUCK can’t I be normal about this???
Why do I care so much????????
I filled four pages without stopping, barely even punctuating.
I wrote about the look on her face when she found the bee with the broken wing: the way she whispered to it, and the careful, practical mercy of her hands.
I wrote about how she was at Fatima’s on Thursday nights; how she had a laugh that started out sharp and then caught itself, embarrassed to have escaped.
I wrote about how she moved around the farm like every step mattered; like she was following a perfectly charted course that only she could see. How I was just trying to keep up with the way she worked; the way she thought; the feelings she drew out of me so easily.
I wrote about how she made me feel small, but not in the way I was used to. Like she was using a measuring stick I didn’t realise was there until I fell short. I wrote about wanting to impress her, to prove her wrong about me, even though I told myself I didn’t care.
When my hand cramped, I let the pen fall into the middle of the notebook and closed my eyes, my head tipping back against the bark.
I heard the sheep bleating in the field on the next farm over, the groan of the old fence in the wind, and Willow’s distant yelp as she chased something down the hedge line.
I thought about the last time someone’s approval had mattered this much to me.
Not since my mother, probably, and that was a disaster I’d spent most of my life pretending was a bad joke.
My mum had been the sort of person who never apologised; who said “I love you” only in the form of elaborate critiques, because she cared, of course.
She’d told me once that I was a “force of nature.” It sounded like praise, until I realised she’d meant it the way you’d describe a cyclone: unpredictable, inconvenient, and destructive.
For a while, I’d tried to outdo her with my indifference. To care less; to be impossible to hurt. Then I’d stopped trying altogether and just let myself be blown around instead by whatever weather happened to come along.
But Teddy was different. She didn’t seem to demand anything in particular from me – she just refused to pretend.
She held me to account when I tried to alleviate a situation with charm.
She was the first person in years who’d made me want to try harder, because it felt like the only way to get her to look at me with anything but indifference.
Her approval was hard to earn, and she made me work for it every single time.
I wiped my nose on my sleeve. I wasn’t going to cry about it, but my eyes stung anyway, maybe from the wind or something.
I looked down at my boots, at the dirt caked in the creases of my knuckles, at the stains on my knees that no doubt matched new ones on my bum.
This job was the most consequential thing I’d ever done.
Not just for myself, but for them – Gwenynen had all its eggs in my basket, and if I failed, what did that mean for them?
Never mind for me. I had a job I could go back to, even if I hated it.
But the fate of the farm was in my hands, too.
Okay, maybe that was a bit dramatic. But it made me appreciate why Teddy was so hard on me. When every little thing is make-or-break, it makes you extra wary of things that threaten breakage.
I was snapped out of my thought spiral by a text message:
JACK
Morgan’s got the day off Friday next week. Kayaking?
I rolled my eyes as I replied:
CHLOE
You want ME to go kayaking?
JACK
No, I want TEDDY to go kayaking. In fact, she said she wants to go. But you’re how I get to Teddy.
CHLOE
So you don’t actually want to hang out with me.
You just want me for my grumpy boss.
JACK
Glad you understand.
Also, my girlfriend wants you to come so she doesn’t have to sit on the bank by herself whilst we kayak.
CHLOE
So I don’t even get to go kayaking at all?!?!?!
JACK
Do you WANT to go kayaking?
CHLOE
Ew, don’t be ridiculous.
Whatever, I’m in. I’ll ask Teddy.
I dragged myself to my feet, wiped my face again for good measure, and headed back to the studio where my laptop was. There were still hours left in the workday, and I had a lot to do and a lot hanging on it.
I spent the next hour glued to my laptop, AirDropping photos and videos to myself, editing the ones that looked the most on-brand, and cataloguing every bit of B-roll into folders for later.
I wanted to be organised. Teddy and I were going to our first local event over the weekend – a cheese festival in a nearby town – and I wanted to get plenty of content.
And to be able to manage that much content, I needed all my digital ducks in a row.
Just before two p.m., I was desperately trying to design a social media graphic that didn’t look terrible, thinking about looping Morgan in for graphic design help, when I heard heavy boots on the hard floor behind me.
Teddy’s boots, I knew without looking. She walked past the table without looking at me, then doubled back and hovered across from where I sat.
I could feel her there, even as I refused to look up from my laptop unless spoken to.
“Do you have time to help me with something?” she asked, her voice so even it might as well have come from a satnav or a smart home device.
I finally looked up at her, noting the way she was chewing on her bottom lip, her brow intensely furrowed as if something were eating away at her. I wanted to say something snide about how I couldn’t very well say no to my boss, but I settled for a nod instead.
“Thanks,” she said, then waved for me to follow her. I frowned, but I still shut my laptop and followed her outside.
We ended up in the polytunnel. Despite the fact that the doors remained open during the day so the bees could get in – I remembered that much from the revised tour Teddy had given me on my second day on the farm – it was humid as hell inside.
Which I supposed was the point, but I hated the way my hair stuck to my neck instantly.
There were dozens of trays of seedlings lining the beds, most of which were relatively empty, and a couple of spades, one on each side.
“Will I be doing some gardening?” I asked, raising a brow at her.
Teddy nodded. “Both of us,” she said, shooting me a fleeting glance, as if she were nervous I’d say no. “These need to be planted out today, ideally, and I had to wash my mangy dog after she rolled around in a cowpat, so now I can’t finish it all on my own.”
Was this her weird, farmer way of trying to make amends? I nodded and tried for a smile. “Sure,” I said. “Tell me what to do.”
Teddy got me started on some sweetcorn seedlings against the wall, whilst she hunkered down in front of some rows of beetroot.
She told me how deep to plant them and how far apart, and we worked in silence for a couple of minutes.
It wasn’t bad, actually, especially if I pretended I was in a farming sim.