Chapter 3
THREE
DYLAN
The tractor always sounds better than people.
That’s a lousy truth for a man who works with the public six days a week during the season. But the diesel hum has a rhythm I understand—air, fuel, fire, work. No guesswork. No old scars lighting up because somebody said my name like they used to.
Taegen sits on the hay bale behind me in the wagon, knees angled toward the side rail, camera strap wrapped twice around her hand like a promise. The wind lifts a piece of hair across her mouth and she tucks it behind her ear without thinking.
It’s the same move as when we were fourteen and she’d work on her homework in the barn loft. Tongue pressed to her teeth, deep in concentration.
She’s… more. That’s the best I’ve got. She’s somehow grown sharper and softer at the same time. Less girl, more woman.
And I don’t want to think about that. So I check the mirrors, roll past the mums, and let the engine talk for me.
She leans forward, raising her voice over the drone. “What am I seeing here, tour guide? Sell me the magic.”
I gesture with a gloved hand.
“Pumpkins on your left. More pumpkins on your right.” I tilt my chin toward the hill. “Forty-some varieties. Whites, blues, warty ones for kids who think bumps are fun.”
She snorts. “We agree on that, at least.”
“Tiny gourds for people who like to pretend they decorate. Giant ones for people who like to prove their strength by carrying it out without a wagon.”
“Which one are you?”
I keep my eyes on the lane as we bounce over a rut.
“The one who likes to prove the tractor won’t bog down even when it should.”
She laughs, and the sound reaches under my ribs where I’d wrapped everything tight and gives it a shake.
I ease us past the catapult—silent on weekdays—and swing toward the far edge where the property shrugs up into firs and spruce.
The mountains crouch beyond like old gods who don’t care for small talk.
“And over there,” she says, camera up, voice a little breathless despite the blasé tone, “is that the maze?”
“Haybales. Straw this year, mostly. We farm some crops over there in the north field. We rotate it to keep the ground from quitting on us.”
I point out the cannon range, the jumping pillow sagging empty as a sad cloud, the photo cutouts that need repainting.
“Weekends, it’s people everywhere. Weekdays, we fix.”
She shifts closer to the side rail to frame a shot. The wagon bumps and she steadies herself with a palm to the plank.
“Did you always want this?”
“This?” I ask.
“This,” she says, and her hand makes a circle that means all of it—the amber fields, the smell of diesel and cider, the mountain air that steals heat from your lungs and makes you want to earn it back. “The farm. The building. The… staying.”
The word sticks like a burr. I downshift as we take the gentle knoll.
“We all wanted something we could make with our hands.” I tip my head at the new fencing, the fresh cedar posts on the viewing deck, the clean span of truss that keeps the cider barn roof from sagging. “Turns out wood is easier to work with\ than people.”
“Depends on the people,” she says.
“Yeah,” I say, because I don’t trust myself with more.
We ride the last stretch to the far fence line in a quiet that isn’t comfortable yet. I cut the engine and the sudden lack of noise rings.
The world rushes back in. Wind blows high in the trees, the click and ping of hot metal cooling, Pumpkin’s distant bark from somewhere he shouldn’t be.
Taegen rewraps her strap, looks at me like she’s taking a picture she won’t print.
“Okay,” she says, voice normal-volume now that the tractor’s shut up. “Off the record?”
I don’t move. “Depends.”
“You look good, Dylan.” She says it like a simple fact and then rushes on before I can react. “Older, obviously—same as me. But you look… settled.”
I huff. “That’s the first time anyone’s accused me of that.”
“Okay, back on the record. Did you build all of this?”
“With my brothers and sister. Plus a few guys who show up when we give them enough beer and steaks.”
She smiles, then sobers, notebook coming out of her bag because old habits don’t die, they hibernate.
“What was the inspiration for the patch?”
“Quinn,” I say. “He can read a ledger faster than I can read a tape measure. And a few years back, he saw we were losing money, and he wanted to find a way to build some new revenue.” I scrub a hand over my jaw. “That’s off the record.”
Her pen hovers, then retracts. “Why?”
I look past her at the timberline. “Because Chad and Karen would love that version of the story.”
“Right.” She bites her lip. “They’re still… them.”
“More than ever.”
We sit with that for a second. She braces her heels on the plank, knees knocking my boot, and I have to look away so I don’t think about how easy it was to sit like this once, forever ago, in the loft with our notebooks and a bag of stale pretzels, pretending we didn’t know everything was about to tilt.
“What about you?” I ask, because she asked me straight and because I don’t get to keep my history with my mouth shut and demand hers. “You went to school. Wrote for the paper. How’d you decide to come back?”
She exhales like it’s a story she’s rehearsed and hates to tell.
“You know, the usual. I followed a boy to college. Stayed for the bylines.” She slips a smile on and it doesn’t reach her eyes. “You remember Derek? Our relationship went about as well as his football career.”
I frown. “I heard he works on tankers.”
“Exactly.”
“And then?” I ask, careful.
“He cheated two months into freshman year.” She says it so matter-of-factly.
“I broke up with him, wrote a column that pissed off the administration, and learned how to splice video on a deadline. The paper paid me in clips and the TV station paid me in exposure and somehow I kept getting work with my portfolio.”
“Good,” I say. It comes out rougher than I meant.
She rolls the pen between her fingers.
“After graduation I thought I’d move farther, but Seattle had enough skyline to keep me dizzy. I did the morning show circuit, then the paper picked me up for a lifestyle column and a video package. It was… good. Busy. Loud.”
“Then you came home.”
“My grandma called,” she says, voice going soft.
“Her knees are going. She can’t do the stairs.
And I realized I’d been running so fast I couldn’t name a single thing I’d built that would still be standing in ten years.
So I came back for the summer to help her.
Then the summer turned into your season. ”
Your season. Not our. Not mine. The correction happens in my brain on its own.
She glances up. “I told myself I’d split my time. Freelance for the paper here, keep my vlog going, help with Grandma.”
The urge comes in strong and out of nowhere. I want to lean in and kiss the corner of her mouth where the wind has left a dry crescent. To tell her she built good things even if they didn’t look like skyscrapers. To say I’m sorry I didn’t ask her out in high school like I should have.
Thank God, I catch myself.
I shift my weight, let the bench creak, and look anywhere that isn’t her mouth. “You want to see the zipline?”
She blinks, like she expected a different kind of question. “Is that a long way?”
“It’s a bit of a jaunt.”
She grins, all old-remembered mischief. “I’ve got boots. Let’s jaunt.”
I hop down and unhitch the wagon, dropping the pin back into the receiver with a clank. When I turn, she’s hesitating at the edge like she’s about to ask where she’s supposed to sit.
“Climb up,” I say, patting the narrow platform behind the seat. “Hands on the rail. Keep your feet clear. It’s not OSHA-approved, but it beats walking.”
“OSHA-approved,” she repeats, laughing under her breath. “That’s a phrase I’ll avoid putting in the column.”
“Please don’t.”
I offer my hand without thinking. She takes it. Skin, heat, history. Zing zing zing like I touched an electric fence—and I deserve the jolt for forgetting what it’s like.
She swings up agile, plants her boots, and braces her palm on my shoulder while she finds her balance. The weight of that hand sears a print through flannel and down to bone.
I clear my throat, face forward, and start the tractor.
We grind along the service lane that cuts behind the cider barn and through the thin strip of woods where I hung line after line in July while mosquitos considered me a buffet.
The air gets colder under the trees; the ground smells like damp leaves and iron.
“Is that new?” she asks over the engine, leaning closer to be heard.
Her breath hits the side of my neck in a way that makes my gut tighten.
“Installed in August. Weekends only, because I like to watch my insurance agent age in real time.”
I nod to the small platform ahead where the line spans out over the pumpkin fields like a silver vein. “We have two harnesses. One brave staffer on the top end, one at the bottom.”
I grin. “Kids go nuts. Their parents go next and pretend they’re thinking about their children’s joy instead of the fifteen seconds they get to feel like they’re not paying bills.”
She laughs, grip tightening. “What inspired it?”
“What inspires anything? I got bored. Had materials. Decided to make gravity do some of the entertainment.” I downshift, let the tractor roll to a stop beside the ladder that leads up to the launch deck.
“Also, you once told me the woods felt like an Enchanted Forest and I wanted to give people a better view of them.”
The words are out before I can catch them. I can feel her go still behind me.
“I said that?” she asks softly.
“Maybe,” I say, which is not an answer. “Once. In the loft. When we were supposed to be studying for AP history and you were drawing mustaches on the Founding Fathers in the textbook.”
She laughs, but it’s quiet. “I was a menace.”
“Still are,” I say, and climb down so I don’t have to watch how she’s looking at me.
I secure the tractor brake and start the climb, boots ringing on the metal ladder. At the top the view opens like a held breath.
The fields are a patchwork of color. The bright shock of orange, the duller green of vines, the rectangular brown dirt of the parking lot.
She steps onto the platform and goes quiet in the way people do when a place reminds them they’re small and that smallness is a relief.
“Okay,” she says after a beat, voice trembling just enough to count as human. “That’s a view.”
“Yep.”
She turns her camera and gets to work, snapping, crouching, framing, leaning out over the rail like she trusts the integrity of my bolts, which she should, but still makes my stomach drop.
“You always were like that,” I say before I can stop it.
“Like what?”
“Braver when you had a job to do.”
She lowers the camera and looks at me, and the wind goes out of whatever defense I had left. “I learned from the best,” she says. “You dragged me onto the rope swing over Cold Creek when everyone else chickened out.”
“I broke my toe that day.”
“You didn’t tell anyone for a week.”
“I didn’t want to give Lanie the satisfaction.”
We grin at the same memory, and the grin melts into something I should never name on a platform I built with my own hands, because then I’ll be responsible for it.
I rest my palms on the rail, look at the line I strung tight, and do the thing I know how to do. “Want to try the zip?”
She blinks the past out of her eyes and tucks a new strand of hair behind her ear. “It’s safe?”
“Of course, it is. I built it.”
She smiles. “Then absolutely. Let’s go big or gourd home.”
I groan. “Do not put that in your article.”
“No promises.”
I check the harnesses, hands steady because I make them be. I talk her through the clip-in, the stance, the lean. She trusts me without needing to say it, and that does more damage than any old memory.
“Wait. I have a one more question,” she says.
“Okay?”
“Off the record,” she says again, softer. “Did we… mess this up back then?”
A beat. Two. The line hums slightly in the wind. I could lie. I could deflect. I’ve been doing both for years.
“It was a long time ago,” I say, and it’s both true and not really an answer.
We stand there with the ghosts for a minute. The wind threads through the spruce.
I could move closer. I could tell her the truth. I could ask the question I didn’t ask at seventeen. I could take a risk in daylight on a platform with a view of every bad decision I’ve ever made.
I don’t.
“On three,” I say, stepping back to give her space. “One… two…”
She launches on two, whooping, hair streaming like a banner. The line sings. The pulley whirs. She flies over the land in a clean, bright glide that fills my heart with a mix of pleasure for what is and grief for what never was.
When I meet her at the bottom she’s breathless and flushed and gorgeous and absolutely, definitely off-limits in all the ways that matter if I’m going to stay useful to this family and this place.