“Ethan.”
“You’re negotiating.”
“With a goat.”
“Mabel drives a hard bargain.”
Lily rushed forward.
“Mabel! No!”
The goat released the fabric.
A wet patch remained.
Victoria stared down at it.
Lily looked horrified.
“I’m sorry.”
Victoria surprised Ethan again.
She crouched.
“It’s okay.”
“Mabel eats things.”
“I noticed.”
“She ate Daddy’s tax paper once.”
“That might have been helpful.”
Ethan looked at her.
Victoria smiled.
Something began shifting after that.
Not dramatically.
Victoria did not suddenly abandon corporate life.
Ethan did not suddenly become ready for romance.
She simply returned.
Sometimes every week.
Sometimes after two.
Once she arrived in a company helicopter because a highway accident made driving impractical.
Ethan stood in the yard watching it land in the far pasture.
When Victoria climbed out, he yelled over the rotor noise:
“Subtle.”
She yelled back:
“I was late.”
“Most people call.”
“Most people don’t own helicopters.”
“Exactly.”
Another time, she came in an old pickup belonging to Richard.
“That’s better,” Ethan said.
“It has no functioning air conditioning.”
“Character building.”
“I have enough character.”
“No one with a private helicopter gets to say that.”
Their conversations widened.
Victoria talked about business.
Ethan talked about farming.
They argued over debt.
She believed debt could be a tool when used strategically.
Ethan believed bankers described debt as a tool because they were not the people losing sleep over payments.
She told him he was overly cautious.
He told her she was too comfortable with risk because her worst-case scenario still included several houses.
She should have been offended.
Instead, she came back with spreadsheets.
Ethan hated that he enjoyed arguing with her.
Victoria discovered that he read far more than she expected.
Agricultural markets.
Local policy.
History.
Repair manuals.
Biographies.
He had no college degree, something she learned only after assuming otherwise.
“I went for one year,” Ethan explained. “Then Grandpa got sick. Farm needed help.”
“Did you ever want to go back?”
“At first.”
“And later?”
“Life kept happening.”
“Do you regret it?”
He thought for a while.
“Sometimes.”
She waited.
“Not enough to hate the life I got instead.”
That sentence stayed with her.
Victoria had spent twenty-eight years moving toward objectives.
Prep school.
University.
MBA.
Consulting.
Hayes Global.
Chief strategy officer.
Division president.
CEO at thirty-nine.
She was forty-one now.
Every step had been deliberate.
Every promotion planned.
Every success measured.