When he stood, so did we. But before I could offer to walk him out, Jake steered him away, the two of them talking like I wasn’t even there. And I fumed at their backs with painful disbelief licking at my ribs.
Jake was indignant, shockingly presumptuous. His surprise at my willingness to stay confounded me almost as much as his rejection. I wanted to make excuses for him, and for a moment, I did. Because he wasn’t any better off than me when it came to losing Pop. Because his whole world was this farm, and its well-being had been placed on our shoulders—or his alone, if you asked him. And I was about to disrupt that world when he’d been so sure I’d pass it all over simply because it was hard.
That self-righteous asshole thought he had me all pegged. He thought I was in over my head, but he was wrong.
And I was going to prove it to him.
3
Shuck It
JAKE
The second I showed Jeremiah out, I stormed toward the old red barn with my chest full of thunder.
Somehow, I hadn’t even suspected she’d want anything to do with the farm, and the fact that she did didn’t sit right. It was an invasion, an intrusion by a foreign general toting pink suitcases. A stranger uneducated in the way of things, with grand designs to meddle with things she didn’t understand.
To change the place I’d poured my whole life into.
It wasn’t like I hadn’t known she was going to inherit the farm. I just assumed she’d come back for the funeral, get her affairs in order, and leave the rest to me as the overseer of the farm. There’d been a chance I could have kept things as they were, run them just as Frank had. But if the last ten minutes were proof, Olivia wasn’t going to let that happen.
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.”
That familiar heaviness sank in my ribs.
Frank. There was only one directive—run this place exactly as he’d done. I’d known him well enough to know what he’d do in any given situation, and the best way to honor him was to act as he would. Anything short of that would be blasphemy. Sure, we were in the red, but there were plenty of conventional ways to turn that around. And if I ever got a handle on running the entire farm alone, I’d get right on that.
It didn’t matter that I was afraid of failing him—there was no choice to be made. I’d stepped into his place whether I knew what I was doing or not. I had to preserve him. It was the best way I knew to make him proud.
Another pause, leaving me to mark the feel of the smooth handle in my fists, buffeted by calluses I’d had since forever. The burn of my shoulders was a comfort, a punishing ache to remind me that I was here. That this was my place.