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The only upside was that I owned half the farm too, so if she wasn’t going to leave, I could stop her.
A shock of realization blazed through me. Half of everything I loved—everything I’d thought I’d have to hand over to Olivia—was mine.
It didn’t feel real, couldn’t be possible. I hadn’t known my father, but all the imagining I did when I was a boy were nothing compared to the truth of Frank Brent. He was more than a father to me. He was a savior. A mentor. He was the indestructible, unchanging peak of a mountain that had crumbled without warning, leaving my view forever changed.
And he’d loved me the same it seemed, to have left me half of his legacy.
Half of this place was mine. And there wasn’t a chance in hell that I’d let Olivia Brent ruin it with her inexperience.
I was absolutely certain there was no way she could tackle the task before her. Olivia, who’d been home a handful of times in ten years. Olivia, who couldn’t lift a hay fork if her life hung in the balance. Her exit was as sure a thing as ever existed.
I could see the outcome spread out before me like a game of chess. She’d fumble around the farm. Figure out how complex it was to run. Realize that nobody gave a goddamn about a dairy farm’s Twitter account. She’d get bored, give up, turn tail, and run back to the city where she belonged, just like she always did.
Maybe I’d have felt different if she’d stayed when I asked her to. Back then, I was stupid enough to think she could do some good around here, first and foremost by coming back for Frank’s sake. If he’d been standing here before me, he’d laugh at the suggestion. He’d play it off, wave a hand, insist she was where she needed to be. But I knew better. I’d spent enough sunsets on the porch with him, seen the look in his eyes when he talked about her. He was lonely, and I was poor company. Having her here would have been a blessing to him, a light of joy in his final years.
But she hadn’t stayed. It wasn’t important enough for her to give up her New York life. And by proxy, neither was Frank.
This time wouldn’t be any different. But I told myself not to worry. She wouldn’t last until September before she got bored and left me to do my job uninterrupted. I could survive Olivia for one summer.
I had before, though God knew I’d never forgotten it.
I suspected I wouldn’t soon forget this summer, either.
My palm smacked the small side door of the barn so hard, it hit the wall with a crack and rebounded back at me.
Old Mack spun around, wild-eyed and peaked.
“Good God, son,” he said, weathered hands shaking as he pulled off his baseball cap to wipe his brow. “What’s got in your Jockeys?”
“Sorry,” I shot, unable to actually sound sorry. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“Doesn’t take much,” he said on a chuckle, and it was true.
The Vietnam vet had been homeless for a decade after the war, his PTSD debilitating. He couldn’t find—or keep—a job, but Frank brought him in, just like he had all of us. Gave him a job and fresh start. He’d saved Mack.
He’d saved me too.
I whipped off my shirt, tossing it over a stall’s fence. Ginger, the mare inside, whinnied at the intrusion.
I ignored her, snagged a hay fork, and went to work.
For a minute, Mack watched me shuck hay, sitting on a bale, catching his breath while I slung straw with more force and speed than was necessary.
“You knew Frank was gonna give her the farm,” he finally said.
That shock again, sharp and quick. “That’s not the problem. She’s not leaving.”
“Oh,” he said in an unreadable tone. “She fire you?”
“Nope. Because Frank left me the farm too. Fifty-fifty.”
Silence behind me as I drove the fork into the pile.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” he breathed. “Congratulations, son.” A pause. “So how come you’re so pissed?”
“Because she wants to work the farm when she doesn’t know what she’s doing,” I fired, dumping the load onto the little trailer hooked up to the ATV.
“I see.” He didn’t at all sound surprised.
“She’s got all these big ideas about social media and who knows what else. She wants to change things—I know she does. I can smell the city all over her. She mighta fed chickens and milked cows when she was a kid, but she didn’t know this farm. She doesn’t know the day-to-day. She doesn’t know how much we’ve worked for. What Frank worked for. It’ll be a cold day in hell when I let her sink what he built.”
“Change ain’t never easy, Jake. And there’s gonna be a lot of change around here now Frank’s gone.”
