32. Tessa
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Tessa
By noon, I regret coming home for lunch.
The problem isn’t noise. The Long House is never noisy. It’s polished wood, and the kind of silence that presses against your ears until your own thoughts grow too loud to ignore.
I regret coming home because Thomas is in the dining room.
And he is in a good mood.
That should not make my stomach drop the way it does, yet lately every time my uncle smiles, it feels less warm and more like a warning.
I step inside, unbuttoning my coat, and toss my gloves on the counter before I can reconsider. The front hall smells faintly of lemon polish and whatever soup Grandma has had simmering all morning. Through the archway, winter light spills across the long dining table in pale, cold stripes.
Thomas stands at the sideboard pouring coffee like a man who has just received excellent news.
He looks up when he hears me. “There you are.”
I stop just short of the doorway. “Here I am.”
His smile sharpens. “I was beginning to think Town Hall had swallowed you whole.”
I set my bag on the nearest chair and force a polite expression onto my face. “Disappointingly, no.”
He chuckles, and I hate how normal it sounds. How easy. As if my world didn’t crack open somewhere between Juniper House and Old Mill Road.
As if I am held together by posture and stubbornness alone.
Thomas lifts his mug. “You’ve done well.”
I go still. “Excuse me?”
He takes a slow sip, infuriatingly calm.
“Nash McCoy’s proposal is officially stalled.
Delayed pending further review. Questions are being asked, caution is being exercised, and for once this town remembers that the McCoys are not entitled to whatever they want simply because they smile nicely and host church barbecues. ”
Every muscle in my shoulders locks.
He thinks this is my doing.
My chest tightens so fast it almost hurts.
“I didn’t do anything,” I say too quickly.
Thomas waves a hand as if details are beneath him. “You stayed close. You listened. You made the situation visible. That matters.”
Visible.
The word catches under my ribs.
Because yes, the situation is visible now, the land, the questions, the fractures in the story both families told themselves because the truth was messier than either side wanted to admit.
But that visibility came in a way he never intended.
He thinks I helped him corner Nash.
And that makes me feel sick.
I move farther into the room and pull out a chair. “You seem very pleased.”
“I am pleased,” he says plainly. “Why shouldn’t I be?”
I don’t answer.
If I answer honestly, I will say that his satisfaction is built on suspicion and half-truths, and that he seems far more interested in winning than in being fair.
I cannot say that here.
Thomas sets his mug down. “This is what I’ve been trying to tell you. The moment the town slows down long enough to think, the McCoy plan begins to unravel.”
I stare at the grain of the table for one dangerous second too long.
Because all I can see is Nash’s face in my memory. His mouth against mine. His voice rough and unsteady on Old Mill Road.
I love you.
The words still feel radioactive. I haven’t managed to touch them directly without burning.
And then I ran.
I left him standing there with the truth hanging between us like exposed wire, and this morning I dressed with shaking hands and went to work as if I hadn’t detonated my own life in the snow.
Thomas mistakes my silence for agreement.
“They should have stalled him sooner,” he continues. “But better late than never.”
My fingers curl under the table, nails pressing into my palm. “It isn’t over.”
“No,” he agrees. “But momentum matters. Doubt matters. Once people start looking closely, they won’t stop.”
My throat tightens.
Because that part is true.
Once you start looking closely, the simpler version of the story stops working. Not after the journal and the map. After my grandmother quietly admitted what pride and fear did to both families.
Not after Nash looked at me like loving me was the simplest truth he had ever spoken and the hardest one to survive.
“People are beginning to see reason,” Thomas continues as I grab a bowl of soup. “I knew they would.”
I lift my spoon and set it back down untouched. “People are gossiping.”
“In Buckhorn, those are often the same thing.”
I almost laugh, except nothing about this feels funny.
He watches me more closely now, curiosity sharpening his expression. “You don’t seem happy.”
I keep my face neutral. “Should I be?”
“Yes.” Thomas folds his hands in front of him, perfectly composed. “This is what we wanted. We needed time. We needed scrutiny. We needed that proposal slowed before it became a permanent problem.”
We.
The word makes my skin itch.
As if I am standing beside him in this fight. As if the past few weeks haven’t shifted something fundamental in me, and Nash is just a McCoy and not a man who carries too much alone, who jokes when he is afraid, who becomes most honest the moment he stops trying to perform.
I lower my eyes to the soup because it is safer than letting Thomas read my face.
“It doesn’t feel like a victory,” I say carefully.
He leans back slightly. “Why not?”
Because it hurt him… and me. And every time Buckhorn turns the feud into a clean story with heroes and villains, everyone moves farther from the truth.
I grip the spoon. “Because it feels uglier than that.”
Thomas’s expression cools by degrees.
“Disputes are ugly,” he says. “That doesn’t mean they aren’t necessary.”
I look up. “Necessary for who?”
His jaw shifts. “For this family.”
I hold his gaze. “And what happens if the truth is more complicated than you want it to be?”
Silence drops between us.
The temperature in the room seems to change.
Thomas’s eyes narrow almost imperceptibly. “That’s an interesting question.”
My pulse quickens, but I keep my face still. “It’s a fair one.”
“Fairness,” he says, “is usually the word people use when they want to renegotiate an advantage.”
I let that sit there.
Then, apparently abandoning every instinct for self-preservation, I say, “Or when they’re tired of pretending the past was cleaner than it was.”
His expression goes flat.
Neither of us moves.
I can feel the line I’m standing on. Thin. Sharp.
Thomas reaches for his coffee again, though the motion is more calculated now. “You’re spending too much time with the McCoys.”
I fold my hands in my lap so he won’t see how tense they are. “I’m engaged to one.”
His mouth tightens immediately. “Spare me.” He points lightly with one finger. “Whatever this performance is, don’t let it confuse you.”
Too late.
Catastrophically late.
“I’m not confused,” I lie.
His eyes hold mine for a long moment. “Good.”
I pick up the spoon and force myself to take a bite of soup I cannot taste.
Thomas watches me eat, checking whether I’ve absorbed the lesson.
Finally, he says, “The council won’t want scandal wrapped around a development proposal. Not now. Not with questions already circling.”
I look at him sharply. “Scandal.”
He shrugs. “Perception matters.”
My stomach twists.
There it is, stripped bare. He doesn’t only want the land issue raised. He wants suspicion. He wants the engagement viewed as manipulation. He wants Nash’s project to be contaminated by doubt until no one can touch it without feeling uneasy.
He wants Buckhorn to flinch.
Suddenly, I see Nash again, standing in the bakery window light, looking wrung out as he said they stared at him like he’d lost his mind. He laughed when he said it, but something underneath that laugh had already begun to fray.
I was supposed to help him hold the line.
Instead, at least in my uncle’s mind, I have become one more weapon pointed his way.
The thought makes me nauseous.
“Tessa.”
I look up.
His expression softens, or tries to. On him, it always looks a little rehearsed.
“You did the right thing.”
I recoil, because he still believes that.
He believes proximity equals loyalty and that whatever I learned or saw can be folded neatly back into obedience.
I stand before I can stop myself.
The chair legs scrape sharply against the floor.
Thomas’s brows lift. “Where are you going?”
“Back to work.”
“You barely touched your lunch.”
“I’m not hungry.”
He studies me, irritation flickering beneath the calm. “You should be pleased, Tessa. Truly. The town is finally taking the threat seriously.”
I reach for my gloves. “Maybe the town should take the truth seriously.”
The second the words leave my mouth, the air goes still.
“That,” Thomas says softly, “depends entirely on whose truth you mean.”
I meet his eyes and realize, with uncomfortable clarity, that I am very close to losing whatever easy version of family I once believed in.
Because I cannot unknow what I know.
And I cannot unknow Nash.
“I have to go,” I say.
“Tessa.”
I pause.
His voice changes, turning firmer, the tone that used to make me straighten at sixteen because I thought being good meant being unquestioning.
“Do not let sympathy make you stupid.”
My hand tightens around my gloves. “And don’t mistake silence for agreement.”
His face hardens.
I think he might say something unforgivable.
Instead, he nods once, clipped and cold. “Go on, then.”
So I do.
I leave the dining room with my spine straight and my pulse hammering, the old house suddenly feeling less a shelter than a museum of every version of me that learned how to survive by being useful.
The front door shuts behind me with a sound that feels like escape.
Outside, the air is brutally cold, sharp enough to sting all the way into my lungs. Snow still clings in dirty ridges along the curb. Buckhorn moves around me in its usual slow winter rhythm.
I stand on the steps, breathing.
Then I start walking.
Not back to Town Hall.
I need noise, movement, something less suffocating than polished wood and Thomas’s satisfaction.
My boots carry me toward Main Street before I consciously choose it, past the feed store, past the bakery window where Clara arranges Valentine’s cookies, past familiar faces that know far too much about everyone’s business.
I keep my expression composed.
Inside, I am a mess of shame and fury and want.
By the time I reach the Rusty Mug Café, my hands are shaking enough that I shove them into my coat pockets.
I need Maeve, because if I don’t say some part of it out loud soon, I might crack straight through the middle.
I push open the café door.
Warmth rushes over me in a wave of espresso and cinnamon.
Laura looks up from behind the counter and squints at me. “That bad, huh?”
I exhale. “Worse.”
She jerks her thumb toward the back corner. “Maeve’s already here.”
I nod. I can predict her schedule so well, thank goodness. I know exactly when she has lunch, and where.
Maeve is curled around a mug when I reach the booth, cardigan sleeves pushed up, and the moment she sees me, she sets her cup down. “Oh no.”
I slide into the seat across from her and drop my gloves onto the table. “That’s exactly how I feel.”
Maeve leans forward. “What happened?”
I laugh once, brittle. “My uncle congratulated me.”
She blinks. “That’s… layered.”
Laura appears with coffee before I can ask.
“Drink first,” she says. “Talk second.”
I wrap both hands around the mug.
Maeve waits.
She has seen me at twelve, seventeen, and twenty-two. She knows the shape of my silences better than anyone alive.
So I start with the ugliest part. “He thinks I helped stall Nash’s plans.”
Maeve’s face softens instantly. “Oh, Tessa. I mean, I know that’s what all of this started with, but…”
I nod.
“And the worst part,” I add quietly, “is that I didn’t know how to tell him he was wrong without telling him why.”
Maeve exhales. “Because then he’d know.”
“Yes.”
“That you’re not on his side anymore.”
I look up at her. “I don’t know what side I’m on anymore.”
“You’re in the middle of it,” Maeve says finally.
I laugh without humor.
“You’re trying to hold family history, land disputes, town politics, and a cowboy who’s in love with you all at once,” she continues. “Of course you feel like you’re losing your mind.”
I look away.
Maeve watches me carefully. “You haven’t talked to him since his confession?”
“No.”
“He hasn’t reached out?”
“Not yet.”
That hurts more than I want to admit. “I panicked, and now I think I’ve wrecked everything.”
I stare into my coffee.
“I stayed close to Nash for reasons that weren’t honest,” I admit.
“And now?”
Now I stay close because when he walks into a room, I know before I look.
Because I can hear the difference between his real laugh and the one he uses when he’s bleeding under the surface.
Because when he said he loved me, some traitorous part of me had been waiting for it.
I stare at the steam rising from my coffee.
“Now I don’t know how to separate what began as strategy from what became… something else.”
Maeve leans back slowly. “That sounds like a real problem.”
Laura passes by and drops a plate of pastries on the table.
Maeve breaks one in half and pushes it toward me. “Eat.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“You’re in emotional free fall.”
I take a bite.
Finally, Maeve says, “What are you going to do?”
I let out a breath. “I have to decide what side I’m actually on.”
Maeve’s expression softens. “That sounds miserable.”
“It is.”
She nods. “Good. Important choices usually are.”
I look down at my hands around the coffee cup.
Somewhere out there, Nash is probably working, or brooding, or pretending he’s fine badly enough that only a fool would believe it.
The thought aches.
And finally, I let myself admit the simplest truth of all.
I do not want to be on the side that hurts him.
That doesn’t solve anything.
It doesn’t untangle the land or the council or the feud or the lie we built this whole mess on.
But it is true.
And right now, truth is the only place left to start.